Microsoft CEO Sataya Nadella kicked off the company’s annual conference, Microsoft Inspire 2022, for its partners today. Pushing the envelope of ‘digital imperative’, he emphasised on the need for the 400,000 organisations-strong Microsoft partner ecosystem to go beyond delivering just digital transformation.
Addressing Microsoft’s partner community, CEO Satya Nadella urged the company's partner ecosystem to step up to the plate and pushed the agenda of ‘digital imperative’. He further said that digital technology is the only deflationary force in the current inflationary environment.
“It's the only way to navigate the headwinds we are confronting today. This is not some abstract concept,” he said, during his keynote.
Recounting a recent encounter, he said a CEO of a CPG manufacturer explained to him how his company leveraged Microsoft technology to increase throughput of operations in a Latin American plant, and used the savings to avoid raising prices and address one of the greatest challenges facing the region's food insecurity.
On Cloud
Speaking on cloud computing, Nadella said that 95 per cent of all new digital workloads will be deployed on the cloud by 2025.
“Cloud is foundational to how organisations will be competitive going forward. Every customer I speak with is clear-eyed about aligning their IT investments to scale with demand. Moving to the cloud allows them to just do that - converting their spending from CapEx to OpEx”, he said.
Courtesy: Microsoft
He announced that Microsoft will add 10 new data centres in 10 markets spanning four continents, to deliver faster access to services and help address data residency needs.
Focus On Sustainability
Maintaining 'sustainability' to be one of the key focus areas, the Microsoft CEO said that the company was adding new capabilities to address its data centres, which will reprocess used equipment drastically that will, in turn, reduce waste. “In fact, we are committed to reusing over 90 per cent of our cloud computing hardware by 2025”, he added.
Microsoft servers might find a second home in schools or job training programs. He said that the reclaim memory carts might be used in electronic toys or game systems.
Age Of AI
Taking on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI), Nadella said that we are in the age of the AI, where the core business logic is no longer being written by developers – it’s being taken on by software.
“By 2025, 10 per cent of all data will be produced by generative AI models. Analytics is moving from backend processes to being critical part of the product experience. And so how are you using this intelligence?”, asked Nadella.
Courtesy: Microsoft
Key Announcements
Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty – With addition of this solution, public sector customers can harness the full power of Microsoft Cloud, including broad platform capabilities, resiliency, agility and security. It will give them a greater control over data and increased transparency to the operational and governance processes of the cloud.
Digital Contact Center Platform – This solution brings together Dynamics 365, Azure Communication Services, Teams, Power Platform, and Nuance into one open extensible and collaborative platform to deliver seamless omnichannel customer engagement. The platform brings together a comprehensive yet flexible solution for contact centers, delivering best-in-class AI that powers self-service experiences, live customer engagements, collaborative agent experiences, business process automation, advanced telephony, and fraud prevention capabilities.
Microsoft Viva Goals, which will be generally available on August 1, 2022, is a goal-setting and management solution that aligns teams to an organisation’s strategic priorities to drive results.
Microsoft Viva Engage, a new app in Teams that helps build community and connection, along with providing tools for personal expression.
Collaborative Annotations allows all meeting participants to draw, type, and react on top of content shared in a meeting using the rich toolset of Microsoft Whiteboard.
Collaborative Annotations |
Courtesy: Microsoft
Video Clip, a feature in Teams chat which will allow a user to record, send, and view short videos. It will allow the user to capture video and then deliver the message at the click of a button. A recipient can play it back at their convenience.
Excel Live allows people to collaborate on workbooks in real-time in Teams meetings.
