3 key cloud adoption trends in migrating and modernizing workloads

In the past few years, organizations have weathered unprecedented change as they have had to adapt to macro-economic, political, and societal challenges. These challenges are not going away—the business outlook remains uncertain with ongoing concerns, including inflation, supply chain disruptions, and rising energy prices.

Microsoft believes the best way to prepare for this uncertainty is for organizations to do more with less—less complexity and cost, with more agility, resilience, and innovation. This means applying digital capabilities to extend what organizations can achieve amidst today’s constraints.

Moving workloads to the cloud provides more flexibility for organizations to align their IT investments with business needs while benefiting from cloud economies of scale. Modern infrastructure and cloud capabilities can also free up an organization’s IT workforce to focus on workloads and applications that are most meaningful to their customers.

To get a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by our customers and their plans around cloud adoption, Microsoft commissioned a global survey with more than 1200 IT decision makers.

The study revealed three key cloud adoption trends:

1. Cloud adoption plans remain integral to strategies in uncertain business climates

The survey found 62 percent of organizations have a migration and modernization strategy in place, showing the increasing importance of cloud adoption in IT transformation. Their top motivators are reducing total business costs, future proofing business strategy, and driving revenue growth. The survey also showed security, business continuity (BC), disaster recovery (DR), and scalability as top benefits desired from cloud migrations. That said, we expect that returns on investment (ROI) considerations will remain top of mind in the near term as customers prioritize cloud initiatives for implementation—be it optimizing their existing cloud workloads or moving additional workloads. This increased attention on cost optimization and the rise of financial operations teams (FinOps) is also echoed in the Flexera state of the cloud 2022 report, where for the sixth year in a row, optimizing the existing use of cloud (cost savings) was the top initiative, followed by migrating more workloads to the cloud.

Organizations are considering cloud adoption plans holistically across their entire IT infrastructure to better prepare for what’s next. Of the organizations we surveyed, the number who have more than half of their workloads in the cloud will grow from 27 percent to 47 percent over the next 18 months with investments spanning both business-critical and non-business critical workloads. Furthermore, the survey found organizations with a cloud migration and modernization strategy are 58 percent more likely to be ‘cloud-only’ (all or almost all applications and workloads running in the cloud) three years from now.

2. Modernization is a key focus for digital transformation

82 percent of surveyed organizations said migrating to the cloud is a steppingstone towards digital transformation. Migration is about getting workloads to the cloud—and modernization is about refactoring existing applications and workloads to take full advantage of cloud-native technologies like Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or containers. Those surveyed told us 74 percent of workloads that have already migrated are candidates for modernization—modernizing workloads helps opens the door to digital transformation whether it’s speeding up product innovation cycles or personalized end-user experiences.

3. Hybrid and multicloud interoperability and integration are expected

Organizations continue to embrace multicloud and are looking for cross-cloud management and interoperability from their cloud providers. Underscoring our recent research on hybrid and multicloud earlier this year, customers surveyed want to retain investment flexibility along with best-of-breed cloud capabilities with 71 percent to continue implementing a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy.

Complexities of cloud-to-cloud integration, refactoring existing applications, and integration with legacy backends are a few of the barriers that can slow down cloud adoption. So, it’s no surprise that support from a dedicated migration and modernization team was ranked highest in surveyed customers’ wish list from cloud vendors. Post migration support, access to engineering resources, and help with technical skilling were other key areas that emerged from the survey.  These findings present significant implications for cloud providers as they define programs and investments to assist customers during uncertain times.

How Microsoft Azure can help customers with cloud migration and modernization efficiently

We have been on our own digital transformation journey since Microsoft began migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud in 2014. We have been transforming our IT footprint using built-in tools and data insights that Azure provides to optimize costs (such as Azure Advisor, Azure Cost Management and Billing, and Azure Monitor) and reinvesting in modernization for business growth. Today more than 95 percent of our workloads run on the cloud, and while our yearly budget for Azure has remained constant since 2014, Microsoft has grown by more than 20 percent. Our own journey and learnings inform how we can empower customers to best meet their current and future technology needs.

Our customers choose Azure as their platform of choice to meet their goals today and to build for the future tomorrow.

Fiserv, a global fintech and payment company, improved their payment processing infrastructure to simplify operations bringing benefits such as risk reduction and cost savings. Perrigo, a worldwide producer and supplier of consumer self-care products for businesses, unlocked agility and flexibility through streamlined finance workloads to build a single source of truth for finance. The Bank of Angola became the first bank in Angola to embrace digitization by moving to the cloud to innovate and improve processes and infrastructure. O2 Czech Republic, the leading telecommunications company in the Czech Republic, saw a 30 percent total cost of ownership (TCO) savings for every workload they moved while enhancing security and scaling their entertainment business.

We continue to invest deeply in helping our customers do more with less and get the most out of their Azure investments with our solutions.

◉ Today we’re announcing a new total cost of ownership (TCO) or business case capability to help customers estimate how much they can save by migrating their Windows Server and SQL Server estate to Azure. This will be available within Azure Migrate, our free self-service migration tool that allows organizations to plan and execute their move to Azure. Try out this new capability and share your feedback.

◉ Customers can optimize their cloud investments with our unique offers and pricing benefits. With unique offers like the Azure Hybrid Benefit (save costs by reusing software assurance enabled Windows, Server SQL Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux licenses on Azure) and Extended Security Updates (free only on Azure), it’s up to 80 percent less expensive to run Windows Server and SQL Server VMs on Azure than it is with our main competitor. With Azure savings plan for compute, customers can significantly reduce resource costs by up to 65 percent compared to pay-as-you-go prices.

