Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Voltus and Azure—no power integrity challenge too big to solve

This post was co-authored by Giancarlo DiPasquale, Microsoft Director, Semiconductor & EDA; Rajat Chaudhry, Product Management Director, Cadence; and Adrian Lao, Senior Software Architect, Cadence.

With the advent of AI and hyperscale designs on advanced nodes, it is common to see designs in over 50 billion transistor categories with tens to 100 billion plus nodes in the on-chip power network. This explosion in scale requires solutions that meet the following requirements:

High performance and capacity.
Elasticity.
Manage varying compute resource requirements.
Low cost to manage the exponential increase in compute requirements.

Voltus on Azure

Voltus is a leading IC Power Integrity Signoff Solution from Cadence Design Systems. It is used by top chip design companies to verify the reliability of their power networks on chip (NoC) and enables power integrity and thermal analysis at the system level.

Microsoft Azure provides a cloud-based high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure with security, reliability, and scalability that is a natural fit for electronic design automation (EDA) workloads, especially power integrity analysis.

Azure can support both a hybrid model as well as an all-in model. In the hybrid model customers mainly use their on-premises infrastructure but can add to their compute and storage capacity on an on-demand basis to satisfy peak demand. The hybrid approach is typically used by customers new to using the cloud. In an all-in model, customers primarily use Azure infrastructure for all their EDA workloads. The all-in model is a great use case for startups and customers who really want to optimize their costs while taking advantage of the scale and flexibility of Azure. Voltus supports both the hybrid as well as the all-in model with Azure.

Managing variable compute costs through the design cycle

Using Azure can help customers optimize their costs as compute requirements will vary through the design cycle with lower requirements early on and peak demand near signoff. This is in contrast to the high fixed cost of on-premises infrastructure.

Running Voltus on Azure

We have used a block and full Chip test case to demonstrate our results.

The Azure team selected Edsv4 virtual machines (VMs) based on second-generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8272CL (Cascade Lake). These VMs are well suited for both compute and memory-intensive workloads.

The Voltus use case setup on Azure is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1

High performance and elasticity

Voltus has a fully distributed and scalable architecture. Every step of the power integrity analysis flow, from design parsing to the solver, is fully distributed and scalable. Data from each part of the automatically partitioned design is assigned to compute nodes on the compute infrastructure for various steps in the analysis. This process is managed by a master machine as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2

The level of distribution is user-controlled, which allows the user to take advantage of compute elasticity and manage performance. As Figure 3 illustrates for both the block and full chip run, we observe near-linear scalability in performance with respect to the number of CPUs.

Figure 3

Higher performance with lower costs

Believe it or not, that is indeed true. The elasticity of Voltus architecture enables the tool to run faster with a higher number of CPUs and since the CPUs are used for a smaller amount of time, the result is that the total cost drops to an optimal point. This can be seen at both the block and full chip levels as illustrated in Figure 3. This is a win-win situation where you can improve your performance and reduce your costs.

Figure 4

The magic of Voltus hierarchical analysis

Designers can further increase their performance and reduce cost by using Voltus XM hierarchical analysis. With Voltus XM, block-level models can be used instead of the full flattened design as illustrated in Figure 5. This method significantly reduces node count while maintaining accuracy. We can even further reduce our runtime and costs with Voltus XM and Azure. We observe a 4.5x reduction in cost and a 2x improvement in performance over the flat run for the full chip test case (Figure 6).

Figure 5

Figure 6

We have demonstrated the benefit of using Voltus on Azure at both the block level and chip level. These benchmarks show that customers can not only just benefit from higher performance using elastic compute, but there is an optimal point for performance and cost. Using Voltus XM hierarchical analysis further improves cost and performance. With Voltus on Azure, semiconductor companies have the ideal solution to verify power integrity for their most complex designs.

Learn more about Voltus on Azure

View our new high performance computing hub on Microsoft Docs
Read more about Azure HPC + AI

Please contact your Cadence sales representative for help enabling Voltus on Azure.

