Orange County Convention Center – Orlando
Monday July 13th 2015
The keynote starts as usual with Phil Sorgen as speaker, Corporate Vice President Worldwide Partner Group. All Partner of the Year Award winners are congratulated. IDC made a forecast by 2018 in which the IT industry will make $ 200 billion revenue every year with cloud. This means that the cloud-business from now on will grow with 500% per year. Microsoft does 92% of its revenue indirectly: through partners. Phil emphasizes Microsoft’s strategy concerning cloud and partners and explains about the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Program. In addition to cloud mobility remains strategic important for Microsoft. The Enterprise Mobility Suite (ESM) will become a single competence In the Microsoft Partner Network after September 2015.
After this Satya Nadella’s vision keynote is on the program. Satya will explain Microsoft’s mission and strategy. Microsoft’s mission is: “Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more”. Mobile First, Cloud First, fits here as vision. Microsoft wants to help its customers to make their ambitions true by making technology available. With Mobile First it’s about the “mobility of the experience”. With this they mean form factors, we talk to devices, etc. The data, applications and experience have to be available to be used on every device and at any time. With Cloud First it’s about distributed computing. Microsoft want to be a key hyper-scale provider. This also goes for legislation concerning the usage of cloud. For the customers cloud means ‘business transformation’. Customers can differentiate more, are more flexible and could save costs with cloud. Satya points out that IT isn’t core competence of most of Microsoft’s customers. They want to consume (IT) technology and generate business value.
Microsoft has three ambitions:
- Reinvent productivity &business processes: according to Satya productivity is about going hand in hand with the optimisation of business processes. Here it is all about: communications, meetings & collaboration, content creation, file share & content management and business apps. Microsoft has the ambition to make products that are used by a private person and are used in a business environment. Outlook gets mentioned specifically as example. Not only are the tools made by Microsoft, Microsoft also offers insights. For example with Power BI, Delve and Cortana. People Centric security (identity) is also a part of the item reinvent productivity & business processes. Satya says that people come in contact with challenges to make decisions daily. Software and applications are meant to help the people to make better decisions. Julia White starts with a demo on this subject. She starts with GigJam and Cortana. A demonstration with GigJam shows how via Skype for Business information could get linked (e-mail, Dynamics CRM and Power BI). Whith GigJam it is possible to share not all the information but only certain information. GigJam actually creates on-the-fly an app with the right information for different audiences. A sales person who uses iPhone gets used as use case. GigJam shared information that is available on iPhone. The Surface Hub also gets used in the demo. On every “device” there is another view shown, which depends on what content can be shared per person. Satya: “Microsoft breaks down walls between devices, applications and people”.
- Building the intelligent cloud platform: here it’s about cloud infrastructure, enterprise mobility, data & analytics, developer & app platform and internet of things. Microsoft increasingly integrates more foundation, platform tools such as Operations Management Suite and Visual Studio. The cloud platform of Microsoft is open: from Microsoft to Linux, from .Net to Java and from iOS to Android. According to Satya it’s all about data in the end. Data has to be transferred to intelligent actions. It’s about asking such as “What happened?” and “Why did it happen?” etc. The Cortana Analytics Suite is a Big Data suite that transfers data to information upon which people could make decisions or whereby systems should be able to automatically perform actions.
- Create more personal computing: here it’s about universal platform & apps, Windows as a service, innovative hardware and engaging experiences. Windows 10 will be announced in weeks. Microsoft provides with Windows 10 a new platform and a new experience. Including hardware such as Surface Hub, Surface Pro, Hololens, Xbox, etc. Management and security of personal devices stays important to Microsoft. But also the security of for example sensors. The sensors will grow a lot with IoT. Next comes a demo of Hololens in combination with AutoDesk’s software (Maya). A demo is given about product development with the possibilities of Hololens. Besides this, they work together with offsite design teams. So not only onsite, but also remote. Here it’s again about communication and productivity.
Terry Myerson, Executive Vice President Windows Devices, is the next speaker of the keynote. On July 29th 2015 Microsoft’s Windows 10 will be officially released and made available. The vision of Microsoft, Create more personal computing, is illustrated thoroughly. Windows 10 will be the first step here. It’s about a platform for cross devices. It’s about one experience, independent of the device. There will be “One Platform”, including one store. A demo follows about Windows 10, Office 2016, Cortana, Continuum and universal apps. After this security is again a main topic in the keynote. There are a lot of new security features implemented with Windows 10. Such as Virtual Secure Mode. With this isolation of virtual machines is possible. But also Windows Hello for identification of the users. There have been some adjustments in Windows 10 in the field of Identity, Information and Device concerning the security features. However, with this modern hardware should be used. In a demo Microsoft talks about smart connected devices and IoT. Even though it is a huge trend (IDC). Microsoft assumes secure connected clients who have a connection to the cloud. Microsoft: “If it’s not kept up-to-date, it’s not secure”. Windows Update will differ in Windows 10. For consumers there will be made use of ‘distributed rings’ for updates. There will also be amendments for enterprises: Windows Update for Business. With this there could be made a distinction in multiple devices in multiple distributed rings, etc. It’s not just about laptops and desktops, but also telephones, Hololens, etc.
Julia White, General Manager Office, talks about the workstyles of the new generations. There is more collaboration and everyone is online at all times. With communication it’s about e-mail, voice, instant messaging, etc. These parts are meant to be integrated in one platform. Besides communication it is also about data and access. Microsoft spends a lot of development time to SharePoint 2016 Server globally. Also in a hybrid scenario with Office 365, Office with cloud PBX, Delve Org Analytics and Contextual Dynamics CRM documents across Office 365.
Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President Microsoft Cloud Enterprise Group, goes more deeply into “Building the intelligent cloud platform”. There are continuously more SaaS solutions. A cloud infrastructure is here the foundation. Also there are increasingly more “higher level services” offered such as Big Data and Analytics solutions. As cloud infrastructure Azure, Azure Stack and Operational Management Suite get mentioned. As SaaS solution Power BI, Office 365 and Dynamics get mentioned. Data & Analytics are about SQL Server and Cortana Analytics Suite. Scott also mentions hyper-scale and again the 19 Azure regions. This is more than AWS and Google have combined. The intelligent cloud platform is about hyper-scale, enterprise proven and hybrid scenarios. So also datacenters of – hosting – partners and on-premise solutions. The whole product portfolio of Microsoft should be open and flexible. With public cloud “trustworthy” becomes a more crucial part. It’s about the trusting that has to be there between the business partners. A few numbers that Scott mentions:
- More than 90.000 new Azure subscriptions each month
- 4 Million SQL databases active in Azure
- More than 13.000 organizations that uses Enterprise Mobility Suite
- 3.200 Azure Market Place applications