◉ The Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) offers customers the right mix of expert help to reduce migration costs and accelerate their move—including technical skilling, engineering resources, specialized partners, and cost-effective incentives so customers are holistically set up for success.

At Microsoft, we are committed to helping our customers be successful, drive strong business outcomes and get the most out of their cloud investments, especially in challenging environments like today’s.

Source: microsoft.com

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General availability of Azure OpenAI Service expands access to large, advanced AI models with added enterprise benefits

Large language models are quickly becoming an essential platform for people to innovate, apply AI to solve big problems, and imagine what’s possible. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service as part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to democratizing AI, and ongoing partnership with OpenAI.

With Azure OpenAI Service now generally available, more businesses can apply for access to the most advanced AI models in the world—including GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL•E 2—backed by the trusted enterprise-grade capabilities and AI-optimized infrastructure of Microsoft Azure, to create cutting-edge applications. Customers will also be able to access ChatGPT—a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 that has been trained and runs inference on Azure AI infrastructure—through Azure OpenAI Service soon.

Empowering customers to achieve more

We debuted Azure OpenAI Service in November 2021 to enable customers to tap into the power of large-scale generative AI models with the enterprise promises customers have come to expect from our Azure cloud and computing infrastructure—security, reliability, compliance, data privacy, and built-in Responsible AI capabilities.

Since then, one of the most exciting things we’ve seen is the breadth of use cases Azure OpenAI Service has enabled our customers—from generating content that helps better match shoppers with the right purchases to summarizing customer service tickets, freeing up time for employees to focus on more critical tasks.

Customers of all sizes across industries are using Azure OpenAI Service to do more with less, improve experiences for end-users, and streamline operational efficiencies internally. From startups like Moveworks to multinational corporations like KPMG, organizations small and large are applying the capabilities of Azure OpenAI Service to advanced use cases such as customer support, customization, and gaining insights from data using search, data extraction, and classification.

“At Moveworks, we see Azure OpenAI Service as an important component of our machine learning architecture. It enables us to solve several novel use cases, such as identifying gaps in our customer’s internal knowledge bases and automatically drafting new knowledge articles based on those gaps. This saves IT and HR teams a significant amount of time and improves employee self-service. Azure OpenAI Service will also radically enhance our existing enterprise search capabilities and supercharge our analytics and data visualization offerings. Given that so much of the modern enterprise relies on language to get work done, the possibilities are endless—and we look forward to continued collaboration and partnership with Azure OpenAI Service."—Vaibhav Nivargi, Chief Technology Officer and Founder at Moveworks.

“Al Jazeera Digital is constantly exploring new ways to use technology to support our journalism and better serve our audience. Azure OpenAI Service has the potential to enhance our content production in several ways, including summarization and translation, selection of topics, AI tagging, content extraction, and style guide rule application. We are excited to see this service go to general availability so it can help us further contextualize our reporting by conveying the opinion and the other opinion.”—Jason McCartney, Vice President of Engineering at Al Jazeera.

“KPMG is using Azure OpenAI Service to help companies realize significant efficiencies in their Tax ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) initiatives. Companies are moving to make their total tax contributions publicly available. With much of these tax payments buried in IT systems outside of finance, massive data volumes, and incomplete data attributes, Azure OpenAI Service finds the data relationships to predict tax payments and tax type—making it much easier to validate accuracy and categorize payments by country and tax type.”—Brett Weaver, Partner, Tax ESG Leader at KPMG.

Azure—the best place to build AI workloads

The general availability of Azure OpenAI Service is not only an important milestone for our customers but also for Azure.

Azure OpenAI Service provides businesses and developers with high-performance AI models at production scale with industry-leading uptime. This is the same production service that Microsoft uses to power its own products, including GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer that helps developers write better code, Power BI, which leverages GPT-3-powered natural language to automatically generate formulae and expressions, and the recently-announced Microsoft Designer, which helps creators build stunning content with natural language prompts.

All of this innovation shares a common thread: Azure’s purpose-built, AI-optimized infrastructure.

Azure is also the core computing power behind OpenAI API’s family of models for research advancement and developer production.

Azure is currently the only global public cloud that offers AI supercomputers with massive scale-up and scale-out capabilities. With a unique architecture design that combines leading GPU and networking solutions, Azure delivers best-in-class performance and scale for the most compute-intensive AI training and inference workloads. It’s the reason the world’s leading AI companies—including OpenAI, Meta, Hugging Face, and others—continue to choose Azure to advance their AI innovation. Azure currently ranks in the top 15 of the TOP500 supercomputers worldwide and is the highest-ranked global cloud services provider today. Azure continues to be the cloud and compute power that propels large-scale AI advancements across the globe.

Source: TOP500 The List: TOP500 November 2022, Green500 November 2022.

A responsible approach to AI

As an industry leader, we recognize that any innovation in AI must be done responsibly. This becomes even more important with powerful, new technologies like generative models. We have taken an iterative approach to large models, working closely with our partner OpenAI and our customers to carefully assess use cases, learn, and address potential risks. Additionally, we’ve implemented our own guardrails for Azure OpenAI Service that align with our Responsible AI principles. As part of our Limited Access Framework, developers are required to apply for access, describing their intended use case or application before they are given access to the service. Content filters uniquely designed to catch abusive, hateful, and offensive content constantly monitor the input provided to the service as well as the generated content. In the event of a confirmed policy violation, we may ask the developer to take immediate action to prevent further abuse.

