Microsoft Inspire — Day Two

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Ricoh Digital Services

4 min readJul 17, 2019

16/07/19

Day Two of Inspire; the day of meetings. No Corenote today, so a full day of meeting and greeting key Microsoft employees and other Partners who want to potentially work with Ricoh Digital Services, and Ricoh UK as a whole.

However, before I go deep into Day Two, I wanted to start with this banger of a slide that was presented at my first session, “Sharpen your human edge: A maverick agenda for inventing the future” presented by Polly LaBarre.

In a creative and disruptive economy, it’s the most creative and disruptive organizations [sic] and individuals that win. In a world of relentless change, hyper-competition, and omnipotent customers, it’s agility, ingenuity, and audacity that invent new markets, win customers’ hearts, and create outsize value.

How many of you reading this blog suffer from the above barriers? If you truly want to be serious about Innovation, then you need to work to overcome these barriers. A longer term strategic view will enable you to embrace innovation and deliver truly innovative solutions to your customers.

I’ll just hop down off my soapbox and take us back to Inspire; the day was broken down into three; Sessions, Meetings and Roundtables. I have summarised below on what we took from the day.

Sessions

“Sharpen your human edge: A maverick agenda for inventing the future”

See above :)

“Succeeding in an evolving IoT landscape”

Microsoft is doubling down on IoT, investing $5B to drive product innovation, partner transformation, and ecosystem acceleration that directly drives greater customer value and profitability.

For Ricoh Digital Services, this is good to know; we have invested heavily over this past 12 months in our IoT offering working closely with our sister company Ricoh Products Limited, and also with our own Ricoh Smart Spaces Meeting Room Utilisation solution. Using Azure Cloud Services such as Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Cognitive Services, Data Lakes and Data Bricks, we are delivering innovative solutions that at their core is being developed on Microsoft Services.

Meetings

Inspire is a great way to travel 5000+ miles to meet people who’s offices are 30 miles away from you in the UK. But joking aside, it’s a great way to network and the meetings to do have are clearly focused on how you can work together moving forwards. Some of the meetings we’ve had so far are:

TechData
Incremental
Exponential-e
NetApp

In addition to this, we met with Nick Wallace from Microsoft, Director — Specialist Solutions Sales, Data & AI at Microsoft. We presented an overview on our RPL solution in the hope that we can work with Microsoft back in the UK to develop the solution more; so watch this space for further information on that.

Roundtables

Roundtables are events at Inspire are ‘invite only’ events where thought leaders in the business and technology world group together to discuss a particular subject; so I’m a little confused as to why I was invited! Also, both tables were ironically square.

The two Roundtables couldn’t have been more different. The first, on AI & Analytics Leadership Roundtable was more of ‘An Audience With…’ as one of the attendees clearly liked the sound of his own voice and was raising issues that were specific to him and his business — not really what you need from a Roundtable discussion.

Obviously, this didn’t bode well for the next session which was preceded by a mad dash across the Mandalay Bay for a back to back session. However, this time, I was pleasantly surprised! There were a lot fewer people in the session (7) and it was a lot more professionally ran by an outside Market Research Group. It was based on Application Development and how we do it. Eventually, we found out it was part of Microsoft’s acquisition of PlayFab and how it’s covering the LiveOps requirement. There’s still more to learn about this, but it definitely has potential and I will be discussing with the team when I get back to the UK and hopefully we can blog about our use of it in the future.

Summary

Inspire is a great event, if not a bit full on. It’s going to be hard doing this all again in Day Three, but it’s definitely worthwhile and we’re getting a lot out of it. I’ll leave you with one final slide from Polly LaBarre; Lead without Authority. You don’t need to be a Senior Manager to lead a team, everyone is capable of being a leader!