What’s the Intelligent Cloud & Intelligent Edge and how they are the keys to your digital transformation

As we all become more familiar with digital transformation, it’s important that we keep the purpose of this transformation in mind. Like most other business decisions, digital transformation is a means to business outcomes. The digital outcomes Satya Nadella outlined in his Ignite 2017 keynote speech are empowered employees, engaged customers, optimized operations and transformed products. All those outcomes sound ideal, but how do you reach these goals?

Digital Transformation defined by the Digital Feedback Loop

To reach your digital transformation outcomes, you need to put in place and pay attention to, your digital feedback loop. Your digital feedback loop is a virtual cycle that starts with your product or service, its adoption, and consumption by customers, leading to the creation of rich data insights across the value chain, which should then filter back into your business model. Then, the loop starts again. 

The important thing here is that you are making informed decisions based on real data and insights from your customers. This digital feedback loop requires a shift in your company’s culture. Your investors, leadership team and employees need to be on board with responding to customers’ needs and market trends at a faster pace than ever before.

To get more detailed information about digital transformation outcomes and the digital feedback loop, check out Satya’s Ignite 2017 keynote speech here and follow this “Intelligent Business” blog series for additional information and tips to guide your transformation.

So, what is the foundation for this transformation? That’s where Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge come into play.

Digital Feedback Loop powered by the Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge

What is the Intelligent Edge?

In this age of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, we need compute capabilities that extend the power of the cloud to mobile and IoT devices. This cloud-enabled “edge” of devices lets data, applications, and intelligence flow to where people are, creating a new class of applications that enable natural user interfaces.

All of this is, of course, wrapped in our priority of keeping data safe, while making people and organizations more productive. As an example- Intelligent Edge will help move personal assistants (Cortana) across devices seamlessly, and help gather insights on data provided from devices and other online interactions, as well as open the door to the next phase of the industrial revolution 4.0.

Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge are just the backdrops for the new generation of enterprise workloads and applications. These concepts aren’t just for developers though, they will change the way we all interact with businesses and our devices on a daily basis- transforming your business and your customers’ businesses. 

To highlight the transformation that is already occurring, I’ll be continuing this “Intelligent Business” blog series with upcoming posts about the Modern Workplace, Business Applications, Applications and Infrastructure and Data and AI.

The Modern Workplace: Tools and solutions are constantly being made to support the modern workforce, but how can you best take advantage of the opportunities available to you? There is a shift happening from repetitive tasks to creativity and innovation, from individual productivity to dynamic teamwork, from disparate systems to integrated solutions, and from individual threats to sophisticated and persistent breaches. I’ll help you navigate what’s right for your organization, to help you modernize your workforce.

Business Applications: A lot of LOB applications are on the market, but most organizations often find that these apps aren’t helping drive the needed business outcomes. Things need to change, from huge software suites to streamlined applications, from data silos to connected graphs, and from custom logic to common data models. In this post, I’ll talk about some of the modern business applications proving most useful, and how you can measure their efficacy.

Applications and Infrastructure: Choosing the right software infrastructure is critical to designing the best enterprise applications. Integrating complex systems can be simpler, and there are options to have a more agile infrastructure with “serverless” solutions. We are moving towards hybrid cloud solutions, microservices and containers, cognitive service and artificial intelligence to get more from our apps and infrastructure.

Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI): So, you have a lot of data, but you don’t know if you’re leveraging it to its fullest extent. Also, what’s this AI stuff all about and how can it help your business? We’ll talk about all this and more in my post about data and artificial intelligence.

Welcome to the world of Intelligent Business powered by the Intelligent Cloud & Intelligent Edge, glad you’re coming with us. Please reach out with comments and questions and I’ll do my best to address them in upcoming blogs. You can also connect with me on Twitter.