We are confident in the quality of the AI models we are using and offering customers today, and we strongly believe they will empower businesses and people to innovate in entirely new and exciting ways.

The pace of innovation in the AI community is moving at lightning speed. We’re tremendously excited to be at the forefront of these advancements with our customers, and look forward to helping more people benefit from them in 2023 and beyond.

Source: microsoft.com

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Microsoft named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Development and Infrastructure Platforms, 2022

Forrester recently published its report, The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Development and Infrastructure Platforms, Global, Q4 2022, placing Microsoft in the “Leaders” category. It’s an honor to be named as one of only two leaders in Forrester’s definitive report on the public cloud development and infrastructure platform market.

The Forrester report recognized Microsoft for its long-term focus on Kubernetes, hybrid, and multicloud capabilities and noted that it is seeking to lead in hybrid and multicloud environments with platform management tools and capabilities. Reference customers praised Microsoft’s service improvements and partnerships. With Microsoft Azure, customers have a trusted cloud partner and the most advanced, highly integrated enterprise IT infrastructure to help them navigate ever-changing environments and achieve business success today, while they build for the future.

Helping developers build any app for any platform

We recognize that developers are the driving engine of innovation. When they are empowered to set up a complete engineering system in seconds, contribute and collaborate with anyone on any device, use the right tool for the job, and integrate with the rest of the organization’s digital estate, organizations can bring innovation to market faster with greater confidence. Azure makes all that possible. For example, with Microsoft Visual Studio, developers can deploy iOS, Android, Windows, Web or embedded apps to wherever they’d like–Azure, hybrid, on-premises and multi-cloud environments. Further, Azure fully supports some of the most popular open source technologies from Linux, to open-sourced databases, to Grafana, allowing organizations to leverage existing investments when running on Azure.

In August, we introduced Microsoft Dev Box, a managed service for developers to create on-demand, high-performance, secure, ready-to-code, project-specific workstations in the cloud, so they can work and innovate anywhere. And we’ve continued to bring new Kubernetes capabilities across Azure, which I’ll cover a little later in this article.

As the range of application development tools continues to grow, we’re seeing a surge in low-code technologies to spur innovation and lower the barrier to entry. Microsoft makes it easy with PowerApps, which provides prebuilt templates, drag-and-drop simplicity, quick deployment and AI-powered assistance, helping anyone create apps using natural language, while enabling the same DevOps practices for low-code tools that customers expect when building trusted enterprise solutions.

In this new world, organizations are harnessing the cloud to create a culture where everyone feels empowered to innovate, while lowering the barrier to creating new types of apps that can take businesses to new heights.

The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform

We’re entering the age of the “intelligent app,” where every app is AI-enabled and adapts to each organization’s modern data capabilities. However; fragmented digital estates make it difficult for organizations to harness their data to add layers of intelligence to their apps.

At our Build event in May, we announced the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform that fully integrates databases, analytics, and governance for a unified data estate. With this integration, organizations can power applications at any scale, get actionable insights from all their data, and properly govern data where it resides. To accelerate time to value, customers can use pre-built, customizable, and production-ready AI models as the building blocks for intelligent solutions with Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Applied AI Services.

As AI becomes more mainstream across organizations, it’s essential that employees have the tools to leverage this technology responsibly. We apply Microsoft's Responsible AI Standards to our product development, and have made it a priority to help customers understand, protect, and control their AI solutions with tools and resources like the Responsible AI Dashboard, bot development guidelines, and built-in tools to help explain model behavior, test for fairness and more.

By unifying and integrating data to create more intelligent apps, customers are opening the door to new innovations never thought possible.

From cloud to edge: Innovate securely, anywhere

More and more organizations are embracing hybrid and multicloud as part of their migration and modernization journeys, and they want to continue this flexible approach in a secure, compliant, reliable, and integrated way. Forrester credits Microsoft with "seeking to lead in hybrid and multicloud environments with platform management tools and capabilities, including the Azure Arc management platform."

Azure Arc operates as a bridge extending across the Azure platform by allowing applications and services the flexibility to run across on-premises, edge, and multicloud environments. One of the key challenges organizations face is securing and managing their distributed environments consistently while building innovative applications using cloud-native technologies.

Recently, we announced new deployment options for Azure Kubernetes Services enabled by Azure Arc so customers can run containerized apps, in addition to many first-party Azure application, data, and machine learning services, anywhere regardless of their location.

They can also take advantage of Azure’s comprehensive security, governance, and management capabilities for their Windows, Linux, SQL Server, and Kubernetes deployments in their datacenters, at the edge, or multicloud.

Azure is the only cloud platform built by a security vendor and ensuring that our customers' data is safe and secure is at the forefront of everything we do. For example, our Defender for Cloud security service spans across all clouds—even AWS and Google Cloud for a seamless, consistent, and secure cloud journey where it leads.

Our deep commitment to our customers is baked into every aspect of our vision and roadmap—to be the trusted partner with the most advanced, yet flexible cloud technologies that enable anyone in any organization to innovate anywhere. It’s an honor to be recognized for that commitment and a great way to usher in the New Year.

Source: microsoft.com

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Azure Confidential Computing on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors with Intel TDX

Microsoft continues to be the cloud leader in confidential computing, and the Azure team is excited to continue our leadership by partnering with Intel to offer confidential computing on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with Intel Trusted Domain Extensions (Intel TDX) later this year, enabling organizations in highly regulated industries to lift and shift their workloads that handle sensitive data to scale in the cloud. Intel TDX meets the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) standard for hardware-enforced memory protection not controlled by the cloud provider, all while delivering minimal performance impact with no code changes. 