 

 

#AzureHPCAI
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Cost Management updates—November 2022

Whether you're a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you're spending, where it’s being spent, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Microsoft Cost Management comes in.

We're always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Microsoft Cost Management can help you better understand where you're accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Use tag inheritance to group by subscription and resource group tags.
View cost change since previous period in the cost analysis preview.
New cost recommendations for virtual machine scale sets.
What's new in Cost Management Labs.
New ways to save money with Microsoft Cloud.
New videos and learning opportunities.
Documentation updates.
Join the Microsoft Cost Management team.

Let's dig into the details.

Use tag inheritance to group by subscription and resource group tags

As organizations grow their cloud usage, they want the ability to slice their cloud costs in multiple ways to better manage and optimize their cloud costs.

For example—finance teams may want costs grouped by department for cost allocation reasons, making each department responsible for the costs depending on their cloud usage. Engineering teams typically want to group costs by application or environment to understand where and how much they’re spending.

Tagging is an effective mechanism to group your costs but requires tagging every resource and relying on resource providers to support and emit tags with usage in the billing pipeline. To overcome these limitations and make it easier to use tags for cost reporting, you can now use the Cost Management tag inheritance preview to apply resource group and subscription tags to resource usage automatically in cost details.

With tag inheritance enabled, you can easily apply a single set of tags to your subscriptions rather than enforcing tag policies and tracking adoption, still to be left with some resources that don’t include tags in their usage data. This covers broad scenarios like departmental chargeback or environment. To tag lower-level data like applications, you can apply tags to each resource group.
Tag inheritance can be enabled on any Enterprise Agreement (EA) or Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) subscription. To enable tag inheritance across all subscriptions, enable it from the EA billing account or MCA billing profile.

You can enable tag inheritance in Cost Management from Cost analysis by selecting Configure at the top of the page or by opening Cost Management directly and selecting Manage billing account (or billing profile or subscription) from the menu. On the management settings page, you’ll see a Tag inheritance (preview) option with the current status.

Select Edit to enable tag inheritance and decide how to handle conflicts when tag names match. Once enabled, you should start to see inherited tags in cost details APIs and experiences, like Cost analysis and scheduled exports, in 8–24 hours.

To learn more, see Group and allocate costs using tag inheritance.

View cost change since previous period in the Cost analysis preview

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the cloud is the flexibility it offers. But that flexibility comes at a cost–and while you can always get a good cost estimate from the Azure pricing calculator, most of us aren’t thinking about cost when we’re focused on solving a problem. This is where cloud computing becomes challenging–if we don’t understand the cost implications of the changes we make, we may very well get a surprise at the end of the month. To help spot these changes sooner, you can now find the percentage change since the previous period in the Cost analysis preview.

When your view is showing three months or less, the difference is calculated as the cost from the start of the period through yesterday, compared to the same days from the previous period. If showing more than three months, the date range uses the first month through the last month. If the current day or month are not part of the period you’re looking at (such as last month), the entire period is compared to the previous period.

Pair this with the average cost KPI and anomaly insights, and the Cost analysis preview gives you several new ways to catch unexpected changes in your cost patterns. If you aren’t using the Cost analysis preview yet, I recommend checking it out. We’re currently rolling out another change to help you start with the best view, so it would be good to share your thoughts early. Give the Cost analysis preview a shot and let us know what you think using the rating button at the bottom.

New cost recommendations for virtual machine scale sets

Cost optimization is on everyone’s minds these days. With a huge uptick in the usage of virtual machine scale sets (VMSS) over recent years, ensuring efficient use of VMSS resources is more important than ever. And as with virtual machines, one of the best ways to drive efficiency of VMSS is by right-sizing or deleting underutilized resources. To that end, Azure Advisor now includes cost optimization recommendations for VMSS.

Given the scale at which VMSS runs with multiple virtual machine instances, right-sizing is even more critical. So not only is it possible to over-provision the size or stock keeping unit (SKU) of the virtual machines, it’s also possible to over-provision the instances relative to the needs of the workloads running on these virtual machines. VMSS may also be used as the underlying infrastructure for Service Fabric, which has certain recommendations on the number of instances to be used, based on the reliability/durability tier.

