Microsoft Tech Summit — The Keynotes
I had the pleasure and privilege of attending Microsoft’s Birmingham Tech Summit yesterday (24th January). It was a highly informative event with a range of talented Microsoft personnel delivering some excellent information — all for free! The major downside was just how many interesting sessions were occurring at the same time, with decisions and trade-offs having to be made.
As I know many of my colleagues and clients weren’t able to attend, I thought it useful to share some of the notes and highlights I took from the event. While there were no major announcements, anyone with an interest in technology (particularly cloud technology) stands to gain a little from the content.
Keynote One: Microsoft 365, Stella Chernyak
By 2020, over 50% of the global workforce will be Millennials. The expectations these workers have are often very different to previous generations and it’s clear that Microsoft are focusing their efforts on delivering a comprehensive set of tools to this new majority. Stella talked about ‘delighting the user’ whilst delivering a lower TCO and, crucially, high levels of security.
This is where I feel Microsoft have an advantage over their rivals in both the productivity space and public cloud providers like AWS and Google. The investment and innovation in one side leads to enhancements in the other. The Azure datacentres which power O365 have over $1 billion dollars invested into them each year and meet 70+ compliance standards, which is more than AWS & GCP combined. The AI and Machine Learning technologies developed for Azure are now being applied to Office & Windows. Much of the keynote was spent showcasing these latest innovations.
First up was Outlook, which will now provide you a ‘Focused’ inbox and an ‘Other’ inbox. Over time, it will learn which emails are important to you as well as who is important to you — yesterday we were shown an example of an email from the CEO being flagged right at the top of the inbox.
What was very clever about that particular email however was that Outlook also identified that this appeared similar to a known sender but the address didn’t match. It turned out to be a spoofed email which was flagged at the header before the user could mistakenly share information with the attacker. Productive but secure, remember?
A particular favourite of mine was when the demo highlighted the use of @ mentions to bring a colleague into the conversation. Checking AD, that user was automatically added in the ‘to’ box. This is a handy time saver. So far, so simple.
But then a line was nonchalantly written into the email that showcased the true power of MS’ efforts: “Cortana please set up some time tomorrow to meet”. Within seconds, MS’ AI assistant had checked all parties’ diaries and scheduled a mutually convenient time into calendars, just as a real assistant would have done. When Microsoft talk about their cloud business being about ‘democratizing technology’, this is it — the average worker now has the ability to delegate out administrative tasks just like a senior exec would, immediately boosting productivity.
There were other demonstrations of Powerpoint, such as instant translation and the ability to seamlessly provide live captioning in a different language to the presentation, straight out of the standard program. Mixed reality was showcased. Teams now has over 150 third-party apps, bots and plug-ins. Skype is getting better UC infrastructure. AutoPilot was demonstrated. The overall picture is one of immense synergies and improvements to the products we all already know and use daily.
James Boswell was brought on stage, Global EUC Director for Centrica, to talk about the ambitious 365 migration they underwent in 2017. The most striking element was not the technology, it was the cultural impact and change. Different working patterns (more working from home, unsurprisingly), improvements being suggested by employees at all levels and rapidly implemented, travel expenses dropping, new job functions within IT. A powerful story which speaks to the overall efforts Microsoft are making.
Finally, we saw some of the advancements in integrating InTune and SCCM/SCOM into a single pane of glass. Regarding security, compliance and GDPR, there is clearly a wealth of tooling available as well. It’s the same story Microsoft have been telling for several years now but with each passing year, the experience gets better. Ultimately, it’s this commitment to innovation that cements their place as the key vendor in the productivity and OS ecosystems — it doesn’t feel like Apple are the only ones with slick integration and a focus on the user experience any more.
Keynote Two: Azure, Nicole Herskowitz
The second keynote was, obviously, of greater interest to me given my role. Accordingly it also offered less new information than the M365 presentation, so upon reflection my focus is more on the stories told than anything product-specific.
Nicole’s focus was on what she sees as the four pillars of Azure:
- Productive
- Hybrid
- Intelligent
- Trusted
Given the nature of the audience, the focus was firmly on how Azure was the best fit for DevOps and continuous innovation; much emphasis was placed, for instance, on Xamarin and Visual Studio. She also highlighted the open stance Microsoft have taken under Satya Nadella’s leadership — over 40% of VMs in Azure are Linux based, while GitHub named Microsoft the best open source contributor of last year. Again, we saw the benefits of Microsoft’s integrated approach — the Bot Framework allows you to design your bot for Skype and then rapidly and consistently deploy to Facebook messenger, for instance.
Most interesting was Nicole’s take on the ‘Hybrid’ part. This is another of Microsoft’s key differentiators from AWS — whilst VMware on AWS was announced last year, it’s not been a focus for the many years that AWS tried to shift as many workloads as possible into their cloud.
“We believe that Hybrid is not a transitory state…it’s not ‘until you get to the cloud’… it should not mean different ways of managing and operating between cloud and on-premise…”
We of course saw quite a bit of detail on Azure Stack, with global powerhouse EY highlighted as the case study. EY run global solutions on Azure but due to regulatory requirements, they can’t do this in Russia. They simply use Azure Stack in Russia to ensure consistency of the application whilst meeting their compliance obligations.
We were also treated to some staggering figures on the cost difference between AWS and Azure for one large customer. $23m for AWS, $5m for Azure — a 70% saving. The customer’s calculations were based largely on the amount of reengineering required for AWS vs leveraging Microsoft’s legacy stack and cross-cloud engineering approach. It’s only a single example but as trashing your competitors goes, this was a nice way to do it.
“When it comes to cloud, you’re not looking for a vendor, you’re looking for a partner who can support your organisation over many years as it grows and changes”
This line stood out to me because it’s something that rings very true at the level of Enterprise-wide change initiatives but in reality doesn’t happen that often when a business ‘chooses a cloud provider’. For most organisations, small steps are taken into the cloud — Dev/Test, a bit of Backup & DR, cheap storage — before any kind of large migrations happen.
Where Microsoft have to win mindshare is at that step, because AWS is the default choice for many people when dipping their toe into cloud. The combined power of Microsoft’s cloud is unparalleled but far too often, businesses don’t conduct a full evaluation before beginning their cloud journey, they simply solve a tactical need. This ultimately leads to skillsets in one vendor over another that can sometimes bias those bigger decisions.
Finally, I wanted to highlight the ASOS story again because it really is powerful. Granted, this is an online only business so they’re fully digital anyway… but it’s a powerful showcase of the true power of Azure.
I’ll end on the most important thing that I think Nicole said, which sums up both keynotes. For me, this shows that ‘the cloud’ isn’t the end goal, it’s simply a means to an end. A better means to an end than we’ve ever had, but it’s still just the vehicle for change. We looked at serverless & functions, the Azure Security Center, bots, SQL Migrations, the datacentres… but actually what is Azure doing? It’s putting more tools into people’s hands than we previously thought possible. It’s removing barriers to entry that were previously faced by all but the largest firms. It’s reducing more inefficient ways of doing things so people have more time to drive change and innovation. Ultimately, it’s enabling the AI-infused future which we’ve all seen coming much more rapidly than we thought.
“We are democratizing AI…so it’s accessible to every developer and every organisation”
Over the coming days I’ll provide more detailed write-ups of the breakout sessions I attended for those with more niche interests!