Microsoft WPC 2016: vision keynote day two

On Day 2 of WPC16 Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President at Microsoft talked us through Microsoft Cloud and welcomed special guests on stage. Here are some highlights from day two’s keynote.

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Data Centres and Infrastructure

Scott Guthrie discussed the data center regions that Microsoft have that allow Partners to do their work quickly and continue to build solutions. Explaining there are 700,000 servers, and Microsoft is investing billions of dollars each year to build up infrastructure, enabling partners to build solutions without having to worry.

The Trusted Cloud

Microsoft continues to be the trusted cloud, with more certifications than any other provider!

Microsoft cloud is also the only public cloud vendor licensed to operate in China.

Gartner Magic Quadrant survey  shows Microsoft as the leader by a mile in the cloud space:

AppSource

James Phillips, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft discussed AppSource the business Apps platform

Benefits of AppSource as described by James Phillips:

• AppSource provides a conduit that delivers users to partners
• AppSource finds the right app for your business needs
• Partners can show off their solutions and add them to AppSource
• Business users can discover applications unique to their role or industry
• Allows the end user to immediately try the solutions

Azure

Azure is a truly open platform and supports the ability to target multiple devices and technologies.

Scott Guthrie: “More and more data is created, and there is an increasing need to turn it into intelligent action. Using data to understand why it happened and what action to take. Azure SQL, server 2016, Power BI etc. allows you to deliver incredibly rich data and enable partners to run real-time analytics.”

Rolls Royce

Scott Guthrie then discussed Rolls Royce as a case study. Rolls Royce produce phenomenal engineering machines, for example they produce aircraft engines for airlines. Rolls Royce wanted to provide an even richer and finished service to help their airline clients become even more profitable. They’ve used Azure IOT and embedded Power BI, and integrate the solution as part of a field service with Dynamics CRM. A fully finished solution that enables an airline to see and understand their engine and predict when there might be problem and surface this visually using Power BI directly to the end user.

The cloud allows us to deliver even more value to our customers and to help them transform their organizations and grow our business together.

“Partners have always been the backbone of our success and we would not be able to succeed without you.” Scott Guthrie

Reinventing Productivity in the Workplace Itself

Kirk Koenigsbauer, Corporate Vice President, Office 365 Client Apps and Services Team discussed Office 365 and the need for productivity in the modern workplace.

Kirk explained, one key trend is the need for teams to work better together. Employees now work on nearly double the amount of teams then they did before. More than ever people need to partner with colleagues in the workplace to get their jobs done.

The workplace is seeing significant demographic changes – by 2020 50% will be millennial, millennials are heavy multitaskers and have preferences on how work is done inside an organization. Office 365 is core to delivering productivity.

Office 365 Roadmap

Kirk explained the vision and four pillars of Office 365

1. Collaboration:  “We’re laser-focused on building services to make it easier for people to collaborate in the workplace.”

2. Mobility: “We are building Word, Excel for iOS, Android and mobile devices. The mobility of the human experience, people can be productive no matter where they are. Your data and content should roam with you no matter where you are.”

3. Intelligence: “The intelligence cloud – this is core to productivity itself, human capacity to keep up lags behind, AI and machine learning, personal assistants and bots help improve productivity and automate tasks to help people.”

4. Trust: “Is built-in security and a simple customer promise, it’s your data – you own it and you decide who has access to it.”

Office 365 – Growing Faster than a Locomotive

Just last week Office 365 celebrated its 5 year anniversary and it’s growing faster than a locomotive – 70 million people are using Office 365 and Microsoft has an 80% share of cloud email.

Tim Campos – Facebook CIO

Tim Campos, Facebook CIO spoke to the crowd stating: The mission of Facebook is to make the world more connected, we have employees in 30 countries worldwide, we want to build the most productive workforce on the planet. Culture for us is everything. It’s also about making sure we get things done. Tools are critical information systems which must be available, secure and fast – it’s critical that information is always up to date. Employees can’t spend time thinking about whether they have access to a document or latest versions, simple access and security is key. We let employees decide what works best for them and it’s our job to see that it works as seamlessly as possible. Our productivity tools are device agnostic and location agnostic. Office 365 is all of these things for us.  Adding, “Our Security bar is constantly evolving and Office 365 and Microsoft can meet the security threats of tomorrow.”

Yusef Medhi, Microsoft Corporate VP Windows and Devices Group

• We’re in the middle of a digital revolution that’s changing business.
• We live in a new world of modern security threats.
• We need to break free of two screens and enter a new world of interaction with the pen and voice and the world of mixed reality.
• On average it takes over 200 days to detect a security breach and another 90 days to recover and trillions of dollars in loss of productivity
• There are two types of big companies – those who have been hacked and those who don’t know they have been hacked.
• Biometrics log in is next, sophisticated and secure.
• We are tackling hackers who are mining data without the user knowing.