How can we continue and accelerate the digital transformation journey for our customers? The Microsoft Ignite keynote was scheduled on November 4th this year. A good time to see where Microsoft’s is heading next year.
Many companies are struggling between tradition and innovation. They want to simplify complex and distributed environments while they are in transformation to create new competitive advantage to stay relevant in this fast-changing world. Business and IT are not separate tracks within an organization anymore. In most cases the business strategy is a digital (IT) strategy: “information technology is at the core of how you do your business and how your business model itself evolves” (Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft). Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. In my opinion the Ignite keynote gives substance to this mission more than ever. Let’s start with the explanation.
The hybrid cloud journey continuous
Many organizations have embraced the public cloud: application development is done on PaaS services and more traditional workloads are running on IaaS services. Different SaaS services are used for productivity apps and tools like Office 365 or business applications like Dynamics 365. Organizations have different public cloud vendors or even a multi cloud strategy. And they have on-premises workloads in datacenters. Those organizations experience inefficient management, inefficient security safeguards, high costs, etc. “In all those cases these customers are telling Microsoft they could use the benefits of Azure cloud innovation whether or not their data is stored in the cloud” (J.G. Chirapurath, General Manager Azure Data & AI at Microsoft). Microsoft launched Azure Arc, which allows customers to enable Azure data services on any infrastructure, like on-premises, Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform. Azure Arc for management of Windows and Linux servers and Azure Arc for management of Kubernetes clusters are available in preview available. For customers who want to simplify complex and distributed environments across on-premises, edge and multi cloud, Azure Arc enables deployment of Azure services anywhere and extends Azure management to any infrastructure. The intelligent edge Azure services family now consists of Azure IoT, Azure Stack Edge, Azure Stack HCI, Azure Stack Hub and Azure Quantum.
To further empower the IT department and support end users even better, Microsoft announced Microsoft Endpoint Manager. All Microsoft management tools including Configuration Manager, Intune, Desktop Analytics and DMAC are now Microsoft Endpoint Manager. Some other announcements Microsoft did to simplify IT management and bring this vision for the future to life:
- Embrace modern management to manage and secure your devices with the unified Microsoft Endpoint Manager.
- Simplify meeting room management with Managed Meeting Rooms service.
- Address app compatibility with the new Microsoft Edge and Windows Virtual Desktop, with an expansion of the Desktop App Assure program.
- Expand your virtualization approach with new options like Linux thin client support with Windows Virtual Desktop.
- Simplify administration with updates to the Microsoft 365 admin center and Office 365 Groups.
- Empower organizations with insights that transform how work gets done and drive impact with Microsoft Productivity Score.
Satya also gave attention to some other Azure innovations, like Project Silica. Microsoft created a proof of concept for storing data on glass. The Superman movie from Warner Bros is stored on regular quartz glass. “We built this entire system that’s essentially a new cold storage system” (Satya Nadella). Project Silica is designed for storing and preserving data and is developed as a storage strategy for the future of the Azure platform.
Build a data-driven culture
Organizations today must embrace a data-driven culture or risk being left behind. A recent Harvard Business Review survey found organizations with data-driven cultures improve revenue by four times and unlock rich insights to drive meaningful business transformation and customer satisfaction. As organizations evolve, new tools and resources are needed to enable them to harness the power of their data anywhere and to build a data-driven culture. A data-driven culture requires the ability to derive timely and accurate business insights across all data. Modern organizations require analytics services that aren’t limited by data types, processing engines, organizational boundaries, or data skills. (J.G. Chirapurath). Microsoft announced Azure Synapse.
Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources—at scale. Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs. Organizations can continue running existing data warehouse workloads in production today with Azure Synapse Analytics and will automatically benefit from new capabilities which are in preview.
Cybersecurity is still a top priority
“Business and users are going to use technology only if they can trust it”, Satya Nadella. The keynote started with the tech intensity story. Trust is part of the tech intensity topic. Microsoft has been on a journey for the last several years working hard to offer customers leading security solutions and services so they can defend against increasingly sophisticated attacks across a variety of devices. Satya mentioned that the costs of cyberattacks is around $1T. The SMB market and consumers are the main target. Microsoft added new features and innovations in security products to help customers across their security, compliance and identity needs. Microsoft offers now also protection beyond Windows with Enterprise Detection and Response for Apple Macs and Threat and Vulnerability Management for servers. The top 10 announcements includes: Azure Sentinel, Insider Risk Management in Microsoft 365, Microsoft Authenticator, Azure AD, Microsoft Defender ATP, Azure Security Center, Microsoft information protection and governance, Microsoft Compliance Score, Application Guard for Office and Azure Firewall Manager. Microsoft is named by Gartner as a leader for Endpoint Protection Platforms and Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in 2019 Endpoint Security Suite Wave.
The next wave of empowering people
“At the core of the products we build, I want to think about productivity centered around people”, Satya Nadella. A key catalyst for digital transformation is developers. Developers are the builders of our era, creating the ideas and writing the code that enables digital transformation for organizations around the world. To become a digital company, every company must build a culture that empowers developers to achieve more. Microsoft did some announcements at Ignite to empower the developer even further and to optimize the productivity of developers. With Visual Studio Online it is possible for developers to start a development environment through a browser. So, no need for a device to install developer tools. Just a browser. Other announcements are Visual Studio Live Share and Visual Studio IntelliCode. With IntelliCode machine learning is used to make coding faster and make the developer more productive.
By 2023 there will be more than 500.000.000 new applications. That is more than that were built the last 40 years. Those applications are built by Citizen Developers with low-code no-code technology. Currently, more than 2.500.000 citizen developers are using the Microsoft Power Platform. New solutions are added to the Power Platform family: Power Automate (this was Microsoft Flow) and Power Virtual Agents. Power Automate is a full Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tool with 275 out of the box connectors. Power Automate could be used for automating complex processes that span legacy and modern applications. Power Virtual Agents provides language understanding through the bot framework.
To make people more productive Microsoft brings new devices to the market. Like the Surface Duo and the Surface Neo. The device innovation is important because the device is close to the end user. Microsoft puts artificial intelligence in every experience to empower people. For example with the Designer function in PowerPoint, search in video’s with Stream and make e-mail more accessible with Cortana.
Microsoft Teams – part of Microsoft 365 – is used by many organizations to work in a modern way and work as productive as possible. Great new features are coming to Teams. Like new integrations with Yammer and Outlook and the multi window feature so users can work more productive.
With the Fluid Framework barriers between applications are broke down. It is the next level of real time collaboration. Users can work together in the same document from different applications and devices at the same time. With Teams Virtual Consults it is possible to schedule an interactive consult with clients/patients. The client will receive an e-mail and can start a web browser video meeting with the expert.
With Microsoft Productivity Score organizations get the possibility to determine success and business impact. Translating productivity into measurable impact can be challenging. Both in regard to how employees are getting work done more efficiently, as well as how technology is enabling them to save time and be more productive. Enter Microsoft Productivity Score to give you insights that help you transform how your users get work done and drive greater business impact.
Microsoft Project Cortex is a new service added to Office 365. It is the new knowledge management service. It will analyze documents, contacts, etc. and add intelligence to it. Users – experts – can teach the system how to understand semi-structured content including data from video, audio recordings, etc.
Project Cortex creates a page like a wiki. Those “topic cards” are available to users in Outlook, Office & Teams.
“Longevity in this business is about being able to reinvent yourself or invent the future” – Satya Nadella. Enjoy the process of reinventing yourself or invent the future!