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Real-world sustainability solutions with Azure IoT

In today’s fast-moving world, organizations are deploying innovative IoT and Digital Operations solutions that drive sustainable business practices, achieve energy conservation goals, and enhance operational efficiencies. I am amazed by their work and want to share a handful of recent stories that showcase how organizations use technology to solve real-world sustainability challenges for their customers.

Sustainability practices reduce energy use, waste, and costs

With technologies like open industrial IoT, advanced analytics, and AI, Microsoft Azure ensures manufacturing organizations are well-equipped to understand, mitigate, and validate their environmental impacts. Celanese and SGS are just two examples of Azure customers using IoT and Digital Operations to reduce energy use, waste, and costs.

Celanese, a specialty materials and chemical manufacturing company, envisions a Digital Plant of the Future powered by Cognite Data Fusion® on Microsoft Azure. The idea is to unify their processes, assets, and 25,000 employees on a common, scalable, and secure platform where AI algorithms actively identify and solve manufacturing problems.

For a global specialty manufacturer like Celanese, its ability to deploy diverse solutions quickly and cost-effectively anywhere across its value chain translates into millions of dollars in savings by optimizing heavy machinery and industrial processes. Microsoft Kubernetes Service (AKS) is core to Cognite’s infrastructure. Azure Functions orchestrates complex calculations with data stored in Azure Data Lake. AI capabilities in Azure and Azure Machine Learning provide actionable insights with contextualized industrial data. The solutions boost energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions across their 30 industrial facilities across the globe.

Testing, inspection, and certification company SGS partnered with Microsoft Azure to develop an intelligent device for wind turbines called OCM-Online®, which uses Azure IoT Edge, Azure IoT Hub, and three Azure database services. The solution monitors and predicts turbine oil conditions and levels by collecting data from sensors that provide more than 17 different parameters from over 315 wind turbines. The solution is installed across one of the largest wind farms in the world, the Three Gorges Yangiiang Shaba Offshore project which powers 2.4 million households.

Instead of following a prescribed schedule for oil changes, wind farm operators now only change oil only when data shows it is needed. This greatly reduces unnecessary oil changes and recycling challenges. Historically, field teams manually collected samples and delivered them to a lab for analysis. With the global market size for online oil fluid monitoring valued at 689.7 million USD in 2021 and projected to reach 1.4 billion USD by 2031, digital solutions like OCM-Online are paramount to reducing waste and recycling challenges.

Data drives energy conservation efforts

We are seeing a massive build-out of clean energy technologies—wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear energy. However, tackling the supply side of energy use will not get us to global energy reduction goals. We need to reduce the demand. It’s challenging for consumers to make energy use decisions without clear and accessible data. Azure customers like SA Power Networks and Watts have innovative solutions consumers need to make smart, informed decisions.

One consumer-based solution comes from Watts, a Danish energy technology company. Watts uses Microsoft Azure for its smart home energy-tracking applications that allow households to monitor their own energy consumption patterns to understand how energy is being used and make decisions about when or if to run appliances. Consumers can even see where the energy comes from so, they can choose to power the house with green energy. The company is at the forefront of developing intuitive, accessible, user-friendly tools that use IoT devices to monitor power consumption. Near real-time data monitoring has driven down energy use in almost all homes on the grid.

Watts chose to build on the Microsoft.NET platform, a free, open-source software development framework and ecosystem designed by Microsoft. It created a system of 50 microservices communicating via Azure Service Bus and running on Azure Event Hubs. The system also relies on Azure Table Storage and Azure Blob Storage. The company has seen a huge increase in its customer base, indicating consumers want to make decisions that have an impact. Watts went from 150,000 users to 550,000 at the end of 2022.

Another consumer-facing solution comes from South Australian utility company SA Power Networks. It developed a solution based on Microsoft Azure IoT which enables customers with rooftop solar panels to export excess solar energy to the power grid. This excess energy provides a significant share of renewables on the grid that services 1.7 million customers spread across 180,000 square kilometers. 

Data from devices provides visibility into network conditions down to the local level, allowing SA Power Networks to respond more quickly to potential issues. It also allows for dynamically managed network capacity to keep energy resources balanced for a stable and more resilient grid. In just 12 months, the average customer doubled their exported energy which makes more low-cost, renewable energy available to all customers on the SA Power Networks grid.

Operational efficiencies support growth while reducing costs

When companies optimize their operations, they experience increased productivity and reduced production costs. They also consume less energy and use fewer resources. Telefónica, a telecommunications provider, uses an Azure-IoT-based platform to efficiently and securely manage 6.5 billion messages each day. Its Home Advanced Connectivity (HAC) platform uses Microsoft Azure IoT and Azure IoT Hub device provisioning service to enable real-time, bidirectional data flows between 4.5 million in-home gateway devices and the Telefónica cloud. Operations teams can diagnose or predict connectivity issues by retrieving information directly from a customer’s router and delivering a fix within a single, continuous data flow. HAC also uses IoT Hub device twins to help ensure precise, remote configuration of routers. It’s an efficient digital solution that streamlines scaling up to 20 million devices in the next few years.

Let Azure unlock your potential

From startups to Fortune 500 powerhouses, Azure is fueling innovation and driving success across diverse industries worldwide. This is a small sampling of the work our customers are doing to support sustainability goals for the public and private sectors. You can read their success stories and about other companies here.
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Microsoft and Accenture partner to tackle methane emissions with AI technology

This post was co-authored by Dan Russ, Associate Director, and Sacha Abinader, Managing Director from Accenture.

The year 2022 was a notable one in the history of our climate—it stood as the fifth warmest year ever recorded1. An increase in extreme weather conditions, from devastating droughts and wildfires to relentless floods and heat waves, made their presence felt more than ever before—and 2023 seems poised to shatter still more records. These unnerving circumstances demonstrate the ever-growing impact of climate change that we’ve come to experience as the planet continues to warm.

Microsoft’s sustainability journey

At Microsoft, our approach to mitigating the climate crisis is rooted in both addressing the sustainability of our own operations and in empowering our customers and partners in their journey to net-zero emissions. In 2020, Microsoft set out with a robust commitment: to be a carbon-negative, water positive, and zero-waste company, while protecting ecosystems, all by the year 2030. Three years later, Microsoft remains steadfast in its resolve. As part of these efforts, Microsoft has launched Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, a comprehensive suite of enterprise-grade sustainability management tools aimed at supporting businesses in their transition to net-zero.

Moreover, our contribution to several global sustainability initiatives has the goal of benefiting every individual and organization on this planet. Microsoft has accelerated the availability of innovative climate technologies through our Climate Innovation Fund and is working hard to strengthen our climate policy agenda. Microsoft’s focus on sustainability-related efforts forms the backdrop for the topic tackled in this blog post: our partnership with Accenture on the application of AI technologies toward solving the challenging problem of methane emissions detection, quantification, and remediation in the energy industry.

“We are excited to partner with Accenture to deliver methane emissions management capabilities. This combines Accenture’s deep domain knowledge together with Microsoft’s cloud platform and expertise in building AI solutions for industry problems. The result is a solution that solves real business problems and that also makes a positive climate impact.”—Matt Kerner, CVP Microsoft Cloud for Industry, Microsoft.

Why is methane important?

Methane is approximately 85 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2) at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 20-year period. It is the second most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas after CO2, accounting for about 20 percent of global emissions.

The global oil and gas industry is one of the primary sources of methane emissions. These emissions occur across the entire oil and gas value chain, from production and processing to transmission, storage, and distribution. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that it is technically possible to avoid around 75 percent of today’s methane emissions from global oil and gas operations. These statistics drive home the importance of addressing this critical issue.

Microsoft’s investment in Project Astra

Microsoft has signed on to the Project Astra initiative—together with leading energy companies, public sector organizations, and academic institutions—in a coordinated effort to demonstrate a novel approach to detecting and measuring methane emissions from oil and gas production sites.

Project Astra entails an innovative sensor network that harnesses advances in methane-sensing technologies, data sharing, and data analytics to provide near-continuous emissions monitoring of methane across oil and gas facilities. Once operational, this kind of smart digital network would allow producers and regulators to pinpoint methane releases for timely remediation.

Accenture and Microsoft—The future of methane management

Attaining the goal of net-zero methane emissions is becoming increasingly possible. The technologies needed to mitigate emissions are maturing rapidly, and digital platforms are being developed to integrate complex components. As referenced in Accenture’s recent methane thought leadership piece, “More than hot air with methane emissions”. What is needed now is a shift—from a reactive paradigm to a preventative one—where the critical issue of leak detection and remediation is transformed into leak prevention by leveraging advanced technologies.

