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I work for a team that is part of Microsoft Services in the UK. We provide consultancy and support to customers specifically related to application development covering the whole of the project life cycle. Our customers are generally a mix of ISVs (building applications to sell) and large enterprise organisations (typically developing internal line-of-business applications and sometimes public facing web sites).

We normally sell annual contracts to our customers providing them with a given number of hours to be called off as they are needed during the contract lifetime. Customers can buy different contract levels depending on their needs and they are usually 150, 300, 600, or 1200 hours over the course of the year. Some contracts also come with a number support incidents similar to those that you get with an MSDN subscription.

Each ADC (the job title for the people on the team is Application Development Consultant, which is a bit of a mouthful so we just say ADC) will deliver 1200 customer hours in a 12 month period. This may be for a single customer with a 1200 hour contract or it could be with as many as 8 different customers with small contracts. Usually it is somewhere in between. The rest of the time is spent on ad hoc requests, internal issues, and technical development so that we can continue to support leading edge products where necessary.

Microsoft typically interacts with customers through partners so one of the goals of Microsoft Services is to provide support beyond what a partner would be able to do. This means that a large number of our customers are evaluating and working with beta software and early bits through early adopter programmes and similar schemes.

One of the reasons we’ve been so busy lately is that there is a huge demand in the UK for this type of service. For this reason we are looking for more consultants to join the team. If the description above sounds appealing, take a look at the job posting here.

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