Azure and Intel enable innovative use cases

Across industries, Microsoft Azure customers use confidential computing with Intel processors to achieve higher levels of data privacy and mitigate risks associated with unauthorized access to sensitive data or intellectual property. They are leveraging innovative solutions such as data clean rooms to accelerate the development of new healthcare therapies, and privacy-preserving digital asset management solutions for the financial industry. These scenarios and more are in production today, leveraging 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX), a foundational technology of the Azure confidential computing portfolio. In fact, Azure was the first major cloud provider to offer confidential computing in the cloud with virtual machines (VMs) enabled with Intel SGX application isolation. As founding members of the CCC, Microsoft and Intel work with numerous other member organizations to define and accelerate adoption of confidential computing. This effort includes contributions to several open source projects. The Azure team looks forward to extending this collaboration by bringing to market Intel TDX–based services in Azure.

Intel TDX extends Azure's existing confidential computing offerings

Today, Azure’s DCsv3 VMs offer application isolation using Intel SGX, delivering the smallest trust boundary of any confidential computing technology today. The addition of Intel TDX expands our portfolio to offer isolation at the VM, container or application levels to meet the diversity of customer needs. Azure is the only major cloud provider committed to offering both VM-level and application-level confidential computing offerings. Both are supported by Intel’s hardware root of trust and address the attestation requirements that meet the confidential computing industry standard. Both Intel TDX and Intel SGX technologies provide capabilities that help remove the cloud operator’s access to data, including removing the hypervisor from the trust boundary. 

Removing trust in the hypervisor

While Azure has engineered our hypervisor to be very secure, we are seeing a growing number of customers seeking further protections to meet data sovereignty and regulatory compliance. These customers require increased isolation and protection of their workloads to reduce the risk of unauthorized data access. As such, Microsoft leverages hardware control over hypervisors to protect customer data. With Intel-based confidential computing solutions on Azure, altering the hypervisor does not allow Azure operators to read or alter customer data in memory.

Establishing trust via attestation

Attestation is a critical concept of confidential computing. It allows customers to verify the third-party hardware root of trust and software stack prior to allowing any code to access and process data. With Intel TDX, the attestation is done against the entire VM or container, each with a unique hardware key to keep memory protected. With Intel TDX, we will offer attestation support with Microsoft Azure Attestation as standard and will also partner closely with Intel on their upcoming trust service, code-named "Project Amber," to meet the security requirements of customers.

Confidential computing takes off

Many Azure confidential computing customers can attest to the value they receive from our existing Intel confidential computing offerings.

Novartis Biome uses BeeKeeperAI’s EscrowAI confidential clean room solution on Azure confidential computing for the training and validation of algorithms to predict instances of a rare childhood condition using real patient data from health records, while maintaining privacy and compliance.

“Rare diseases are often challenging to diagnose and if left untreated, they can significantly diminish a patient’s quality of life. With BeeKeeperAI, our scientists were able to securely access a large gold standard dataset that enabled us to improve the predictive capabilities of our algorithm, bringing us much closer to identifying patients early in the disease course and to improving their outcomes.” —Robin Roberts, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Novartis Biome

Fireblocks provides enterprise-grade secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. They use Intel confidential computing technology on Azure to hold one of the keys to its wallets.

"Some of the biggest cryptocurrency businesses, financial institutions, and enterprises in the world trust Fireblocks software and APIs to provide digital custody solutions, manage treasury operations, access DeFi, mint and burn tokens, and manage their digital asset operations. We leverage Azure to hold one of the keys to our wallets due to Azure Confidential Computing ... " —Michael Shaulov, CEO and Co-founder, Fireblocks

Carbon Asset Solutions soil-based carbon credit collection and tracking system uses immutable ledger technology provided by Azure confidential ledger.

"Carbon Asset Solutions is a world-first precision measurement, recording, and verification platform focused on atmospheric carbon removal through soil carbon sequestration. With Azure, we deliver higher integrity Carbon Credits than any other method." —Sara Saeidi, Chief Operating Officer, Carbon Asset Solutions

Azure’s vision for the confidential cloud

We see a future where confidential computing is standard and pervasive both in the cloud and at the edge within all Azure service offerings. Customers will be able to more confidently use the cloud for their most sensitive data workloads while verifying the environment and staying in full control of data access. We look forward to the launch of 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and offering Intel TDX–enabled instances with VM-level data protection and performance improvements later this year, continuing our partnership with Intel to help transition Azure to the confidential cloud.

Source: microsoft.com

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Microsoft named a Leader in 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Insight Engines

How your organization can benefit, no matter the industry.

As the amount of data being generated continues to grow at an exponential rate, it's becoming increasingly important for organizations to have a rich set of tools that can help them make sense of it all. That's where insight engines come in. These powerful solutions apply relevancy methods to data of all types, from structured to highly unstructured, allowing users to describe, discover, organize, and analyze it to deliver information proactively or interactively at the right time, in the right context.

Microsoft has recently been named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines, a report that evaluates the capabilities of various vendors in the market.

Microsoft offers two integrated solutions in this space: Microsoft Search, which is available with Microsoft 365, and Azure Cognitive Search, which is available as a platform as-a-service (PaaS) with Microsoft Azure. These solutions are designed to help professionals and developers build impactful AI-powered search solutions that can solve complex problems and enhance the customer experience by enabling information discovery across the spectrum from unstructured to structured data. Whether you need a turnkey solution to reason over enterprise data or the flexibility to tailor search to specific scenarios, Microsoft has you covered.