Accenture’s specific capabilities and toolkit

To date, the energy industry’s approach to methane management has been fragmented and comprised of a host of costly monitoring tools and equipment that have been siloed across various operational entities. These siloed solutions have made it difficult for energy companies to accurately analyze emissions data, at scale, and remediate those problems quickly.

What has been lacking is a single, affordable platform that can integrate these components into an effective methane emissions mitigation tool. These components include enhanced detection and measurement capabilities, machine learning for better decision-making, and modified operating procedures and equipment that make “net-zero methane” happen faster. These platforms are being developed now and can accommodate a wide variety of technology solutions that will form the digital core necessary to achieve a competitive advantage.

Accenture has created a Methane Emissions Monitoring Platform (MEMP) that facilitates the integration of multiple data streams and embeds key methane insights into business operations to drive action (see Figure 1 below).

Figure 1: Accenture’s Methane Emissions Monitoring Platform (MEMP).

The cloud-based platform, which runs on Microsoft Azure, enables energy companies to both measure baseline methane emissions in near real-time and detect leaks using satellites, fixed wing aircraft, and ground level sensing technologies. It is designed to integrate multiple data sources to optimize venting, flaring, and fugitive emissions. Figure 2 below illustrates the aspirational end-to-end process incorporating Microsoft technologies. MEMP also facilitates connectivity with back-end systems responsible for work order creation and management, including the scheduling and dispatching of field crews to remediate specific emission events.

Figure 2: The Methane Emissions Monitoring Platform Workflow (aspirational).

Microsoft’s AI tools powering Accenture’s Methane Emissions Monitoring Platform

Microsoft has provided a number of Azure-based AI tools for tackling methane emissions, including tools that support sensor placement optimization, digital twin for methane Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, anomaly (leak) detection, and emission source attribution and quantification. These tools, when integrated with Accenture’s MEMP, allow users to monitor alerts in near real-time through a user-friendly interface, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: MEMP Landing Page visualizing wells, IoT sensors, and Work Orders.

“Microsoft has developed differentiated AI capabilities for methane leak detection and remediation, and is excited to partner with Accenture in integrating these features onto their Methane Emissions Monitoring Platform, to deliver value to energy companies by empowering them in their path to net-zero emissions”—Merav Davidson, VP, Industry AI, Microsoft.

Methane IoT sensor placement optimization

Placing sensors in strategic locations to ensure maximum potential coverage of the field and timely detection of methane leaks is the first step towards building a reliable end-to-end IoT-based detection and quantification solution. Microsoft’s solution for sensor placement utilizes geospatial, meteorological, and historical leak rate data and an atmospheric dispersion model to model methane plumes from sources within the area of interest and obtain a consolidated view of emissions. It then selects the best locations for sensors using either a mathematical programming optimization method, a greedy approximation method, or an empirical downwind method that considers the dominant wind direction, subject to cost constraints.

In addition, Microsoft provides a validation module to evaluate the performance of any candidate sensor placement strategy. Operators can evaluate the marginal gains offered by utilizing additional sensors in the network, through sensitivity analysis as shown in Figure 4 below.

Figure 4: Left: Increase in leak coverage with a number of sensors. By increasing the number of sensors that are available for deployment, the leak detection ratio (i.e., the fraction of detected leaks by deployed sensors) increases. Right: Source coverage for 15 sensors. The arrows map each sensor (red circles) to the sources (black triangles) that it detects.

End-to-end data pipeline for methane IoT sensors

To achieve continuous monitoring of methane emissions from oil and gas assets, Microsoft has implemented an end-to-end solution pipeline where streaming data from IoT Hub is ingested into a Bronze Delta Lake table leveraging Structured Streaming on Spark. Sensor data cleaning, aggregation, and transformation to algorithm data model are done and the resultant data is stored in a Silver Delta Lake table in a format that is optimized for downstream AI tasks.

Methane leak detection is performed using uni- and multi-variate anomaly detection models for improved reliability. Once a leak has been detected, its severity is also computed, and the emission source attribution and quantification algorithm then identifies the likely source of the leak and quantifies the leak rate.

This event information is sent to the Accenture Work Order Prioritization module to trigger appropriate alerts based on the severity of the leak to enable timely remediation of fugitive or venting emissions. The quantified leaks can also be recorded and reported using tools such as the Microsoft Sustainability Manager app. The individual components of this end-to-end pipeline are described in the sections below and illustrated in Figure 5.

Figure 5: End-to-end IoT data pipeline that runs on Microsoft Azure demonstrating methane leak detection, quantification, and remediation capabilities.

Digital twin for methane IoT sensors

Data streaming from IoT sensors deployed in the field needs to be orchestrated and reliably passed to the processing and AI execution pipeline. Microsoft’s solution creates a digital twin for every sensor. The digital twin comprises a sensor simulation module that is leveraged in different stages of the methane solution pipeline. The simulator is used to test the end-to-end pipeline before field deployment, reconstruct and analyze anomalous events through what-if scenarios and enable the source attribution and leak quantification module through a simulation-based, inverse modeling approach.

Anomaly (leak) detection

A methane leak at a source could manifest as an unusual rise in the methane concentration detected at nearby sensor locations that require timely mitigation. The first step towards identifying such an event is to trigger an alert through the anomaly detection system. A severity score is computed for each anomaly to help prioritize alerts. Microsoft provides the following two methods for time series anomaly detection, leveraging Microsoft’s open-source SynapseML library, which is built on the Apache Spark distributed computing framework and simplifies the creation of massively scalable machine learning pipelines:

Univariate anomaly detection: Based on a single variable, for example, methane concentration.

Multivariate anomaly detection: Used in scenarios where multiple variables, including methane concentration, wind speed, wind direction, temperature, relative humidity, and atmospheric pressure, are used to detect an anomaly.

Post-processing steps are implemented to reliably flag true anomalous events so that remedial actions can be taken in a timely manner while reducing false positives to avoid unnecessary and expensive field trips for personnel. Figure 6 below illustrates this feature in Accenture’s MEMP: the ‘hover box” over Sensor 6 documents a total of seven alerts resulting in just two work orders being created.

Figure 6: MEMP dashboard visualizing alerts and resulting work orders for Sensor 6.

Emission source attribution and quantification

Once deployed in the field, methane IoT sensors can only measure compound signals in the proximity of their location. For an area of interest that is densely populated with potential emission sources, the challenge is to identify the source(s) of the emission event. Microsoft provides two approaches for identifying the source of a leak:

Area of influence attribution model: Given the sensor measurements and location, an “area of influence” is computed for a sensor location at which a leak is detected, based on the real-time wind direction and asset geo-location. Then, the asset(s) that lie within the computed “area of influence” are identified as potential emissions sources for that flagged leak.

Bayesian attribution model: With this approach, source attribution is achieved through inversion of the methane dispersion model. The Bayesian approach comprises two main components—a source leak quantification model and a probabilistic ranking model—and can account for uncertainties in the data stemming from measurement noise, statistical and systematic errors, and provides the most likely sources for a detected leak, the associated confidence level and leak rate magnitude.

Considering the high number of sources, low number of sensors, and the variability of the weather, this poses a complex but highly valuable inverse modeling problem to solve. Figure 7 provides insight regarding leaks and work orders for a particular well (Well 24). Specifically, diagrams provide well-centric and sensor-centric assessments that attribute a leak to this well.

Figure 7: Leak Source Attribution for Well 24.

Further, Accenture’s Work Order Prioritization module using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service application (Figure 8) enables Energy operators to initiate remediation measures under the Leak Detection and Remediation (LDAR) paradigm.

Figure 8: Dynamics 365 Work Order with emission source attribution and CH4 concentration trend data embedded.

Looking ahead

In partnership with Microsoft, Accenture is looking to continue refining MEMP, which is built on the advanced AI and statistical models presented in this blog. Future capabilities of MEMP look to move from “detection and remediation” to “prediction and prevention” of emission events, including enhanced event quantification and source attribution.

Microsoft and Accenture will continue to invest in advanced capabilities with an eye toward both:

Integrating industry standards platforms such as Azure Data Manager for Energy (ADME) and Open Footprint Forum to enable both publishing and consumption of emissions data.

Leveraging Generative AI to simplify the user experience.

Learn more

Case study

Duke Energy is working with Accenture and Microsoft on the development of a new technology platform designed to measure actual baseline methane emissions from natural gas distribution systems.

Accenture Methane Emissions Monitoring Platform

More information regarding Accenture’s MEMP can be found in “More than hot air with methane emissions”. Additional information regarding Accenture can be found on the Accenture homepage and on their energy page.

Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy

Azure Data Manager for Energy is an enterprise-grade, fully managed, OSDU Data Platform for the energy industry that is efficient, standardized, easy to deploy, and scalable for data management—ingesting, aggregating, storing, searching, and retrieving data. The platform will provide the scale, security, privacy, and compliance expected by our enterprise customers. The platform offers out-of-the-box compatibility with major service company applications, which allows geoscientists to use domain-specific applications on data contained in Azure Data Manager for Energy with ease.

Related publications and conference presentations

Source Attribution and Emissions Quantification for Methane Leak Detection: A Non-Linear Bayesian Regression Approach. Mirco Milletari, Sara Malvar, Yagna Oruganti, Leonardo Nunes, Yazeed Alaudah, Anirudh Badam. The 8th International Online & Onsite Conference on Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science.

Surrogate Modeling for Methane Dispersion Simulations Using Fourier Neural Operator. Qie Zhang, Mirco Milletari, Yagna Oruganti, Philipp Witte. Presented at the NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning.

1https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3246/nasa-says-2022-fifth-warmest-year-on-record-warming-trend-continues/
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Optimize the cost of .NET and Java application migration to Azure cloud

In today’s uncertain economic environment, cost is top of mind for every organization. With uncertain global economic conditions, high inflation rates, and challenging job markets, many businesses are tightening their spending. Yet, companies continue to prioritize substantial budget allocations for digital transformation, especially for the agility, performance, and security gained by migrating applications to the cloud. The reason is simple: investments in cloud translate to positive impacts on the business revenue and significant cost savings.  

But how do businesses turn this opportunity into reality? In this article, we’ll look at  several levers that Azure provides to help organizations maximize the cost benefits of migrating .NET and Java apps to the cloud. One of the things to note about cost optimization is that it’s not only about the price. There are significant financial benefits to be gained when you leverage the right technical resources, have access to best practices from real-world experiences with thousands of customers, and flexibility of the right pricing option for any scenario. These factors may result in a compelling total cost of ownership (TCO).  

Let’s look at some of these benefits for Azure App Service customers below: 

Azure landing zone accelerators

Enterprise web app patterns

Powerful Azure Migrate automation tooling

Offers to offset the initial cost of migration

Cost-effective range of pricing plans

Faster time to value with expert guidance through landing zone accelerators  

For cloud migration projects, getting it right quickly from the start sets the foundation for business success and savings. Azure landing zone accelerators are prescriptive solution architectures and guidance that aid IT pros in preparing for migration and deployment of on-premises apps to the cloud.  

Provided at no additional cost and capturing the expert guidance from migrations done with thousands of customers, landing zone accelerators are a compelling differentiator with Azure that help organizations focus on delivering value rather than spend cycles doing the heavy lifting of migration on their own. Based on well-architected principles and industry best-practices for securing and scaling application and platform resources, these resources create tangible cost savings by reducing the time and effort to complete app migration projects.  

Learn more about other landing zone accelerator workloads, and watch the Azure App Service landing zone accelerator demo. 

Enhance developer skilling with the reliable enterprise web app pattern

The reliable web app (RWA) pattern is another free resource from Azure that is specifically designed to empower developers confidently plan and execute the migration process. It is targeted at both experts in the cloud and developers who may be more familiar with on-premises tools and solutions and taking their first steps in the cloud. Built on the Azure Well-Architected Framework, this set of best practices helps developers successfully migrate web applications to the cloud and establishes a developer foundation for future innovations on Azure. We are pleased to announce that a reliable web app pattern for Java is now available, in addition to the .NET pattern announced at Build.

The reliable web app pattern provides guidance on the performance, security, operations, and reliability of web applications with minimal changes during the migration process. It smoothens the learning curve and greatly reduces the length of the migration project, thereby saving organizations the cost of maintaining on-premises infrastructure any longer. The Azure Architecture Center provides comprehensive guidance, open-source reference implementation code, and CI/CD pipelines on GitHub. Check out the free, on-demand Microsoft Build 2023 session to learn more. 

Accelerate the end-to-end migration journey with free automated tooling  

Costs of tooling and automation are often underestimated during migration projects. Azure Migrate is a free Microsoft tool for migrating and modernizing in Azure. It provides discovery, assessment, business case analysis, planning, migration, and modernization capabilities for various workloads on premises—all while allowing developers to run and monitor the proceedings from a single secure portal. Watch this short demo of the business case feature, and find Azure Migrate in the portal to get started.

Azure Migrate, Azure Advisor, and Azure Cost Management and Billing are components of this migration journey that provide guidance, insights, and the ability to right-size Azure resources for optimal cost-efficiency. 

Offset the initial cost of migration projects with Azure offerings

To alleviate risks and help jumpstart migration with confidence, Azure Migrate and Modernize partner offers are available to customers. It not only helps build a sustainable plan to accelerate the cloud journey with the right mix of best practices, resources, and extensive guidance at every stage, but may also include agile funding to off-set the initial costs.  

With Azure Migrate and Modernize, moving to the cloud is efficient and cost-optimized with free tools like Azure Migrate and Azure Cost Management. Additionally, it supports environmentally sustainable outcomes and drives operational efficiencies, while reducing migration costs through tailored offers and incentives based on your specific needs and journey. Work with your Microsoft partner to take advantage of these offers in your enterprise app migration.  

Benefit from a wide range of flexible and cost-effective plans

Azure App Service is one of the oldest and most popular destinations for .NET and Java app migrations, with over two and a half million web apps and growing fast. It offers a wide range of flexible pricing options to save on compute costs. Azure Savings Plan for Compute is ideal if the flexibility to run dynamic workloads across a variety of Azure services is crucial. Reserved instances are another popular option, providing substantial cost savings for workloads with predictable resource needs. There are various pricing plans and tiers to suit every budget and need—from a new entry-level Premium v3 plan called P0v3, to large-scale plans that support up to 256GB memory. For hobbyists and learners, Azure App Service has one of the most compelling free tiers that continues to attract new developers every day.  

Check out the Azure App Service pricing page and pricing calculator to learn more.  

Learn more

Interested in learning more? Dive deeper into the cost optimization strategies and see how other organizations have optimized their cost of migration with the following papers: 

Save up to 54 percent versus on-premises and up to 35 percent versus Amazon Web Services by migrating to Azure.

Forrester study finds 228 percent ROI when modernizing applications on Azure PaaS.

Plan to manage costs for App Service.

Read our customer stories, including from the NBA, a leading sports association in United States, and Nexi, a leading European payment technology company.  

Follow Azure App Service on Twitter.
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Scale generative AI with new Azure AI infrastructure advancements and availability

Generative AI is a powerful and transformational technology that has the potential to advance a wide range of industries from manufacturing to retail, and financial services to healthcare. Our early investments in hardware and AI infrastructure are helping customers to realize the efficiency and innovation generative AI can deliver. Our Azure AI infrastructure is the backbone of how we scale our offerings, with Azure OpenAI Service at the forefront of this transformation, providing developers with the systems, tools, and resources they need to build next-generation, AI-powered applications on the Azure platform. With generative AI, users can create richer user experiences, fuel innovation, and boost productivity for their businesses.  

As part of our commitment to bringing the transformative power of AI to our customers, today we’re announcing updates to how we’re empowering businesses Azure AI infrastructure and applications. With the global expansion of Azure OpenAI Service, we are making OpenAI’s most advanced models, GPT-4 and GPT-35-Turbo, available in multiple new regions, providing businesses worldwide with unparalleled generative AI capabilities. Our Azure AI infrastructure is what powers this scalability, which we continue to invest in and expand. We’re also delivering the general availability of the ND H100 v5 Virtual Machine series, equipped with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core graphics processing units (GPUs) and low-latency networking, propelling businesses into a new era of AI applications. 

Here’s how these advancements extend Microsoft’s unified approach to AI across the stack.  

General availability of ND H100 v5 Virtual Machine series: Unprecedented AI processing and scale

Today marks the general availability of our Azure ND H100 v5 Virtual Machine (VM) series, featuring the latest NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking. This VM series is meticulously engineered with Microsoft’s extensive experience in delivering supercomputing performance and scale to tackle the exponentially increasing complexity of cutting-edge AI workloads. As part of our deep and ongoing investment in generative AI, we are leveraging an AI optimized 4K GPU cluster and will be ramping to hundreds of thousands of the latest GPUs in the next year. 

The ND H100 v5 is now available in the East United States and South Central United States Azure regions. Enterprises can register their interest in access to the new VMs or review technical details on the ND H100 v5 VM series at Microsoft Learn.  

