Welcome to the home page of the UK Emerging Business Team with Bindi Karia and Lars Lindstedt. If you are new to partnering with Microsoft, please take a look at the resources available on the Why Microsoft and Partnering pages on this site. There you can read about the benefits of building your business using our technologies and about our partner programmes.

For most startup software companies the best programme to join is Empower. This provides all the software you need for five developers, as well as managed newsgroup support and a telephone advisory service, for a 12-month period. You should aim to meet the Certified Partner requirements at the end of that period, although an extension for a further 12 months is possible.

If you're not yet ready to join Empower, or you have already enrolled but want to get hold of lots of other good stuff, you should check out John Nogrady's blog on Free Software from Microsoft.

In addition to the standard partner programmes and resources described on the pages I've mentioned above, we also have the Microsoft Startup Accelerator programme, where we work more closely with a small group of high-potential start-up and early-stage partners on both their technology and business plans. The current UK Accelerator partners are: