The MTC working lab is dedicated to the development and rapid deployment of e-commerce solutions for startup and established dot-com companies. The MTC state-of-the-art lab's other partners are Dell, APC, BMC Software, CyberSource, EMC, Epicenter, FG Squared, Giganet, HP, Intel, Interwoven and Symantec.

Rainbow is a provider of high-performance security solutions for the IT industry. Rainbow's CryptoSwift e-commerce accelerator enables the MTC lab to deliver fast, secure online transactions into high-availability, high-performance and scalable e-commerce infrastructures. "Using the technologies provided by Rainbow allows Microsoft to provide all the speed that demanding secure e-commerce applications need and more, ensuring that customer applications have every performance advantage possible," says David Driftmier, Microsoft practice manager for the center.

Rainbow's lead product facilitates secure transactions and dramatically reduces response time with as many as 1,000 transactions per second. The cryptographic security engine is designed to improve server response time for secure connections by up to 90% and frees the e-commerce server to perform other tasks, especially during peak load and heavy traffic periods.