The ND H100 v5 VMs include the following features today: 

AI supercomputing GPUs: Equipped with eight NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, these VMs promise significantly faster AI model performance than previous generations, empowering businesses with unmatched computational power.

Next-generation computer processing unit (CPU): Understanding the criticality of CPU performance for AI training and inference, we have chosen the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors as the foundation of these VMs, ensuring optimal processing speed.

Low-latency networking: The inclusion of NVIDIA Quantum-2 ConnectX-7 InfiniBand with 400Gb/s per GPU with 3.2 Tb/s per VM of cross-node bandwidth ensures seamless performance across the GPUs, matching the capabilities of top-performing supercomputers globally.

Optimized host to GPU performance: With PCIe Gen5 providing 64GB/s bandwidth per GPU, Azure achieves significant performance advantages between CPU and GPU.

Large scale memory and memory bandwidth: DDR5 memory is at the core of these VMs, delivering greater data transfer speeds and efficiency, making them ideal for workloads with larger datasets.

These VMs have proven their performance prowess, with up to six times more speedup in matrix multiplication operations when using the new 8-bit FP8 floating point data type compared to FP16 in previous generations. The ND H100 v5 VMs achieve up to two times more speedup in large language models like BLOOM 175B end-to-end model inference, demonstrating their potential to optimize AI applications further.

Azure OpenAI Service goes global: Expanding cutting-edge models worldwide

We are thrilled to announce the global expansion of Azure OpenAI Service, bringing OpenAI’s cutting-edge models, including GPT-4 and GPT-35-Turbo, to a wider audience worldwide. Our new live regions in Australia East, Canada East, East United States 2, Japan East, and United Kingdom South extend our reach and support for organizations seeking powerful generative AI capabilities. With the addition of these regions, Azure OpenAI Service is now available in even more locations, complementing our existing availability in East United States, France Central, South Central United States, and West Europe. The response to Azure OpenAI Service has been phenomenal, with our customer base nearly tripling since our last disclosure. We now proudly serve over 11,000 customers, attracting an average of 100 new customers daily this quarter. This remarkable growth is a testament to the value our service brings to businesses eager to harness the potential of AI for their unique needs.

As part of this expansion, we are increasing the availability of GPT-4, Azure OpenAI’s most advanced generative AI model, across the new regions. This enhancement allows more customers to leverage GPT-4’s capabilities for content generation, document intelligence, customer service, and beyond. With Azure OpenAI Service, organizations can propel their operations to new heights, driving innovation and transformation across various industries.

A responsible approach to developing generative AI

Microsoft’s commitment to responsible AI is at the core of Azure AI and Machine Learning. The AI platform incorporates robust safety systems and leverages human feedback mechanisms to handle harmful inputs responsibly, ensuring the utmost protection for users and end consumers. Businesses can apply for access to Azure OpenAI Service and unlock the full potential of generative AI to propel their operations to new heights.

We invite businesses and developers worldwide to join us in this transformative journey as we lead the way in AI innovation. Azure OpenAI Service stands as a testament to Microsoft’s dedication to making AI accessible, scalable, and impactful for businesses of all sizes. Together, let’s embrace the power of generative AI and Microsoft’s commitment to responsible AI practices to drive positive impact and growth worldwide.

Customer inspiration

Generative AI is revolutionizing various industries, including content creation and design, accelerated automation, personalized marketing, customer service, chatbots, product and service innovation, language translation, autonomous driving, fraud detection, and predictive analytics. We are inspired by the way our customers are innovating with generative AI and look forward to seeing how customers around the world build upon these technologies.

Mercedes-Benz is innovating its in-car experience for drivers, powered by Azure OpenAI Service. The upgraded “Hey Mercedes” feature is more intuitive and conversational than ever before. KPMG, a global professional services firm, leverages our service to improve its service delivery model, achieve intelligent automation, and enhance the coding lifecycle. Wayve trains large scale foundational neural-network for autonomous driving using Azure Machine Learning and Azure’s AI infrastructure. Microsoft partner SymphonyAI launched Sensa Copilot to empower financial crime investigators to combat the burden of illegal activity on the economy and organizations. By automating data collection, collation, and summarization of financial and third-party information, Sensa Copilot identifies money laundering behaviors and facilitates quick and efficient analysis for investigators. Discover all Azure AI and ML customer stories. 

Learn more

Resources and getting started with Azure AI  

Azure AI Portfolio 

Explore Azure AI. 

Azure AI Infrastructure 

Apply now for NDH100 v5 Virtual Machine Series.

Review Azure AI Infrastructure documentation. 

Read more about Microsoft AI at Scale. 

Read more about Azure AI Infrastructure.

Azure OpenAI Service 

Apply now for access to Azure OpenAI Service. 

Apply now for access to GPT-4. 

Review Azure OpenAI Service documentation.

Explore the playground and customization in Azure AI Studio.  

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7 ways generative AI is bringing bionic business to manufacturing

Generative AI is transforming what we know, and when we know it. Fast access to knowledge is being used in the world of manufacturing, where AI’s ability to design, customize, and accurately predict potential defects allows businesses to optimize costs. Microsoft, a global technology leader, has strategically positioned itself at the forefront of the manufacturing industry revolution, employing a potent combination of its strong partnerships, cutting-edge cloud services, and revolutionary technologies like Azure Open AI Service, Internet of Things (IoT), and mixed reality. The company’s visionary approach revolves around empowering manufacturers with intelligent, interconnected systems that revolutionize productivity, enhance product quality, and optimize operational efficiency, thereby driving the industry toward unprecedented levels of success and innovation. 

The impact of generative AI

By fostering strategic alliances with key players across the manufacturing ecosystem, Microsoft has cultivated a collaborative environment that fuels creativity and cooperation. Through these partnerships, the tech giant gains valuable insights into industry pain points and emerging challenges, enabling them to develop tailor-made solutions that cater to the specific needs of manufacturers worldwide.  

Below, we take a look under the hood of generative AI’s transformational prowess.

Collect and leverage data—Strabag SE, the global construction company, partnered with Microsoft to build a Data Science Hub to collect decentralized data and leverage it for insights. This enabled the organization to develop use cases to prove the value of data including its risk management project. The solution uses an algorithm to pinpoint at-risk construction projects, saving Strabag SE time and reducing financial losses.  

Product customization—By leveraging customer input and preferences, manufacturers can use generative AI algorithms to create personalized designs or adapt existing designs to suit specific needs, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction and meeting diverse market demands without compromising efficiency. 

Process optimization—Generative AI can identify patterns, inefficiencies, and potential improvements, leading to enhanced productivity, reduced waste, and optimized resource allocation. By continuously learning from real-time data, generative AI can adapt and optimize production systems to maximize output and minimize costs.

Rapid prototyping—Generative AI can explore a vast design space, providing innovative solutions that might not be immediately apparent to the human eye. Modern Requirements built their solution on Microsoft Azure DevOps and integrated with Azure OpenAI Service, providing the essential requirements tools to effectively manage projects throughout their life cycles. Doing so allowed them to reduce time to market and improve project quality across a multitude of industries—all of which require regulatory compliance.  

Quality control—Generative AI can assist in quality control processes by analyzing large volumes of data collected during production. By identifying patterns and correlations, it can detect anomalies, predict potential defects, and provide insights into quality issues. Manufacturers can use this information to implement preventive measures, reduce product defects, and enhance overall product quality.  

Supply chain optimization—Generative AI can optimize supply chain operations by analyzing historical data, demand forecasts, and external factors. It can generate optimized production schedules, predict demand fluctuations, and optimize inventory levels. This helps manufacturers minimize stockouts, reduce lead times, and improve overall supply chain efficiency. 

Maintenance and predictive analytics—Generative AI can analyze real-time sensor data from manufacturing equipment to identify potential failures or maintenance needs. By detecting patterns and anomalies, it can predict equipment failures, schedule maintenance proactively, and optimize maintenance processes. This approach helps reduce downtime, improve equipment reliability, and increase overall operational efficiency.

Microsoft aims to enable seamless connectivity, data analysis, and AI-driven insights across the production process. By leveraging Azure OpenAI Service’s capabilities, manufacturers can optimize production operations, improve equipment maintenance, and enhance product quality.

Our commitment to responsible AI 

Microsoft has a layered approach for generative models, guided by the Microsoft AI Principles. In Azure OpenAI, an integrated safety system provides protection from undesirable inputs and outputs and monitors for misuse. In addition, Microsoft provides guidance and best practices to help customers responsibly build applications using these models and expects customers to comply with the Azure OpenAI Code of Conduct.  