Azure Cognitive Search can be used in a variety of industries to improve efficiency and decision-making. Some specific examples of how it can be used include:

◉ Manufacturing: Cognitive Search can be used to help manufacturers quickly find information about production processes, equipment, and materials. It can be applied to structured data scenarios such as part catalogs as well as unstructured content such as equipment manuals, safety procedures, and imagery. 

◉ Energy: Cognitive Search can be used to quickly find information related to exploration, drilling, and production. Geo-location search combined with traditional search input enables discovery experiences to get the most of past and present geological site studies, and extensibility allows incorporating energy industry-specific information.

◉ Retail: Cognitive Search can be used to develop a powerful product catalog search experience for retail web sites and apps. Customizable ranking options, scale capability to handle peak traffic with low latency, and the ability for near-real time updates for critical data such as inventory make it a great fit for the scenario. 

◉ Financial services: Cognitive Search can be used by financial institutions to quickly find data related to investments, market trends, and regulatory compliance. Its sophisticated semantic ranking and question-answering capabilities can enable users to answer business questions faster and more confidently.

◉ Healthcare: Cognitive Search can be used by healthcare organizations to improve patient care, streamline operations, and make better informed decisions by quickly finding and accessing relevant information within electronic medical record systems, providing real-time access to clinical guidelines and evidence-based best practices.

Nearly every user knows what to do when they see a search box. All SaaS applications targeting audiences from consumer to enterprise can greatly benefit from a great search experience over their own data. Azure Cognitive Search can deliver an out-of-the-box solution, inclusive of various multi-tenancy strategies, support for over 50 languages, and a global presence to ensure your solution is delivered in the right location for your customers.

If you're a technical decision maker in one of these industries, or any other industry, and you're interested in learning more about how Microsoft's cognitive search solutions can help you unlock the full potential of your data, you can visit the Azure Cognitive Search website and the Microsoft Search website.

You can also download a complimentary copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines to see how Microsoft is recognized in the space.

Source: microsoft.com

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Drive efficiency through automation and AI with the Microsoft Cloud

This year at Microsoft Ignite we explore how organizations can activate AI and automation directly in their business workflows and empower developers to use those same intelligent building blocks to deliver their own differentiated experiences.

The global pandemic has created unprecedented levels of uncertainty, as well as the need to sense and reshape our physical and digital environments, sometimes in completely new ways. Leaders across industries recognize innovation as the only path forward. Critically, we’ve seen a shift from “innovation for innovation’s sake” toward a desire to lower operating costs, anticipate trends, reduce carbon footprints, and improve customer and employee experiences. We’re calling this commitment to innovation “digital perseverance.”

Do more with less with the Microsoft Cloud

Automation and AI are key ingredients for digital perseverance and helping organizations drive efficiency. Komatsu Australia, for example, a leading industrial equipment manufacturer, used Power Automate and AI Builder to automate over 1,000 invoices annually and realize an efficiency gain of 300 hours per year—and that was just for one supplier. These capabilities also improve employee engagement. Of those surveyed in a recent Microsoft study, the use of no-code or low-code platforms or apps is shown to have led to an 83 percent positive impact on work satisfaction. When people are freed from tedious, low-value tasks and feel empowered to contribute their best work, everyone wins.

Organizations are also using AI and automation to reinvent their businesses to stand out from competitors and drive growth. In a recent survey, of respondents investing in AI, 47 percent indicated the main driver was to create new products or services, while only 43 percent indicated the main driver was to improve existing products and services.1 With the Microsoft Cloud, technical and non-technical roles can access leading AI and automation capabilities directly in their flow of work to be more productive. For example, Fashable, a technology startup in Portugal, is using Azure Machine Learning to reduce “fast fashion” waste by forecasting customer interest in computer-generated fashion designs before ever touching a sewing machine. Another great example is Investec, a global financial services company, which uses conversation intelligence in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to help their sellers be more productive on sales calls, follow up quickly, and preserve valuable customer information, which raises the bar in the sales journey and drives growth.

Automation and AI everywhere and for everyone

We believe everyone should have access to these transformative technologies, so we’re infusing AI and automation throughout the Microsoft Cloud, from Viva Sales to Power Platform and Azure AI. This means customers can leverage the skills and resources they already have and confidently combine platforms as needed, all while building on a secure, flexible, and integrated foundation within the Microsoft Cloud.

Drive seller productivity and deeper customer engagement with Dynamics 365 and Viva Sales

We are infusing automation and AI into Dynamics 365 to help professionals focus on what matters most—creating great customer experiences. Microsoft Viva Sales, a seller experience application now generally available, captures customer and deal insights from Microsoft 365 and Teams and populates it within any customer relationship management (CRM) system, eliminating manual data entry and freeing time to focus on selling. Today, we are announcing that conversation intelligence capabilities will be available to all Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales customers at no additional cost. With conversation intelligence, AI guides sales conversations in real time by recommending talking points and sales literature to share with the customer. In addition, sellers receive insights on customer emails within Outlook, which can be updated directly in their CRM.

Empower people and automate processes with Microsoft Syntex

Content is everywhere, in the form of videos, audio files, documents, and more. Microsoft research estimates organizations spend nearly $46 billion a year storing and managing content while netting countless hours of manual processing. Content AI transforms how this content is created, processed, and discovered to turn content from a cost into an advantage.

We’re excited to introduce Microsoft Syntex: Content AI integrated in the flow of work. It integrates innovations across the Microsoft Cloud, from Microsoft 365 to Azure, to Power Platform and Microsoft Purview. Syntex automatically reads, tags, and indexes high volumes of content and connects it where it’s needed in context—in search, in applications, and as reusable knowledge. It puts people at the center, with content integrated into collaboration and workflows like eSignature. Customers like TaylorMade Golf Company, a global golf equipment provider, are using Syntex to empower their people and automate workflows at scale.

