“Together, we achieve more” – was a collective motto at the Inspire world this year.
That’s us – the 100,000 and the 17 million – to empower the 7 billion, said Satya Nadella, as he discussed Microsoft's mission, solution areas and the impact Microsoft employees and partners can have on the 7 billion people on the planet.
e-Zest has been a proud Microsoft partner for over a decade. For us, his speech only ushered opportunities that give more meaning to what we do, helping organizations Up The Game – to achieve more, to be more productive, more competitive and more efficient.
In the rest of the article, I have tried to capture the essentials from Satya’s speech (some inputs are verbatim, and some have a few additional inputs from me). The keynote by Satya at Inspire offered many fascinating and important strategic insights into the technological possibilities and the impact it will have on every individual and enterprise.
Billions of Windows and smartphones user data essentially being hosted in the cloud means Azure is now not just another cloud platform, it is increasingly being connoted as the world’s computer. Microsoft has big plans for the said computing fabric, and it begins with the Azure cloud platform. The team is questioning the conventional wisdom of the data centre. Microsoft is, therefore, taking all data to Azure – to Azure Stack, to Azure IoT Edge, to Azure Sphere. “This is one ubiquitous, distributed computing fabric. One programming model that is event-driven, serverless, so you can write an application that truly works across all of this.”
For Microsoft, the next and the most important focus is on the realm of AI that is now comparative to human perception and linguistic capabilities. The demo made at the event on Mixed Reality combined with holographic technology and Azure AI services for business reflected Microsoft’s ambitions with Azure, HoloLens, and beyond.
The emphasis on the fusion of Dynamics 365’s Mixed Reality apps with the virtual capacities of HoloLens 2 and Microsoft Cognitive AI services enables visualizations, instructions, remote assistance and many other futuristic-looking features in the Mixed Reality cloud. What is even more exciting is that Microsoft is building the developer ecosystem with Windows Mixed Reality thereby empowering developers and enterprises to bring AR + VR together.
And lastly the power of BI in business applications such as Dynamics 365 has emerged as the “one tool that has changed the culture inside the company,” as it helps businesses to focus on leading indicators rather than on lagging indicators, with time, thanks to IoT and other tools, more things will be automated. Soon there will be a need for tools that will help to reduce the total cost of automation and customizations.
Microsoft has been core to our business and we aim to deliver digital technologies across solution areas that positively impact the business of global enterprises. We look forward to another great year with Microsoft ushering many new opportunities and developments with a string of innovations with Azure cloud and AI services. With these tools for positive developments from Microsoft, we are most certainly committed to transforming businesses and help them achieve more in the days to come. Are you geared!