Get started with Azure OpenAI Service 

Apply for access to Azure OpenAI Service by completing this form. 

Learn about Azure OpenAI Service and the latest enhancements. 

Get started with OpenAI GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service in Microsoft Learn. 

Read our Partner announcement blog, ”Empowering partners to develop AI-powered apps and experiences with ChatGPT in Azure OpenAI Service.” 

Learn how to use the new Chat Completions API (preview) and model versions for ChatGPT and GPT-4 models in Azure OpenAI Service. 

The post 7 ways generative AI is bringing bionic business to manufacturing appeared first on Azure Blog.
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Efficiently store data with Azure Blob Storage Cold Tier — now generally available

We are excited to announce the general availability of Azure Blob Storage Cold Tier in all public and Azure Government regions except Poland Central and Qatar Central. Azure Blob Storage Cold Tier is an online tier specifically designed for efficiently storing data that is infrequently accessed or modified, all while ensuring immediate availability.

Azure Blob Storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. With blob access tiers, you can store your data in the most cost-effective way, based on how frequently it will be accessed and how long it will be retained. Azure Blob Storage now includes a new cold online access tier option, further reducing costs.

Across diverse industries, Azure customers are harnessing the power of blob storage to address a wide range of needs. With the introduction of the new tier, customers can now experience remarkable benefits in scenarios such as backing up media content, preserving medical images, and securing critical application data for seamless business continuity and robust disaster recovery.

Cost effectiveness with cold tier

Cold tier is the most cost-effective Azure Blob Storage offering to store infrequently accessed data with long term retention requirements, while maintaining instant access. Blob access tiers maximize cost savings based on data access patterns. When your data isn’t needed for 30 days, we recommend tiering the data from hot to cool to save up to 46 percent (using the East US 2 pricing as an example) due to lower prices on capacity. When your data is even cooler, for example, if you don’t require access for 90 days or longer, cold tier results in more savings. When compared to cool tier, cold tier can save you an additional 64 percent on capacity costs (using the East US 2 pricing as an example; hot to cold tier savings are 80 percent). See detailed prices in Blob storage pricing and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 pricing.

Prices for read operations are higher on cooler access tiers and read patterns and file size distribution affect the cost-effectiveness. We recommend calculating the total cost based on both operation and capacity costs. The chart below shows how total cost differs on cool tier and cold tier based on how long you keep the data with the tier.

In the above scenario, the total cost estimation assumes 10 TiB data in total, 10 MiB blob size on average, reading once every month, and reading 10 percent of the total data each time. If you keep data for 30 days, the total cost is lower on the cool tier than the cold tier. If you keep data for 60 days or longer, cold tier is a more cost-effective option.

See detailed guidance on how to calculate total cost with access tiers in choose the most cost-efficient access tiers documentation.

Seamless experience with cold tier

Cold tier is as easy to use as hot tier and cool tier. REST APIs, SDKs, Azure Portal, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, Azure Storage Explorer have been extended to support cold tier. You can use the latest version of these clients to write, manage, and read your data directly from cold tier. The read latency is milliseconds on the cold tier.

Lifecycle management policy also supports automating tiering blobs to cold tier based on conditions including modified time, creation time, and last access time. See more in the Blob lifecycle policy.

The cold tier extends its support to both Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Locally redundant storage (LRS), Geo-redundant storage (GRS), Read-access Geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS), Zone-redundant storage (ZRS), Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS), and Read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS) are all supported based on regional redundancy availability. See more in Azure Storage Data redundancy.

There are some features that are not yet compatible with cold tier. Check the latest cold tier limitations to ensure compatibility with your scenario.

Empowering customers and partners to maximize savings

Customers across industries can use cold tier to improve the cost efficiency of object storage on Azure without compromising read latency. Since we launched the preview for cold tier in May 2023, our customers and partners have used this capability on Azure to store data that is infrequently accessed or modified. Here are some quotes from customers and partners:

“AvePoint leverages multiple cloud storage types to provide cost-effective and intelligent tiering solutions for our customers. The inclusion of Azure Blob cold tier storage in our storage architecture is a significant enhancement that has the potential to boost our future return on investment. We are thrilled to witness the general availability of this service as it empowers us to provide even greater flexibility to our customers.” — George Wang, Chief Architect at AvePoint.

“Commvault is committed to ensuring customers can take advantage of latest advancements on Azure Blob Storage for their enterprise data protection & management needs. We are proud to support cold tier as a storage option with Commvault Complete and our Metallic SaaS offering later this year. Commvault’s unique compression and data packing approach, integrated with cold tier’s policy-based tiering and cost-efficient retention, empowers customers to efficiently defend and recover against ransomware, all while ensuring compliance and cost-efficient, on-demand access to data.” — David Ngo, Chief Technology Officer, Commvault.

“Embracing Azure Blob cold tier storage, MediaValet empowers customers with the power of instant retrieval, even for rarely accessed digital assets that are conventionally archived, eliminating workflow disruptions and administrative burdens. Customers can easily take advantage of cold tier storage in their existing workflows with our solution, experiencing no delays in retrieval and enjoying the same enterprise-class cloud storage solution.” — Jean Lozano, Chief Technology Officer at MediaValet.

“Nasuni has qualified and now fully supports the newly released Azure Blob Storage cold tier. Azure’s new cold tier, which supports online access to objects, will help joint customers generate significant cost savings while managing their files on Nasuni, which is built on the Azure Blob platform. Nasuni plans to leverage this cold tier of Blob Storage in pursuit of supporting customer migrations as part of their digital transformation journey.” — Russ Kennedy, Nasuni’s Chief Product Officer.

“Building on our existing storage integration options for Microsoft customers, Veeam is excited to announce support for Azure Blob cold tier storage in the next release of the Veeam Data Platform. Cold tier support provides instant access, while offering a cost-effective price point between other on-demand tiers like hot and cool, and the offline archive tier. As the importance of data protection and ransomware recovery continues to grow, we remain committed to providing our customers with robust solutions.” — Danny Allan, CTO at Veeam.

Getting started with cold tier

Learn more about all blob access tiers, including Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive, in Blob access tier overview.

Understanding the prices on cold tier comparing with other access tiers in Blob storage pricing and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 pricing.

Learn more about regions here — Azure Product by Region.

Learn how to configure tiers on blobs for cold tier in Configure blob access tiers.

The post Efficiently store data with Azure Blob Storage Cold Tier — now generally available appeared first on Azure Blog.
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Cloud Cultures, Part 2: Global collaboration in Sweden

The outcomes of cloud adoption are shaped dramatically by the people and cultures that operate and innovate with the technology. The rapid pace of technological advancements we are seeing on a global scale is exciting, but if there is one thing that I love more than technology, it is the people, the stories, and the life experiences that influence how it’s used. These stories show firsthand how technology and tradition combine to form cloud cultures. In our first episode, we explored how the people in Poland are fearless when it comes time to act. They are a dynamic country embracing change, reinventing themselves, and creating new innovative opportunities. Conversations with our customers and community leaders in Poland gave me an important view of how much of an impact the history of Poland has on the present and future markets. In the second episode, see what I learned about cloud culture in Sweden.

Sweden: A global-first mindset

Our first Sweden datacenter region launched in 2021 and will grow to be one of our largest datacenter regions in Europe. My time in Sweden helped me understand why this region is growing so fast.

I learned firsthand how Swedes transform simple ideas into global successes. For Sweden, success knows no borders. This is a place that thinks beyond its own perimeter, because the market demands it, and success depends on it. Despite being one of the largest countries in Europe by landmass, it’s one of the smallest in population—which forces Sweden’s ambitious entrepreneurs to adopt a global-first mindset from day one. Collaborating with people around the world with different mindsets is one of the biggest challenges companies will face as they globally scale. It requires tapping into those diverse perspectives to create a better outcome. This is what drew me to Sweden. Their holistic approach to innovation has created an environment that fosters collaboration when scaling and enables them to thrive.

This focus on collaboration helped me better understand “fika”. While the term “fika” translates to “coffee”, in English, I learned in Sweden, fika is much more than that. Fika is an experience that does involve coffee and cookies but is more about the conversation and connection. It really focuses on the human power of collaboration. This idea of fika is woven into Sweden’s culture of innovation. It becomes clear that when shared beliefs underpin collaboration, the impact can be extraordinary.

Our conversations with customers and partners helped me see how the powerful winds of innovation that have converged with local customs, values, and ways of living, helped create something unique.

