Making Others Look Cool — A Trip to Vegas
Last month I had the honour of representing Greenwood Campbell with a speaker slot at Microsoft’s annual worldwide partner conference, Inspire. Inspire brings together all of Microsoft’s partners from around the globe, and this year was held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas with over 16,000 attendees.
It was a great opportunity to present the CherryBot case study, network with partners and key figures from Microsoft, and learn about the Microsoft’s plans for the year ahead.
I’ll cover in detail my highlights and key takeaways below.
Presenting: Intelligent Experiences
I had the pleasure of presenting with Sebastien Le Calvez (App Innovation & Intelligent Cloud Partnerships)and Neil Smith (EMEA Partner Leader for App Innovation) — two masters from Microsoft’s “Global Black Belt team” on how emerging technologies such as machine learning, containers and mixed reality can disrupt the application development landscape and help build the next generation of applications for our customers and brands. We presented the CherryBot case study and demonstrated how using a combination of natural language processing, facial and emotion image recognition, along with a sophisticated brand and marketing strategy we were able to increase fan engagement for UK premiership football club AFC Bournemouth.
Key takeaways for a number of audience members was the realisation that AI technologies including chatbots can be used for customer facing applications, and help bring brands to life on a different channel.
Networking
Inspire was a great opportunity to meet up with new and existing friends from both Microsoft and partner companies. For Greenwood Campbell, it was a great opportunity to demonstrate how through our insightful UX and beautiful design skills, combined with a strong capability in the Azure tech stack, we’re able to produce amazing experiences that people want to talk about and share.
The highlight was being exclusively invited to the “Intelligent Cloud Pre Day” where I heard from Keith White (Vice President, Intelligent Cloud, Worldwide Commercial Business) on the future of cloud and partnerships with Microsoft, then got to speed date with numerous high value partners and Microsoft employees to discuss our story, successes and struggles.
Updates from Microsoft
Below are some of my favourite key takeaways…
The Intelligent Cloud / Intelligent Edge
“The opportunities for us to serve our customers in this new era of the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge is far greater. I’ve sort of lived through the client-server, the Web, mobile, cloud, but what we’re going to see going forward is going to be even more profound.” — Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft
Satya led us through many customer scenarios that involved the intelligent cloud or the intelligent edge. What is the intelligent edge? It’s Microsoft’s term for all the connected devices (IoT) we use to achieve our goals, think internet connected fridges, fitness trackers, connected temperature sensors etc. More info here.
Focus on Privacy
“Privacy is a fundamental human right. … Our fundamental value proposition for our customers, not just as a company, but as a community, that we will help them better protect the privacy of their customers.” — Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer, Microsoft
This was an incredible session which included real life examples including how the WannaCry virus massively impacted NHS patients.
For anyone who hasn’t had the opportunity, I thoroughly recommend reading “The Future Computed, Artificial Intelligence and its role in society”, Brad co-wrote the foreword. You can get it here.
Azure Scale
“The amount of interconnect cable we have across Azure datacenters is enough to go to the moon and back three times over. It’s crazy.” — Satya Nadella
This was an impressive example of how much investment Microsoft has and continues to put into their cloud offering. They have added a further 14 datacentre regions over the last financial year bringing the total to 54 worldwide. Greenwood Campbell can leverage the massive scale of Azure to provide scalable, robust and secure solutions for our clients.
What’s Cool
“I always say this to any student who is joining Microsoft or looking to join Microsoft. I say to them, ‘Look, if you want to be cool, go look for someplace else. But if you want to join a company that is committed to making others cool, join Microsoft.’” — Satya Nadella.
This was a favourite anecdotal comment that I had to share — Microsoft puts culture at the heart of it’s business, which draws a strong parallel with GC — it’s at the core of how we operate, what we do, and how we act.
And finally — Partner Pledge
At the UK General Session, Cindy Rose (Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft UK) talked about an exciting new initiative, the Partner Pledge. This pledge aims to help create future generations of tech talent through the following goals:
- Help the UK prepare for the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution through Microsoft’s Digital Skills Programme
- Create more UK apprenticeships
- Improve the diversity of the UK technology workforce
- Develop and implement AI in a responsible and ethical way
Greenwood Campbell are proud to have signed up to this pledge and fully endorse its goals.
