PART3 Microsoft. To be eligible, a startup (a new technolo- gy company or an independent software vendor) must be in business for less than five years and with less than IM USD in annual revenue. The key bene- fits of the programs are: 1) an access to free soft- ware and tools such as Visual Studio, Office 365 or Azure cloud services ( U SD 750 per month of free credit), 2) a community of startups and technical advisors, 3) support from Microsoft and BizSpark Network Partners. On top of the BizSpark program, Microsoft has launched BizSpark Plus, which offers up to 120,000 USD of Azure credits to qualified startups involved with over 200 of the world's top accelerators. Since the inception of BizSpark, more than 100,000 startups have become part of the pro- gram and 41,186 of them in 151 countries are cur- rently listed by Microsoft. The majority of them are based in six countries, USA (12,444), United l