How are Swedish customers using the cloud

These conversations helped uncover the essence of Sweden’s digital transformation while exploring the country’s dynamic technology landscape. Below are just a few of the Swedish customers who are transforming their businesses to adapt to the growing needs of their customers in Sweden, and beyond:

Storekey is a Stockholm-based startup that is helping retail businesses flourish and meet the demands of an ever-evolving industry. Storekey is helping retailers by removing friction for the consumers and the retailers through an autonomous technology platform and the benefits of e-commerce to physical stores.

Handelsbanken is one of Sweden’s top banks, which provides universal banking services through a nationwide branch of networks in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and is built on a strong emotional bond with their customers. They realized using cloud services is something that increased their capability for innovation, improved employee experiences, and created better interactions with their customers. This adoption of the latest cloud technology has helped Handelsbanken innovate, in a trusted way, in collaboration with their customers.

Swedbank is a multinational bank, based in Stockholm, who saw the flexibility and scalability of the cloud as a way to innovate by using AI and machine learning to enhance security measures to protect against criminal activities such as bank fraud.

Building a sustainable future

On my trip in Sweden, I sat down with Annika Ramsköld, the Chief Sustainability Office at Vattenfall, an energy company who is making waves with their commitment toward a fossil free future. Sustainability is not a trendy buzzword in Sweden, it is fundamental for Swedish organizations and their partners, and Vattenfall is very focused on holding their suppliers and partners, such as Microsoft, to their same sustainability requirements.

“It is our purpose. Everything we do, we want to help the entire society to be fossil free. That means every little piece of the supply chain, whether it is transport, or the way you extract materials, or the way you produce that material, should be fossil free and be done in a responsible way.”— Annika Ramsköld

I couldn’t agree more with Annika, as our own corporate commitments to be carbon negative, water positive, with zero waste, are echoing similar commitments by Vattenfall. Our partnership with Vattenfall has helped us make our Sweden Central datacenter region one of our most sustainable regions globally, and an example of how a partnership with a common vision can help us bring a supply of sustainable services to our customers.

The reach of cloud technology

Technology does not define people and culture but instead culture defines technology and how we use it. I learned in Sweden, their approach to collaboration, their approach to the fika, has shaped their usage of technology, bringing Swedish innovation to the entire world. I can’t wait for my next trip to learn even more.

Watch the Cloud Cultures: Sweden episode today.
The post Cloud Cultures, Part 2: Global collaboration in Sweden appeared first on Azure Blog.
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Dev-optimized, cloud-based workstations—Microsoft Dev Box is now generally available

Last month at Microsoft Build, we shared several new features in Microsoft Dev Box—ready-to-code, cloud-based workstations optimized for developer use cases and productivity. From new integrations with Visual Studio, a preview of configuration-as-code customization, and our own rollout of Dev Box internally, there was a lot to share, and the response to this news was great. Today, I’m excited to share another announcement—Microsoft Dev Box is now generally available.

Our journey to dev-optimized virtual desktops

We first announced Microsoft Dev Box at Microsoft Build 2022, but our journey didn’t start there. For more than seven years, we’ve focused on improving developer productivity and satisfaction with the power of the cloud. In 2016, we introduced Azure DevTest Labs, a service that enables development teams to create templatized virtual machines (VMs) for a variety of development and testing use cases.

Over the years, we’ve helped many customers build custom solutions on DevTest Labs to expand on its core features. One use case that has been especially popular is using DevTest labs to create persistent, preconfigured dev environments. But building these custom solutions on top of DevTest Labs is challenging, requiring significant effort to build out additional governance and management features. Customers wanted a turnkey solution.

Delivering fast, self-service dev environments in the cloud

In response, we introduced Visual Studio Codespaces in 2019—preconfigured, container- and Linux-based dev environments that developers could spin up in seconds directly from Visual Studio Code, providing developers with a fast and easy way to work on their apps while on the go.

Developers love Codespaces for its speed and mobility, and the service still exists today as GitHub Codespaces. But software development requires all sorts of tools. Initially, we built Codespaces to support Visual Studio Code and GitHub, but customers quickly started asking for support for other Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), source code management, and tools.

As a first step, we started to expand Codespaces to include support for Visual Studio. However, doing so revealed more challenges than we expected—primarily around enterprise-ready management and governance. That, combined with the fact that devs wanted access to all their tools in their cloud environment, made us realize we needed to deliver:

Enterprise-ready security, compliance, and cost management capabilities.

High-fidelity, cloud-based performance with built-in dev tool integrations.

Self-service access to preconfigured, project-specific resources.

Essentially, the solution needed to be a developer-optimized virtualization solution. Microsoft already offers Windows 365—delivering Cloud PCs, securely streaming your personalized Windows desktop, apps, settings, and content from the Microsoft Cloud to any device anywhere. Critically, Windows 365 is fully integrated with Microsoft Intune, which enables IT admins to manage their Cloud PCs alongside their physical devices. That was exactly what we were looking for, so we decided to use Windows 365 as the foundation for our new solution.

Transforming the dev workstation experience

With enterprise management taken care of, our next consideration was the underlying hardware. While high-powered compute was an obvious need, we soon realized that storage can also significantly impact developer performance. Large builds put a lot of strain on storage drives, which become a bottleneck if read or write speeds can’t keep up with the build. To account for this, we decided to include premium Solid-State Drivers (SSDs) in our product. But we still hadn’t addressed the primary challenges of dev workstations—long deployment times and configuration errors caused by complex projects and toolsets.

Solving these problems would require a more fundamental shift in how our service managed configurations and deployment. Devs work on all sorts of projects, many of which require specific tools. For these devs, a blanket, role-based configuration would require them to spend time tailoring their workstation and installing additional tools once it was provisioned. IT admins and dev leads alike needed a way to create multiple, tailored configurations and enable developers to spin up a new workstation on-demand that would be ready-to-code for their current project.

Our first step was to integrate our solution with the Azure Compute Gallery, providing a scalable way to share base images and manage image versions. We then set up a new management layer that enabled teams to organize their images and networking configurations by project. Now, dev leads and IT admins could set up multiple workstation configurations for a single project. Admins could even define the Azure region in which each workstation would deploy, ensuring a high-fidelity experience for devs around the world.

By preconfiguring workstations like this, we eliminated the need for devs to reach out to IT every time they needed a new workstation. And because we could make multiple workstation configurations available for a single project, devs weren’t locked into a single configuration—they could select a tailored workstation, spin it up, and start coding quickly. We even gave devs a specialized Developer Portal that offers fast, easy access to their project-based workstations. Devs can also use this portal to quickly deploy environments for any stage of development using Azure Deployment Environments, also generally available.

Arriving at Microsoft Dev Box

That’s how we ended up at Microsoft Dev Box—cloud-based workstations optimized for developer use cases and productivity. Dev Box combines developer-optimized capabilities with the enterprise-ready management of Windows 365 and Microsoft Intune. And as we work to improve Dev Box, we’ve continued to partner with other teams at Microsoft. Most recently, we worked closely with the Visual Studio team to add built-in integrations that optimize the Visual Studio experience on Dev Box. We’re also actively introducing configuration-as-code customization into Dev Box, which will provide dev leads even more granular control to configure dev boxes around specific tasks and enable them to connect Dev Box provisioning to their existing Git flow.

But before we launched Dev Box, we wanted to make sure it was truly enterprise-ready. At Microsoft, it’s common to test our services internally before releasing them. In this case, that meant stress-testing Dev Box against products with repos that are hundreds of gigabytes large. This has been a challenging but useful experience, and our learnings have helped us speed up the path to general availability. Already, there are more than 10,000 engineers using Dev Box at Microsoft, and we have several customers using Dev Box in production environments today.

Enabling the best of Dev Box with flexible pricing

From our initial work with customers, we learned a lot about their usage patterns and the use cases it can support. Dev Box works great as a full-time desktop replacement, or for specialized part-time use. You can spin up a high-powered Dev Box for a particularly compute-heavy task, or a second machine to isolate an experiment or proof of concept.

Initially, we planned on charging for Dev Box based on a pure consumption model—customers would only pay for Dev Box when it was running, and no more. Unfortunately, while this worked great for part-time Dev Box use, such a model left a lot of variability for administrators that wanted to pay a standardized monthly cost for full-time usage.

To accommodate different use cases, we’ve introduced a predictable monthly price for full-time Dev Box usage while keeping consumption-based, pay-as-you-go pricing that charges up to a monthly price cap. This model strikes a balance between the extremes of full consumption or subscription-only pricing, ensuring devs can optimize their spend for both full-time and part-time use cases.

