Last week we were in Las Vegas for one of the largest Microsoft events – Microsoft Inspire. The annual partner conference gathered more than 20 000 attendees from around the world and provided us with a unique view into Microsoft’s latest advancements and near-term plans.
In this blog, we’ll share the leitmotifs of the conference and our key takeaways. Microsoft’s latest updates will inevitable have a significant impact on helping our clients increase productivity, get on the road to the cloud or adopt Microsoft technology.
“We operate in an industry of tremendous opportunities and strategic partnerships with giants like Microsoft allow us to stay abreast of today’s technology trends and thus, create innovation together with our clients,” commented our Managing Partner – Dimitar Dimitrov.
New Azure Capabilities
Azure has seen many changes and updates and the most interesting of for us, announced at Microsoft Inspire, is the introduction of the Azure Lighthouse. It represents a control panel that enables the management of Azure deployments at scale and across all customers. This provides a better managed Azure experience with higher automation and efficiency, resulting in greater visibility and security for customers. This marks the first time Microsoft has architected a solution at this scale, with partners, and for partners. Other new powerful capabilities are dedicated to simplifying the migration of on-premise apps and data to the cloud, made possible with Azure Migrate. AMP offers proactive advice and tools to help mitigate risks and address common issues associated with moving workloads to the cloud. Overall, we’ve been expanding our expertise in Azure along with its ongoing evolution. A solid portfolio of Azure success stories later, we’re now a strategic cloud technology partner for customers worldwide, committed to being among the first to adopt Microsoft latest technology.
“This is the year of Azure Cloud migrations.” – Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft
AI-first Dynamics 365
Using Dynamics 365 in our daily operations, we’re excited for the complete new set of AI insight modules across all the platform features. They are designed to provide automated insights that help predict sales pipeline, drive efficiency and gain customer 360 view. The tech is even supposed to be able to lower support costs by using virtual agents—all while eliminating in-house AI experts and writing code. We’re now looking forward to Infusing these AI-first modules into our customers platforms.
More updates to Dynamics 365 include a Nonprofit Accelerator and two new integrations for Dynamics 365 that address the automotive and financial services industries. Besides, the Business Applications ISV Connect program is generally available, with new development tools and guidance, marketplace resources, joint field engagement processes and go-to-market support.
Security
Security was one of the main themes at Microsoft Inspire and certainly a topic we wouldn’t afford to miss. With the new Microsoft Security competency now available, we can now showcase and prove our dedication to building solutions that take security best practices into consideration in every phase of the software development lifecycle.
“And, of course trust in the technology we build. We have to treat privacy as a human right. We have to have end-to-end cybersecurity built into technology. We have to have both a set of ethical principles that guide our AI, but most importantly we have to translate that into engineering practices that are there, that are part of everyday engineering.” – Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft
Mixed Reality
Another announcement at Microsoft Inspire we were all ears! It was time to bridge the gap between business process and application across the boundaries of what’s virtual and what’s physical. Microsoft Mixed Reality unlocks commercial opportunities and HoloLens 2, demonstrated at the conference, was the perfect example. The IT giant has built applications right into Dynamics 365 – layout, guides, remote assistance, product visualizer, taking advantage of this new medium of mixed reality. Among the newly built services is Azure Spatial Anchors. Azure Spatial Anchors enables businesses and developers to create mixed reality apps that map, designate and recall precise points of interest that are accessible across HoloLens, iOS and Android devices.
Power Platform
To meet the growing number of applications being developed each year and address the challenge of enormous amount of data getting lost in the silos, Microsoft built Power Platform. Based on Azure Services and fully integrated into Dynamics 365, the Power Platform is one of our team’s favorite Microsoft technologies. Combining its key services, Power BI, Power Apps and Flow, we have created data-driven solutions for large enterprises worldwide and helped them become more efficient at harnessing data coming from a multitude of sources. During Microsoft Inspire, we got introduced to new a new capability of Power Platforms – PowerApps Portals, which are web portals that surface data stored in Common Data Service to employees or users outside their organizations. We are now looking forward to getting our hands on the new feature and help our clients build interactive websites more easily than ever.
Wrapping up
The conference gave us a good idea of the areas Microsoft is focusing on and helped us envision new perspectives. To utilize the full potential of Microsoft latest technology, we also rely on continuously building strong relationships with our clients. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said it a number of times at Inspire, it is the joint successes that make a difference and drive the important digital trends of our time.
Learn more about our Microsoft technology capabilities and get in touch for more information!