Microsoft Product Strategy and Recent Innovations

For the first time, Microsoft Inspire, the annual Microsoft partner conference, was delivered as an online event only. With more than 500 sessions to pick from and online connection zones, it was hard to choose which sessions to attend. This conference allows us to get a good overview of the Microsoft strategy and product innovations. In this article, I will highlight the main ones.

Considering the COVID-19 crisis, to keep operations going, organizations are going through the following phases:

1)     Response: Organizations had to understand how to respond to the sudden need to allow employees to work from home. Establish the right infrastructure, deploy, or scale IT services that will enable employees to work remotely.

2)     Recovery: Than, they had to work at every single workload around the organization and look for opportunities to bring it back to a healthy level of operation.

3)     Reimagine: We know things are not going to be the same post-COVID. Organizations must now look at what operational processes and services must be re-built, what must be reimagined, and what must be left behind.

Research shows that 89% of the CIOs have declared they will now increase their overall budget to go to the cloud and accelerate the movement compared to 54% before the pandemic. Every organization in every industry will have to take an approach of “tech intensity” to successfully navigate through the phases COVID has caused all of us to go through as described above.

Organizations will have to break up traditional silos and expose the technology, data, and business models workflows to allow better collaboration between IT departments and business groups. This is important to respond to these changes in the market place, and to the opportunities that can be generated with a new way of going about doing business in the post-COVID era.

The goal for every organization should be to empower its employees to find new ways of working and create a mindset of transformation and acceptance of new ways of doing things. Engage the customers intelligently and virtually across every industry and business segments. Transform their products and services to continue delivering value to their customers. And optimize operations to maintain profitability while keeping customers and employees safe.

Among the new capabilities of Microsoft solution stack, is the launch of 7 new regions of Azure Datacenters, adding to a total of 61 regions worldwide. Most of these datacenters have compliance certificates adding up to more than 90 compliance certifications altogether. Microsoft has the ambition to generate a net 0% carbon emission in all data centers by 2030. With about 95% of fortune 500 companies running Azure, we appreciate Microsoft’s commitment to the environment.

In the Azure helm, one of the more exciting innovations is the Azure Arc. The goal is to provide a single control plane to visualize and manage services across all workloads on any datacenters on any other cloud services outside of Azure. Also, one of the focuses of Microsoft this year is the Power Platform. It allows anyone to build “no-code” apps, expanding the power and extensibility of Microsoft 365 apps. It is an attempt to allow business groups inside organizations to produce apps themselves without support from IT. The idea is that if you can build formulas in excel, you should be able to make application solutions with Power Apps.

As online transactions increase, so does fraud. On the Business Application side, new capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics include Fraud Protection for e-commerce. It helps combat fake accounts creation, fraudulent account access, and loss prevention that helps protect revenue by reducing the amount of potential fraud. The store experience has been reimagined. Dynamics 365 Connected Stores includes traffic analytics, which will help store managers to monitor the overall traffic easily and whether they are adhering to the social distancing mandate and keeping them closer to also understanding consumer behavior.

The way we work, learn, interact with each other, and experience events is changing dramatically. Organizations need more than ever, a comprehensive solution that brings together communication, collaboration, and business processes with a strong foundation of security and privacy. In this new world, we need to find a balance of optimal productivity and employee and customer well-being. Microsoft Teams is perhaps the most critical Microsoft solution considering the COVID-19 crisis. There are 75 million active users of Teams right now. Remote learning is probably going to be more of a norm than it used to be, the new “Together Mode” in Microsoft Teams use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to place participants side-by-side in a view as if they were sitting next to each other in an auditorium setting. Hence, conversations are more natural and more inclusive. The noise cancellation feature is another one that will exclude the background noise from the conversation and only allow the user’s voice to be picked up by the Microphone. Also, the integration with augmented reality has the potential to transform remote work and collaboration.

All the above new capabilities are supported by a strong foundation of security and compliance. CIOs have indicated security is a strategic priority to most organizations. The shift to “remote everything” only increases the need for an integrated security and compliance solution architecture that reduces the cost and complexity of implementation and management. Microsoft ecosystem is perhaps the only cloud solution that offers a built-in end-to-end capability across security, compliance, and identity powered by cloud intelligence. Threat Actors have exploited the COVID-19 pandemic as more people rely on e-mail and remote communication, increasing the surface of attach for these perpetrators. They are looking to scam people into giving them personal information and stealing identities. Microsoft analyzes more than 8 trillion threat signals each day. 

Small business is often most vulnerable to attacks because they do not have the IT support and budget to protect themselves adequately against new and sophisticated ways of cyberattacks. Among the list of essential security capabilities are multi-factor authentication, conditional access, least privileged access. The new endpoint data loss prevention in Microsoft 365 helps organizations identify and protect sensitive information across all their endpoints. These innovations brought to the small business package, will allow small businesses to have an enterprise-grade level of cybersecurity.

There are a lot more innovations and capabilities that would take a lot more than this short article to describe. Still, the level of integration, and easy to implement capabilities described above are unparallel to anything else available in the industry. I believe this infrastructure will allow small and large businesses to more quickly and cost-efficiently establish enterprise-grade security and compliance capabilities as well as increase productivity and improve the bottom line. I am excited about this new wave of innovation and looking forward to working with our customers on implementing and deploying many of these capabilities to help their businesses grow and strive.