Getting started with Microsoft Dev Box

Dev Box has already transformed the developer workstations at Microsoft from rigid, long-running desktops to project-specific, ready-to-code workstations in the cloud. We’re excited to see more developers leave behind the challenges of physical workstations to focus on writing the code only they can write. To see what Dev Box can do for your team, visit our website or start a proof of concept today.

If you’ve already started using Dev Box, we’d love to hear you think. Please submit any feedback you have so we can keep making Dev Box the best option for developer productivity.
The post Dev-optimized, cloud-based workstations—Microsoft Dev Box is now generally available appeared first on Azure Blog.
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Turn your vision into impact with Microsoft Azure

Organizations in every industry and every geography have an opportunity to harness the power of today’s technological advancements to solve their biggest challenges and create a positive impact in society as the landscape around us continues to evolve rapidly. At Microsoft, we understand that organizations with a strong digital foundation are best positioned to adapt, grow, and stay ahead of market forces. Working with our partner ecosystem, we are committed to helping our customers build the digital capabilities they need to stay agile in the face of change. 

By connecting customers with our 400,000-plus partner ecosystem, we want to enable organizations in every industry to leverage the Microsoft Cloud as the best foundational investment for bringing their biggest opportunities to life. The breadth and depth of cloud capabilities are underpinned by Microsoft Azure, which enables innovation wherever it’s needed and is the trusted platform to lead organizations into the era of AI. 

Our partners helping customers innovate with Azure

We continue to work with our partners to bring this value to life for our customers through six prioritized focus areas, outlined below, that maximize value for companies around the world. Our partners are actively helping companies achieve incredible innovations that are helping them stand out from the competition. 

We saw this recently with Autotechnics, a spare parts distributor in Ukraine, which needed a more resilient infrastructure to keep its data accessible to customers, even during times of crisis. They partnered with SoftwareOne to develop and implement a cloud-based migration in just a few days, using Azure to secure their data. The immediate result was that they were able to offer uninterrupted support to their customers that were reliant on their systems.  

At the same time, our partners are already leveraging Azure to create their own transformative AI solutions so that their customers can accelerate the value of this emerging technology. We are making it easier for our partners to innovate with agility using the same Azure AI platform and services that power the copilot solutions that Microsoft has brought to market over the past few months. ISVs like SymphonyAI, are building for the future on Azure with their own copilots. The new Sensa Copilot has the potential to transform the financial services and banking industry by integrating AI algorithms and machine learning models to find areas of previously undetected risk and to help financial crime investigators do their jobs more efficiently and effectively. 

The role of partners is more important than ever to help customers capitalize on this continuing wave of technological innovation, and we are invested in their success. 

New Azure capabilities and investments

Today, at Microsoft Inspire, we are sharing new advancements across Azure technologies, including: 

Unprecedented investments in partner incentives in Azure Migrate and Modernize and the brand-new offering for AI, analytics, and app innovation: Azure Innovate.

Enhanced capabilities across our products and tooling including Azure Migrate.

The preview of Extended Security Updates enabled by Azure Arc.

Expanding our partnership with Meta to bring Llama 2 to Azure AI and new innovations across the Azure AI portfolio.

GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps public preview to increase developer productivity.

Below, we dive into our announcements in more detail, starting with our hero offerings and extending across our priority focus areas.

Hero offerings to accelerate cloud adoption 

Today we are excited to announce an unprecedented three times investment to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate and Modernize, along with the launch of Azure Innovate, an all-new dedicated $100M plus investment we are making in response to the heightened demands for analytics and AI.   

In response to partner feedback, we are maximizing opportunities by streamlining Azure incentives, tripling our investments, and simplifying partner engagement with these two offerings. This will make it easier than ever to access the funds to drive the greatest impact.  

These comprehensive offerings will help partners increase deal velocity and reduce time to value with funding that ranges from pre-to-post sales—like brand new assessments in Azure Migrate and Modernize, proof of concepts in Azure Innovate, and expanded implementation scenarios.   

For our customers, whether you are migrating to gain a secure and AI-ready foundation, or you are ready to build your own AI powered apps, now you have everything you need in one place. Our new offerings have expanded scenario coverage, richer investments and offers, and guidance from Microsoft experts and specialized partners. 

“SVA has been able to leverage the Azure Migrate and Modernize offering with our clients, as it provides a great argument for taking that leap and starting to modernize their applications. It allows us to approach our customers proactively in cases where they could clearly benefit from a cloud migration by showing them that they will have the support of both SVA and Microsoft in the process.“

—James Bell, Business Consultant, Competence Center Azure and Hybrid Solutions, SVA System Vertrieb Alexander GmbH

“The cloud has brought a number of financial benefits. Total savings that we achieved was more than 4.2 million euros. With Crayon and Microsoft as trusted partners we look forward to continuing the cloud project to support STADA‘s digitalization approach, which is focused on the delivery of a future ready and scalable IT Platform which drives operational excellence and enables STADA´s growth journey.“

—Igor Kosanovic, Global IT Infrastructure and Cloud Architect, Stada Group 

 Learn more about these new Azure offerings:

Partners can learn more and nominate here.

Customers can learn more about these benefits to help accelerate innovation here.   

Discover more about all Microsoft Inspire announcements here.

Migrate and secure Windows Server and SQL Server 

Customers have continued to trust Windows Server and SQL Server as foundational platforms for their mission-critical workloads for over 30 years. By migrating these workloads to Azure, customers can be on a secure and AI-ready platform to accelerate innovation using our comprehensive portfolio of AI and cloud-native services. True to our open and flexible roots, Microsoft is announcing new capabilities for customers to migrate and modernize on their terms: 

With Windows Server 2012/R2 end of support approaching in October, customers can remain protected by upgrading or using Extended Security Updates, available for free in Azure or purchasable for on-premises deployments. For customers who cannot meet the deadline, we are announcing Extended Security Updates enabled by Azure Arc. With Azure Arc, customers will be able to purchase and seamlessly deploy Extended Security Updates in on-premises or multi-cloud environments, right from the Azure portal.  

Announcing the preview of Azure Boost, a new system that offloads virtualization processes traditionally performed by the hypervisor and host OS onto next-generation hardware infrastructure, delivering new levels of performance and security for your workloads.  

Additional infrastructure announcements can help organizations migrate securely, which include: 

More capabilities in our free tool, Azure Migrate.

Expanded services in Azure Confidential Computing.

General availability of Azure Active Directory support for Azure Files REST API, enabling share level read and write access to file shares with better security and ease of use over storage account access key authorization. 

Power business decisions with cloud scale analytics

As we enter a new era accelerated by AI, an organization’s data is becoming even more critical as companies look to benefit from new insights that come from having a comprehensive view of their entire data estate. With the recent unveiling of Microsoft Fabric and Copilot in Microsoft Power BI, we are enabling our customers and partners to unlock the underutilized potential of this data.

Microsoft Fabric, now in public preview, brings together an organization’s data and analytics into a single, AI-powered platform that’s purpose-built to help customers unify their data estate, build powerful AI models, and responsibly put insights in the hands of everyone that needs access. Integrating proven technologies like Azure Data Factory, Microsoft Power BI, and Azure Synapse, with new experiences like Data Activator will help customers seamlessly go from data to insights to action—fostering a data-driven culture across the organization. I encourage partners to get access to a free Fabric trial.  

Copilot in Microsoft Power BI, now in private preview, combines advanced generative AI with your data to help everyone uncover and share actionable insights more quickly. Simply describe the insights you need, or ask a question about your data, and Copilot will analyze and pull the right information into a comprehensive report.

Build and modernize AI apps

Azure is designed to help you build the next generation of intelligent applications. From Azure OpenAI Service to Azure AI Studio, to Microsoft Fabric, it’s clear that AI can accelerate innovation within companies and for partners of all skill levels—leveraging the power of natural language to increase the value and relevance of data and machine learning. At this year’s Microsoft Build, we unveiled several new AI capabilities, and today, we’re excited to showcase continued momentum for partners and customers.

Vector search in Azure Cognitive Search, now available in preview, offers pure vector search, hybrid retrieval, and sophisticated reranking. Use vector search to create Generative AI applications that combine your own data with large language models, or to power novel semantic search scenarios such as image or audio search.

Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI Service work together, bringing powerful generative AI to document processing. With the Document Generative AI solution, you can ingest documents for report summarization, value extraction, knowledge mining, and new document content generation. 

Whisper model, coming soon to Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Speech, offers capabilities to transcribe and translate audio content as well as produce high-quality batch transcriptions at scale.

We are also excited to announce new features in Azure AI Speech; Custom Neural Voice, now generally available, and Real-time Diarization in public preview.