Improve operational efficiency by automating repetitive processes with Power Platform

Low-code enables people and organizations to punch above their weight in IT resources, doing more and at a lower cost, and when it comes to revolutionizing day-to-day processes, there’s nothing quite like Power Platform. Power Platform makes it easy for anyone to build apps and webpages, automate workflows, create virtual agents, and analyze data. At Microsoft Ignite, we’re excited to share new innovations that make AI and low-code more intuitive for users of all skill levels.

Building on the success of GitHub Copilot, we’re bringing natural language capabilities to Power Automate with description to cloud flows. Now, a maker only needs to describe in natural language the flow they want to build and a suggestion of relevant flows is generated—the maker then adds connections to finalize their flow. It’s that easy. In AI Builder, feedback loop gives you the ability to flag and retrain documents for higher accuracy, and there is now additional support for unstructured data and text recognition to identify 164 languages.

Quickly and easily embed AI into business apps with Azure Applied AI and Cognitive Services

Azure Applied AI Services and Azure Cognitive Services provide developers with pre-built and customizable models to quickly deploy intelligent applications. While AI adoption increased overall during the pandemic, it particularly accelerated use cases like document processing for H&R Block, knowledge mining for Beiersdorf, and natural language understanding in sales and service scenarios for Progressive Insurance. These companies are using Azure AI services to remove friction in business-critical processes to help end-users and employees focus their time and energy on valuable work.

Now customers can use a new pre-built model for contracts in the Azure Form Recognizer Studio to extract entities such as parties and payment terms for downstream processing. Azure OpenAI Service, available in preview, now offers access to DALL·E 2 by invitation. Azure Cognitive Service for Language now offers expanded summarization, contact center capabilities, language support, and Language Studio enhancements.

Build and deploy responsible machine learning models faster to enhance productivity at any scale with Azure Machine Learning

For organizations building custom predictive models, Azure Machine Learning provides a powerful, unified machine learning platform to help teams get models into production more quickly. To enhance collaboration, we’re excited to announce Azure Machine Learning registries, enabling teams to share registries at the tenant and organization level for greater repeatability and scale. To help customers do more with less, we’ve also consolidated open source tools within the Responsible AI Dashboard, now generally available, for easier debugging directly within a data scientist’s workflow. Finally, we’re helping organizations build with the frameworks they already know and love. Our latest release for Azure Container for PyTorch enables teams to optimize training for PyTorch models directly within the Azure Machine Learning Studio or SDK.

Drive the next level of insights, efficiency, and sustainability with the industrial metaverse

When you think about how data, automation, and AI can combine to make a real impact, one of the most compelling scenarios is in the industrial metaverse. One example is how Bosch built their industrial metaverse with different users’ needs in mind.

Bosch is reducing complexity on their factory floors by using the Internet of Things (IoT) and Azure Digital Twins to optimize predictive maintenance. Their machines trigger an alert when there’s an issue and before something breaks down. The alerts are automatically routed through Microsoft Teams—for simple issues—or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, when a service ticket is needed. And all the data from this system feeds back into itself, continuously improving Bosch’s predictive maintenance models over time. By combining platforms, Bosch empowers everyone from their frontline workers, to operations managers, and data scientists to contribute their expertise and deliver greater efficiency. That’s the kind of disruption that makes Bosch a leader in the manufacturing industry.

Digital perseverance is inclusive and responsible

Digital perseverance allows organizations to thrive despite uncertainty by harnessing digital technology to achieve their business goals and do more with less. Microsoft provides an unmatched foundation for this, combining leading platforms for CRM, Robotic Process Automation, and Cloud AI Developer Services, among others. We’re also committed to the advancement of AI that’s driven by principles that put people first, enabling our customers and partners to innovate responsibly for the future of work. By democratizing leading and responsible innovation across the Microsoft Cloud, we’re helping customers get the most out of their technology stack and ensuring everyone from the frontline to the back office can contribute their best work.

Source: microsoft.com

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Forrester study finds 228 percent ROI when modernizing applications on Azure PaaS

Using modern apps in the cloud to do more with less

There’s no denying the pivotal role developers play in today’s organizations. Whether you’re a high-tech company, a non-profit organization, or a fast-food restaurant, robust digital and online services are key to your customer success. Take the example of one of our customers, Jotun, a multinational chemical supplier—their customer-facing and sales applications are mission critical to their business. But with a small development team managing global applications on premises, the time and effort they spent on routine management and administration was extensive.

The company decided to embrace application modernization—ending investments in on-premises structures—and migrate their apps to Microsoft Azure with Azure App Service. In addition to eliminating routine maintenance tasks and increasing uptime, the new approach enabled them to scale developer expertise, deliver high application performance from anywhere in the world, and begin the transition to a modern development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) approach—all while lowering costs and accelerating time to market.

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) represents one of the most cost-effective ways to strategically shift resources to application innovation, rather than spending time managing application infrastructure. Azure PaaS services like Azure App Service, Azure Spring Apps, and Azure Integration Services provide developers and IT professionals with a fully managed application platform for building, deploying, and managing applications of all kinds—from the simplest website to the most complex business solution. Developers focus on innovation, and the cloud platform takes care of everything else. A new, commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, The Total Economic ImpactTM (TEI) of Azure PaaS, details the significant business impact of this approach.

