Doing more with less was a key theme of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s pre-recorded keynote. Here are some of the highlights his keynote.
· Microsoft Azure is building cloud infrastructure massively
· End-to-end data platform from databases, data lake, data factory and synapse analytics
· AI and automation -Open AI collaboration, design, write and test code automatically
· Power apps platform updates for Low-code and no-code , and integration with other tools
· Ditching “Office” and branding Microsoft 365
· Security updates - Defender, Sentinel, Purview, Entra, Priva and Intune endpoints
Optimizing cloud spending is the top priority as cloud spending for organizations is expected to reach $500 billion in 2022. Optimizing spending has been a continuous top initiative for technology, business, and financial leaders. Microsoft has developed cost-saving strategies to help customers get maximum value for their cloud investment.
According to Erin Chapple, product and design for Azure
· customers can lower costs by 37%
· increase efficiency through automation by 53%
· achieve 46% higher productivity for their development teams
By 2025, 70% of new apps will make use of low- and no-code, up from 25% in 2020. With the help of AI, we are transforming low-code into no-code. The same ideas and tools that underpin Copilot are being applied to the Power Platform.
To help you get started creating your own flows, you can describe what you wish to automate, and the system will create suggested flows. You just need to set up the connectors and complete the flow design; that's it. Building complex workflows and automation has never been simpler for you.
Introducing Microsoft Syntex to automatically read, categorize, and index large amounts of content and expose it where it is required. It does this by utilizing our AI Builder and Power Automate features.
Syntex has AI-powered tools for auto-assembly, annotation, translation, and summary. Naturally, Teams and Microsoft 365 both have it integrated. For instance, a collection of Word or PDF documents written in a different language can be quickly translated by Syntex. When you open the translated document, Syntex will provide a summary with highlights and links to the most crucial content.
Teams is part of Microsoft 365, which also includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook in addition to additional tools for creation and expression like Loop, Clipchamp, Stream, and Designer.
And it's all based on the Microsoft Graph, which gives you access to data about people, their relationships, and all of their work-related activities, such as meetings, events, and documents, in a networked system.
Nothing gets done in a vacuum at work. You must excel at both in-person and remote collaboration.
Over the past year, we've released more than 450 capabilities, and today we're releasing additional Teams features. Included in this is Teams premium, which offers increased meeting security so you never have to be concerned about your most private talks being revealed.
According to Gartner, the global AI software market will generate $62.5 billion in revenue in 2022, a 21.3% rise over the previous year. Gartner Senior Research Director Alys Woodward said, "Successful AI business outcomes will depend on the careful selection of use cases," on Thursday at Microsoft Ignite 2022. Use cases that provide sizable amounts of commercial value while being scalable to reduce risk are crucial for demonstrating to business stakeholders the benefits of investing in AI. Seth Juarez, lead program manager at Microsoft, stressed that AI must be a top focus regardless of the industry you work in.
Eric Boyd, corporate vice president of the AI Platform team, was greeted by Juarez and shared success tales from some of Microsoft's clients. In mission-critical workloads, "we're seeing more and more customers achieve true business benefit from AI," he said. For instance, the Volkswagen Group is translating numerous documents while adhering to EU laws by employing translation, Azure Machine Learning, cognitive search, cognitive services, and other tools.
Azure AI is already used today in our daily life such as when it recognizes your face when you login on in the morning, improves the inclusiveness and effectiveness of meetings, helps you with daily tasks, or discovers new activities tailored just to you.
Responsible AI dashboard, new AI builder capabilities and Microsoft Syntex are some of the new announcements, and they are nicely integrated with Power apps, Data services and Microsoft 365 apps so use the AI features.
In addition, Satya and Open AI CEO Sam Altman talked about their collaboration and Altman showed the codex demo for automatically correcting and testing the code.
This is Microsoft’s answer to the unified data platform directly competing with Google data cloud and AWS data services. Microsoft announced some new data services and updates to their data platform.
· Launched new partner ecosystem for ISV partners to build solutions
· Partner databases and analytics in Azure: MongoDB, Yugabyte, Informatica, Qlik, Confluent, FiveTran, dbtLabs, Striim
· Azure Synapse Link - to pull operational data into Synapse in realtime
· Microsoft 365, Power apps and Dynamics 365 data connected to Azure Synapse for collaboration and analytics
· Introduced public preview of Database Migration Assessment and migration service to migrate data from Oracle to Azure SQL
· Azure CosmosDB for PostgreSQL to support distributed relational data blending of a NoSQL with ACID transaction compliance
· SAP change data capture connector in Azure data factory
· Showed how TD Bank is leveraging Microsoft Intelligent data platform
In conclusion, Microsoft Ignite 2022 conference is an opportunity to learn breadth and depth of Microsoft’s offerings, latest updates, new announcements and how to design and build to get the maximum values from your cloud investments.