To earn a Microsoft gold competency, partners must successfully complete exams (resulting in Microsoft Certified Professionals) to prove their level of technology expertise, and then designate these certified professionals uniquely to one Microsoft competency, ensuring a certain level of staffing capacity. They also must submit customer references that demonstrate successful projects, meet a performance (revenue and or consumption/usage) commitment (for most gold competencies), and pass technology and/or sales assessments. Vizient is a services-led, analytics-enabled healthcare performance improvement company that leverages data for solutions that align cost, quality and market performance for more than 50 percent of the nation's hospitals. The Microsoft gold status demonstrates Vizient's ability to guide its member hospitals through its data application solutions as well as scale up those applications as more hospitals seek insights to help them improve performance and drive costs down.