Through a series of customer interviews, Forrester finds that a composite organization—an anonymized aggregate profile of these customers—using Azure PaaS can realize:

◉ A three year 228 percent return on investment (ROI), with a payback period of 15 months.

◉ A 50 percent increase in the speed of application development.

◉ A 40 percent reduction in app-dev related infrastructure costs.

Speaking with Azure customers, Forrester observed several common factors that drove their organizations’ decision to adopt Azure PaaS for modernizing applications. These include being part of a broader strategic initiative, the potential for cost savings, limitations with existing architectures, wanting to take advantage of cloud capabilities, the tight market for tech talent, and prior experience with Azure.

Simply put, this set of fully managed services offers a powerful tool for enterprises to equip their developers in the rapidly changing application landscape.

Retire legacy infrastructure, reduce server costs, and deliver value faster with Azure

Whether your goal is to modernize applications in the cloud, integrate with modern databases and AI, rapidly build apps with low-code platforms, or future-proof existing applications, Azure helps you to provide your developers with the right tools for the right job.

Let me tell you about several ways Azure's fully managed services can transform your organization’s application development process:*

Tackle application development infrastructure costs

Whether you’re operating in an on-premises or hybrid environment, Azure PaaS supports your migration needs efficiently, enabling you to retire legacy infrastructure after applications are fully migrated.

Forrester estimates total application development-related infrastructure cost savings for the composite organization at USD19.1 million over three years during this process.

Rely on trusted cloud infrastructure and security management

While migrating to virtual machines is sometimes the simplest and fastest path for many organizations, application modernization provides the full benefits of the public cloud. PaaS makes this easier because now companies benefit from the cloud provider managing the underlying infrastructure and software of the platform. The cost savings for the composite organization begin almost immediately, with Forrester research showing estimated savings of USD10.3 million on related administrative costs over three years.

Free developers to focus on innovation

Developers are at their best when they’re given time to focus on innovating and developing new applications. Modernizing with PaaS helps increase productivity using dev/test and staging environments, provides the ability to run on the latest versions of the OS, languages, and framework, and enables the use of modern DevOps practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery. The potential for savings for the composite organization is up to USD7.2 million over three years.

Prioritize application uptime

Offloading management of infrastructure not only reduces the immediate spending, but also ensures that the service provider is responsible for maintaining a 99.95 percent SLA uptime. The resiliency inherent in the fully managed service approach provides peace of mind to the developers in the composite organization and an estimated USD3.8 million in avoided revenue losses over three years.

Reap immediate benefits for your business

With an efficient and reliable platform that works out of the box, developers increase the speed of application development by up to 50 percent. The improved time to market saves the composite organization USD2.8 million over three years and enhances the organization’s ability to serve customer needs better.

*Disclaimer: In this study, Forrester provides the detailed assumptions and methodology used to arrive at these estimates. We encourage readers to use their own estimates within the framework provided in the study to determine the appropriateness of an investment in Azure PaaS.

Source: microsoft.com

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Wipro and Microsoft partner on services and accelerators for the new Microsoft Energy Data Services

Since its first customer-ready release, the OSDU™ Data Platform has been tested and piloted within the energy industry with great success. However, customers have been awaiting an enterprise-ready version of the OSDU Data Platform that is secure, resilient, and backed up by SLAs. The platform needs to provide connectivity with the legacy and cloud applications and be extensible and customizable for customer-specific scenarios. Partners like Wipro blend domain experience with the OSDU Data Platform to help accelerate the operationalization of Microsoft Energy Data Services.

Microsoft Energy Data Services is a fully managed, enterprise-grade data platform that enables efficient data management, standardization, liberation, and consumption in energy exploration. The solution is a hyperscale data ecosystem that leverages the capabilities of the OSDU Data Platform and Microsoft's secure and trustworthy cloud services with our partners’ extensive domain expertise.

A significant constraint with today’s industry business platforms is the strong bias of first principles analysis with a domain value chain that strongly preconditions the way that data is used and when. Data is siloed within the stages of the value chain and locked up by the applications supporting the workflows in these stages. The growing need and demand for data-driven analysis to complement first principles analysis, and for business workflows to also leverage advanced analytics and machine learning (AI/ML) applications are largely unsatisfied.

The OSDU Forum is an open source consortium of energy operators, which has set out to design and develop a cloud-native data platform. Wipro is a key contributor and helps address the data issue by providing self-service consumption of analytics-ready data. This is a critical objective of Wipro’s participation in the OSDU Forum.

Current data management technologies creates substantial lock-in and require significant amounts of effort to run and maintain cost-effective infrastructure. A move to the cloud potentially reduces lockin and running costs and paves the way towards "pay-for-use" rather than "pay-to-own." The existing data foundation platforms are complex, dominated by service and technology providers, and do not readily maximize the benefit of emerging technologies, such as data interoperability and analytics, due to significant legacy content. Furthermore, to date within E&P there has only been limited acceptance of technologies arising from other industries, including the adoption of cloud and Open Source.

Wipro and Microsoft partner to provide new technologies to enterprise-level organizations

With Microsoft Energy Data Services, Wipro is offering to adopt an open architecture that provides accelerated access to new technologies through an open, modular cloud agnostic design. Based primarily on existing generic IT components, the solution provides a data foundation that decouples applications from their data source and further reduces operating costs through the adoption of a cloud hosting environment. Moving to a cloud-based data foundation provides considerable benefits to an enterprise including:

◉ A centralized data landscape containing fewer database instances designed to meet the anticipated increase in storage capacity occasioned by the acquisition of real-time data and the introduction of fiber optics for drilling, downhole sensors, and the internet of things (IoT).