Today we announced a partnership with Meta to bring the Llama 2 family of large language models to Azure AI. Llama 2 is designed to enable developers and organizations to build generative AI-powered experiences. Now Azure customers can fine-tune and deploy the 7B, 13B, and 70B-parameter Llama 2 models easily and more safely on Azure. Models like Llama 2 allow organizations to customize for specific use cases and needs. Our model catalog continues to expand to meet our customer needs offering the latest open, frontier, and customer provided models.

Accelerate developer productivity 

We are reimagining developer experiences and helping customers innovate faster with the power of AI using the most comprehensive developer platform. GitHub Copilot writes 46 percent of code for developers who use it1 and enables developers to code up to 55 percent faster2. We are excited to extend our AI innovation to developer workloads, enabling faster time to market and increased developer productivity. 

Microsoft Dev Box, now generally available, is a virtualized solution that empowers developers to quickly spin up self-service workstations preconfigured for their tasks while maintaining centralized management to maximize security and compliance. 

GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps public preview is generating significant excitement, with over 200 customers joining the waitlist in one week. GitHub Advanced Security, coupled with Microsoft Defender, offers protection against both threats to codebases as well as to applications running in Azure. Shopify secures both their code and the code they consume from the Open Source Community leveraging this technology.

Migrate enterprise apps 

There are a significant of custom line-of-business apps and customer-facing apps running in on-prem environments—many built using .NET and Java among others. One of the effective ways of modernizing with new AI experiences is by migrating legacy on prem applications first. Azure App Service is a PaaS offering that gives customers an easy path to the cloud, when they may be starting from a traditional IT environment. Their developers can keep innovating using the apps and development environments they know and love, such as Visual Studio, .NET, and Java, while offloading the cloud infrastructure and migration to Azure and its partners. 

Migrate SAP 

We have a strategic partnership with SAP and are jointly working with customers to help them move to SAP S/4 HANA by the 2027 end-of-support milestone. This represents a significant opportunity for customers to migrate, save, and optimize—and for our partners to support them on their migration journey. 

With AI being at the forefront of our business today, we have a unique opportunity with SAP and a great example of this is our new collaboration on integrating SAP SuccessFactors with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot for Microsoft Viva Learning, as well as Azure OpenAI Service to enable new experiences designed to improve how organizations attract, retain, and skill their people. Read more about our recent joint announcements with SAP. 

Get started at Microsoft Inspire

With so much opportunity ahead, where should you get started? Be sure to tune in to the Microsoft Inspire sessions to hear how we are helping our partner community grow and scale with Microsoft Azure. We rely on our partners to bring tailored industry expertise and solutions to complement the innovation that Azure delivers.

The Impact of AI on Developer Productivity, Peng, 2023​

GitHub Copilot now has a better AI model and new capabilities, Zhao, 2023

The post Turn your vision into impact with Microsoft Azure appeared first on Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure

da Agency

Drive innovation in the era of AI with ISV Success

Microsoft Inspire is our annual event celebrating the community of over 400,000 Microsoft partners. With the rapid advancements in commercially available AI cloud services over the past year, any company building cloud applications—whether a start-up or an established ISV—has a tremendous opportunity to build their AI-based offerings and partner with Microsoft. The Microsoft Cloud offers a broad host of AI products and platforms that can be integrated with your applications to create powerful, comprehensive, and connected solutions that can be built and delivered through our marketplace, all with industry-leading security.

To support your organization’s growth and aid your exploration with our AI products and platforms, we’re excited to announce that ISV Success is now generally available to companies developing B2B cloud applications using the Microsoft Cloud. ISV Success helps companies build and publish their B2B cloud applications and acquire customers to drive sales through our marketplace. ISV Success has already enabled thousands of ISVs to launch new applications on our marketplace that are searchable and transactable by our millions of commercial customers. Since private preview, participation in ISV Success has grown by over 500 percent.

Harness opportunities with AI

ISV Success helps you create AI-powered applications across the Microsoft Cloud—our collective offering of Azure, Microsoft 365 (including Teams and Viva), Security, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform. Through ISV Success, you receive benefits with a retail value of more than USD125,000 to jumpstart your innovation. These benefits include cloud sandboxes and developer tools, curated resources, community guidance, and go-to-market support. To help you stay current and ahead on the latest AI capabilities, ISV Success is also offering AI trainings, so you know what’s coming and how to prepare.

AI’s rapid advancement serves as a driving motivator for embracing new business models and nurturing invention. Microsoft provides you access to our current and future innovations, enabling you to:

Build your own AI and large language models with Azure OpenAI Service in a private enterprise-grade environment. 

Innovate with Azure Cognitive Services and low-code technology with Microsoft Power Platform that help you develop apps quickly.

Learn more about upcoming feature roadmaps, share feedback on in-development work, and engage Microsoft 365 product groups with the Technology Adoption Program (TAP).

And there’s more. I’m excited to announce that by the end of the year, ISV Success participants will also have GitHub Copilot included in their benefits. With GitHub Copilot, ISVs can use an AI pair programmer to spend less time on repetitive code, and more time building innovative applications.

At Microsoft Inspire 2023 and amongst our Microsoft Partner of the Year awardees, there are already inspiring stories of technology providers tackling new customer challenges, leveraging the benefits of ISV Success. Here are a few examples of ISVs in ISV Success who are doing so.

DataStax: DataStax empowers organizations—and developers—to build real-time AI applications. As business moves faster and faster, DataStax is leaning into the marketplace to accelerate sales. Moving towards a digital-first, B2B sales motion, DataStax is closing multiple six-figure deals through the Microsoft commercial marketplace.

Profisee: Profisee’s master data management solution is how enterprises can overcome their data issues to unlock strategic initiatives. By centralizing their sales through marketplace—they’ve created a model for simplified selling that’s resulted in over 800 percent year-over-year growth in marketplace sales.

Tanium: Since joining ISV Success one year ago, Tanium has won multiple seven-digit deals through the Azure Marketplace. Tanium’s integrations with Microsoft provide Azure customers with effective and resilient IT operations and security at scale, with real-time visibility, control, and remediation for healthy and secure environments. And through the marketplace, Azure customers can get Tanium’s product almost instantly.

Sell faster and get bigger deals through the marketplace

Cloud marketplaces have emerged as the preferred method to support customers in managing their entire cloud estate. Commercial customers are increasingly navigating to marketplaces to find solutions that help them spend and fulfill their pre-committed cloud budgets. ISV Success provides expert guidance to get your solutions quickly listed on the marketplace so those customers can find, discover, try, and buy your solutions. After your solution is listed, ISV Success helps you optimize your marketing with Marketplace Rewards—now part of ISV Success—to accelerate sales.

To help you build new sales channels, multiparty private offers are now available on our marketplace when selling to customers in the United States. This feature empowers partners to collaborate together and create tailored solutions for customers. You can engage our broad partner ecosystem to sell your products and services on your behalf and scale your revenue generation while you sleep.

Pre-committed cloud budget is the largest driver for customers using cloud marketplaces. Microsoft automatically counts the entire sale towards a customer’s commitment when buying eligible solutions. With our new multiparty private offer capability, the sale counts towards the customer’s cloud consumption commitment if your solution is “Azure benefit eligible.” With advancements in private offers and flexible dealmaking features, your organization has the tools to reach customers, unlock budgets, and fuel growth. Over 85 percent of our enterprise customers with Microsoft Azure consumption commitments are actively buying through the marketplace—looking to maximize the value of their cloud spend.

“At Dynatrace, we typically sell into the enterprise, and nearly all our customers have cloud commitments. With 100% of their purchase for our solution counting towards their contract, the marketplace opportunity is a win-win. The number of marketplace deals we’re transacting are increasing because customers are looking to get more value from their investments and fulfill their commitments. And now with multiparty private offers, we can open new sales channels through our partnerships while helping customers maximize their spending power.”

—Ayla Anderson, Senior Manager, Microsoft Alliance, Dynatrace.

Partner with us and join ISV Success

This year at Microsoft Inspire, we are delighted to share with you the latest in AI technologies, connect you with experts who are ready to help you get started, and showcase real-world solutions powered by AI.

As we continue to grow the Microsoft Cloud and the marketplace as the best place to develop and sell AI-powered applications, we are most excited to see what you build next. We invite you to partner with us by joining ISV Success today.

Learn more

Join ISV Success.

Check out these Inspire sessions:

Innovate with Microsoft Cloud and get support with ISV Success.

The power of working together, through marketplace.

Evolving Microsoft Azure IP co-sell aligned with commercial marketplace.

The post Drive innovation in the era of AI with ISV Success appeared first on Azure Blog.
Quelle: Azure