New Virtual Earth Server capabilities and licensing

BOULDER, COLORADO—September 7, 2009 — Vexcel Corp., a Microsoft company, today announced the availability of version 2.0 of the Microsoft^® Virtual Earth™ Server, the on-premises intranet mapping platform based on Microsoft Bing Maps for Enterprise (formerly known as Microsoft Virtual Earth). Virtual Earth Server is designed for those customers who are interested in using Bing Maps, for example defense/intelligence customers or first responders (police, fire, etc), but have concerns about a dependency upon, or connection to, the internet in order to access this service. Either their application is too critical to rely on internet connectivity, they don’t have an internet connection, their internet connection isn’t sufficiently reliable or fast, or they have other security concerns. The Virtual Earth Server allows these customers to take advantage of the Bing Maps platform without the need to have an internet connection.

Version 2.0 provides a number of significant product enhancements to support the needs of enterprise customers including: a new Silverlight-based map control; 3rd party data integration capabilities for GeoTIFF and KML that take advantage of SQLServer 2008’s spatial extensions; a template to connect to and ingest content from OGC-compliant WMS imagery servers; and a forward geocoding capability.

Coinciding with the 2.0 release is the debut of the Virtual Earth Server on Microsoft Volume Licensing. Customers can now easily license the Virtual Earth Server through their Microsoft Enterprise Agreements and take advantage of significant price discounts.

“We are excited to provide this new release of the Virtual Earth Server to the marketplace.” said John Lee, director of business development for Vexcel. “This release integrates powerful new geospatial capabilities from Microsoft with enterprise tools to efficiently ingest and manage customers’ geospatial content and it provides an easy and cost-effective mechanism to license the Virtual Earth Server for their organizations.”

About Vexcel

Founded in 1985, Vexcel Corp. is a remote sensing company with headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. The company’s legacy offerings to government and commercial markets include turnkey satellite ground systems, a range of remote sensing imagery processing products, and advanced radar processing and geospatial services. The company was acquired by Microsoft Corporation on May 3, 2006.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.