Microsoft recently announced it's picks for the Worldwide Partner Conference awards and Vertigo was officially named as Microsoft Web Development Partner of the Year for Custom Development Solutions.  According to Microsoft, the awards are a chance to:

"...recognize partners who have developed exemplary solutions for their customers during the past year and who are winners of and finalists for the 2008 Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) Awards. These outstanding partners demonstrated significant customer impact, originality, effective time to market, deployment of advanced features, and the ability to optimize their use of Microsoft technologies to meet business needs. "

You can check out the full award list here.  The full text of the category that Vertigo won is as follows:

Custom Development Solutions, Web Development Partner of the Year

Finalist: TI-M, Mexico
Finalist: Infusion Development, United States

Winner: Vertigo Software, United States
Vertigo created a solution with the Hard Rock Cafe to enable users to view and interact online with its memorabilia collection. The collection houses 70,000 pieces—and 70,000 stories—and the Hard Rock vision called for new photography, new copy, a new content-management system, and a new online database with a compelling user interface. While going live with 70,000 pieces of memorabilia would be a few years off, it was critical to Hard Rock management—and to the reemerging brand—that the site go live with rich content as soon as possible. Vertigo made this solution real by using Silverlight and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. The solution also included a content-management system built with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but in a partner ecosystem with hundreds of thousands of Microsoft partners worldwide, we are very proud of the Hard Rock application and this award.  Congratulations to the Hard Rock team.  Take a second and go check out the Hard Rock application yourself!