Originally posted 31 October 2017
It’s not that far off two years ago since I wrote a blog post from the Microsoft Cloud Roadshow event in Sao Paulo. Now I’m a bit closer to home, and more directly involved in Azure in my day to day job, heading up Atos’ Managed Azure Cloud engineering and development team. So, what has the best part of 2 years changed in the Microsoft vision at this this two day Microsoft event in London, Future Decoded?
I took a few key take aways from the keynotes today, and it is still thoroughly exciting to see Microsoft’s vision.
Day one had a wider set of themes than just Azure Cloud by itself, including a fascinating keynote on Quantum Computing, and a comedic Q&A with David Walliams. But, we still had some excellent talks on both Cloud and Digital Workplace. The introductory slide below helps to set out that vision, underpinned by the ‘intelligent cloud’.
A couple of key messages stood out to me in the talk including one statistic that within 3 years time 50% of the global workforce will be mobile. An amazing stat really, and Microsoft’s vision is of technology becoming just a transparent enabler to allow that work to flow between location and device. It’s a world I already live in, working from between home, office, and indeed Microsoft roadshows, using devices interchangeably to pick up work from my laptop, tablet and phone as most convenient and suitable for the occasion. The future vision sees that going steps further including improvements in Office 365, as well as of course the Surface range.
When it comes to Microsoft’s enablement of digital transformation and Microsoft’s view of four towers , the first – Empower Employees – is crucial, and links back to the comment above on transparency.
All this work should be to empower employees in the end. I would say the other three points of engaging customers, optimising operations and transforming products all fall out of the first step. Back in my previous role working on the Olympics, a key message that would always be said is the transparency of technology – generally people don’t care about the complex and substantial IT systems that are behind watching a competition, as long as they work! IT only becomes visible if it fails. In the digital workplace we are heading towards, and in some areas faster and closer than others, technology should take a similar viewpoint. The convenience and simplicity we are often used to at home is coming to the workplace, whether enabling geographically diverse teams to communicate and collaborate better, to an expenses system that is as simple and convenient as many modern apps to use or, as I’ve been doing today, the ability to seamlessly work on a document on my phone, tablet and now laptop to post online. Modern workplace and business applications form two of the four pillars Microsoft discussed.
They were joined by Applications and Infrastructure, the backbone of Azure Cloud, and Data and AI. These are transformed by the move from virtualisation to PaaS services (specifically mentioned as microservices an containers in the below slide), as well as the convergence of disparate data to a connected data estate. A key point here was with the commonly viewed point of data as a currency.
The convergence of disparate data is a fairly standard message, but the capabilities of Azure and Microsoft’s view of AI being an enabler give a significant next step in Big Data analytics.
I had a conversation earlier discussing the growth of AI in our day to day lives over the last few years, whether it be interacting with Alexa, Cortana or Siri to the ever improving translations online. It has become such a natural day to day part of our lives without really that much realisation that we are living with tools that only twenty years ago were more the realm of Star Trek than our living rooms. Who knows what the future can hold!
And one last thing to mention, Project Emma. A genuinely amazing and emotional piece of work.
Tomorrow Future Decoded continues, looking more specifically on Azure.
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