◉ Higher consistency of data, simplified workflows, reduced complexity, and an analytical user interface result in increased automation that facilitates a switch to self-service operation.

◉ Real-time data acquisition to cloud and centralized delivery to cloud for other sources of data (vendor, partner, release, and more).

◉ Deliverable as a service (SaaS and PaaS), thereby significantly reducing support training costs and overall cost of ownership (TCO).

◉ Reduced tie-in to products from traditional service contractors.

◉ Provision of a long-term, low-cost digital archive for all drilling and well-logging data and analyses.

The benefits of the OSDU data as a service model

The OSDU Data Platform enabled and supported by Microsoft Energy Data Services provides many solutions to business challenges, including:

◉ Faster deployment with automated service offerings

◉ Easier deployment of OSDU Data Platform functionality

◉ New insights with domain workflows and application integration with any data source

◉ Data-driven decisions, performance improvement, and data ready to leverage HPC and AI/ML scenarios

◉ Reduced cycle time, enabling developers to quickly develop and integrate new applications and scenarios

◉ Legacy decommissioning

◉ Open source

◉ Scalable due to cloud

◉ TCO reduction

◉ Analytics, automation across datasets, and the entire value chain

◉ Reduced vendor lock-in

Wipro and the OSDU Data Platform

Understanding the E&P domain and full comprehension of the various data types and data formats forms a key component of Wipro’s offering. Specifically, Wipro’s domain expertise is a clear differentiator that has been successfully leveraged in similar engagements for other operators. This domain knowledge in every part of the upstream value chain has been brought together in Wipro’s dedicated global OSDU Data Platform practice. When this E&P expertise is coupled with Wipro’s big data service capabilities, the combination of these two perspectives provides a truly 360-degree domain-driven service.

Wipro and Microsoft partner together on Microsoft Energy Data Services client engagements. This optimizes the cooperation and coordination between cloud provider and systems integrator, which will be of significant benefit to clients aiming to implement Microsoft Energy Data Services as their standard system of record. This collaboration, together with the experience of both parties, ensures that Wipro is well positioned to quickly jump-start any OSDU Data Platform journey to liberate and integrate subsurface data with Microsoft Energy Data Services.

Wipro is a member of, and a major contributor to, the OSDU Forum. Wipro has authored developing standards as put forward by the OSDU Forum, and its prominent participation in the OSDU activities enables it to assure seamless integration between data platform onboarding and data loading, and legacy data and application platforms. Wipro fully understands the strategic importance and value of data, and the OSDU Data Platform will be distinguished by its ability to provide a digital data portal. Wipro is, and has, made significant investments in people, solutions, and capabilities to build a dedicated OSDU Data Platform practice to provide a high level of service. Further, Wipro has invested in a sustainable staffing model going forward by leveraging its global footprint and strategic partnerships. Wipro regularly works remotely on OSDU Data Platform deployments and therefore does not foresee any impediment to working in a worldwide implementation environment.

Wipro has a templated deployment approach and can bring its own tools and utilities to enhance, where appropriate, the standard OSDU data platform. This enables Wipro to securely deploy and configure functional, information security–compliant Microsoft Energy Data Services in an Azure subscription.

Wipro’s standard deployment comprises three workstreams, as follows:

◉ Deploy the OSDU Data Platform with Microsoft Energy Data Services in the client’s own or hosted Azure subscription so it can be securely operated.

◉ Ingest existing client subsurface data that is aligned with the OSDU Technical Standard, provide knowledge transfer to business stakeholders, and provide insight on how to leverage the OSDU data platform to increase business value.

◉ Develop a Microsoft Energy Data Services roadmap and evaluate operating model alternatives for optimal business value, and promote understanding of tools and workflows that promote integration and adoption of the OSDU Data Platform.

Wipro services and accelerators

Wipro has invested significantly in helping companies on their OSDU Data Platform adoption journey and as such has developed services that provide open source functionality over and above the standard OSDU Data Platform offering.

◉ Platform onboarding

◉ Dataset and user onboarding

◉ Data migration

◉ Data ingestion

◉ WINS framework

◉ External data access and publish scenarios

◉ Application integration

◉ Data discovery

The following screenshots provide an example of a Power BI business intelligence dashboard containing data sourced from an OSDU Data Platform using the native Power BI application connector.

Customized search and display functionality can be achieved via Bing search service APIs and/or OSDU-compliant third-party software vendors.

Wipro’s OSDU Data Platform practice uses the combined knowledge, skills, and operational delivery capabilities from the combination of Wipro’s domain and consulting, engineering, and cloud platform verticals to provide an innovative horizontal solution offering.

This enables our clients to:

◉ Accelerate their end game to digital transformation.

◉ Make their organizations data-centric via the OSDU data platform.

◉ Enable the refactoring, integration, and deployment of workflow interoperability.

◉ Prioritize their data and prepare for OSDU migration at scale.

◉ Define and achieve inter-organizational collaboration and operational support model requirements.

How to work with Wipro Services and Accelerator on Microsoft Energy Data Services

Microsoft Energy Data Services is an enterprise-grade, fully managed, OSDU Data Platform for the energy industry that is efficient, standardized, easy to deploy, and scalable for data management—ingesting, aggregating, storing, searching, and retrieving data. The platform can provide the scale, security, privacy, and compliance expected by enterprise customers. Wipro offers services and accelerators utilizing the WINS framework which accelerates time-to-market and the ability to run domain workflows with ease, with data contained in Microsoft Energy Data Services and with minimal effort.

Source: microsoft.com

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