Microsoft Inspire — Day Three & Wrap Up
17–18th July 2019
“It’s all about the 7 Billion”
- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
Day Three was all about 3 numbers; 100, 17 and 7… 100,000+ Microsoft Employees and 17m+ Partners coming together to improve the lives for the 7 Billion People on the planet. Satya Nadella was as invigorating as ever, and delivered the message with an unrivalled confidence and passion. He really is a leader amongst leaders in the technology giant that is Microsoft.
An Apology…
However, first, before I get into that; an apology. I would like to apologise to all the people back home in the UK, or in fact, anywhere in the world who were not in Las Vegas to see the Legendary Queen perform at the Festival Grounds. The apology is not on behalf of myself (I mean it’s not fault you weren’t there is it) but on behalf of all the people who thought it would be an amazing idea to spend all night filming the event on the large screens (not even the actual people) and then boring the socks off all of their friends with their videos when they get home. So I am sorry for that.
“Hey, I’d really love to see a pixelated 1080p video of a large screen of Adam Lambert and Queen at an event that I wasn’t able to attend. Do you have any?”
- Nobody. Ever.
I mean, come on! Watch the band! Take it all in, listen to how great Adam Lambert is, how Brian May can still make it squeal and Roger Taylor keeps them all in time (if a little slower time than the old days…)
Queen were, as expected, unbelievable. Playing all the classics (and a couple of Roger Taylor’s whilst Adam Lambert changed into another elaborate shirt) they absolutely smashed it out of the park. Highlights included a VR image of the great Freddie Mercury and Brian May on stage together singing ‘Love of My Life’, the original video footage of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and an encore of ‘We Will Rock You’ (of course) preceded by Freddie doing ‘DAAA OOOHHH’ to 100,000 adoring fans at Wembley Stadium. To watch this in Las Vegas with 40,000 people was really a tick on the bucket list. Well done Microsoft. Well Done.
Key Takeaways
Back to Business… There were several key takeaways from Nadella’s Corenote, and I have tried to summarise them below. However, the Corenote is now available online for you to hear it direct from the main man himself.
Azure — Well, of course.
Intelligent Edge — Holding up a Raspberry Pi (yes, he didn’t name drop it, but we all knew what it was) Satya explained how every Starbucks in the US had Edge based devices connected to Azure; pretty impressive.
Power Platform — “500 Million Apps will be built in the next 5 Years”, an astounding statistic; the Power Platform allows non-developers to develop and deploy these apps.
Dynamics 365 — And in particular the Analytics behind Dynamics 365 making the platform more powerful.
Mixed Reality — Backed by an impressive HoloLens demo, and a life size game of Minecraft.
Microsoft 365 — Key point from this one was the massive focus over the next 12 Months on Microsoft Teams. There’s more about that in the UK Specific section below.
The key now, will be for my colleagues and I to come back to the UK and strategise how we can focus our business to align with the plan of Microsoft. It’s obvious that you can’t be involved in all of the above, it wouldn’t be feasible and would cause a ‘Jack of all Trades, Master of None’ scenario. Therefore, you need to pick 1 or 2 and excel in them. There are enough partners to go around (17m+ apparently), so it’s important to focus and become leaders in our chosen field.
UK Area General Session
The final session was the UK Area General Session, hosted by Joe Macri (Vice President, UK Commercial Partner), Cindy Rose (CEO, Microsoft UK) and Clare Barclay (COO, Microsoft UK).
Firstly, it’s great to see Microsoft UK flying the flag for Diversity and Inclusion. Having two female board members on the stage was fantastic, but so was Cindy Rose’s recognition that it still wasn’t quite there. Cindy even asked for no applause to the statistic that Microsoft UK were now 35% Women in Tech, which is still fantastic for the industry.
The UK Board outlined the following four key areas of growth in the coming year:
Intelligent Cloud ($124B)
Modern Workplace ($44B)
Business Applications ($16B)
Surface ($7B)
However, the key banger for me was that there will be $255M pumped into the evolution of Microsoft Teams in the next 12 months. That is quite a commitment and a clear show of direction from the Microsoft UK Team. Within Ricoh Digital Services, we are well versed in Teams, we are users, trainers and adopters of the technology already. This means we have a head start on the market and it is definitely something that I will be taking back to discuss with the team in more detail.
MerchCount — 12
Listed in order of usefulness:
Wine Tumbler
Chargers
Cisco Socks
Vegas Socks
BitLocker Socks
Health and Wellness Pack
Microsoft Bluetooth Water Bottle (?)
Azure Sunglasses
Bottle Opener
Pen
Cosmos DB Luggage Tag
Glowing Red Ball Thing
Summary
Well, that’s it I’m afraid. After a ridiculously busy week where I have lost track of what day it is, what time it is (largely due to the Casino darkness) and have walked in excess of 70 miles (and have the iWatch to prove it) I can honestly say, it’s been emotional.
The plan is now, to take all the findings back to the UK and take some time to soak it all up. There is so much to think about and so many opportunities out there to follow. Watch this space for more non-technical blogs from myself, but more interestingly, technical blogs on some of the solutions Ricoh Digital Solutions are delivering.
For now, it’s over and out from Las Vegas.
Neil Dallaway
Head of Digital Solutions, Ricoh Digital Services