Azure Advisor takes all these complexities into account while generating recommendations that are sure to save on your costs, while not impacting the performance or reliability of your workloads.

Overall, these recommendations represent close to $23 million in potential monthly savings! We want to help you do more with Azure for less.

To learn more, see Optimize virtual machine (VM) or virtual machine scale set (VMSS) spend.

What's new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what's coming in Microsoft Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share feedback and help us better understand how you use the service so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Cost Management Labs:

New: Change since previous period in the cost analysis preview—Now available in the public portal. 
Show the percentage difference in cost compared to the previous period at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.

New: Recent and pinned views in the cost analysis preview—Now enabled by default in Labs. 
Show all classic and preview views in the cost analysis preview and streamline navigation by prioritizing recently used and pinned views. You can see this in the Cost Management Labs or by opting in using Try Preview.
New: Recommendations view.
View a summary of cost recommendations that help you optimize your Azure resources in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
Forecast in the cost analysis preview.
Show your forecast cost for the period at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try preview.
Group related resources in the cost analysis preview.
Group related resources, like disks under VMs or web apps under App Service plans, by adding a “cm-resource-parent” tag to the child resources with a value of the parent resource ID.
Charts in the cost analysis preview. 
View your daily or monthly cost over time in the cost analysis preview. You can opt in using Try Preview.
View cost for your resources. 
The cost for your resources is one click away from the resource overview in the preview portal. Just click View cost to quickly jump to the cost of that resource.
Change scope from the menu.
Change scope from the menu for quicker navigation. You can opt-in using Try Preview.

Of course, that's not all. Every change in Microsoft Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it's in the full Azure portal or Microsoft 365 admin center. We're eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you'd like to see next. What are you waiting for? Try Cost Management Labs today.

New ways to save money in the Microsoft Cloud

There were lots of cost optimization improvements happened over the last month. Here are some of the notable general availability offers you might be interested in:

Virtual Machine software reservations.
Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage.
Auto-shutdown for Machine Learning compute instances.
New node sizing for Azure VMware Solution.
Azure Database for PostgreSQL in China North 3 and China East 3.
Azure Stream Analytics in Qatar Central.

And here are two new previews:

Azure HX and HBv4 virtual machines for HPC.
Azure Network Watcher for hybrid networks.

New videos and learning opportunities

Cost management and optimization were popular topics at Microsoft Ignite last month. Explore all 76 sessions with topics covering Azure, Microsoft 365, and more.

Follow the Microsoft Cost Management YouTube channel to stay in the loop with new videos as they’re released and let us know what you'd like to see next.

Want a more guided experience? Start with Control Azure spending and manage bills with Microsoft Cost Management.

Documentation updates

There were plenty of minor documentation updates. Here are a few you might be interested in:

New: Understand reservations discount for Azure SQL Edge.
New: Error when you create multiple subscriptions.
Updated: Overview of Cost Management + Billing–Complete rewrite to offer a more detailed overview.
Updated: How an Azure saving plan discount is applied–Covered how discounts are applied when both savings plans and reservations are available.
Updated: Azure portal administration for direct Enterprise Agreements–Added details about how to enable.
Updated: Reservation discount for Azure Data Explorer–Added details about stopping or suspending Data Explorer clusters.
Updated: Transfer Azure subscriptions between subscribers and CSPs–Added details about MCA subscription transfers.
9 updates based on your feedback.

Want to keep an eye on all documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request. You can also submit a GitHub issue. We welcome and appreciate all contributions.

Join the Microsoft Cost Management team

Are you excited about helping customers and partners better manage and optimize costs? We're looking for passionate, dedicated, and exceptional people to help build best in class cloud platforms and experiences to enable exactly that. If you have experience with big data infrastructure, reliable and scalable APIs, or rich and engaging user experiences, you'll find no better challenge than serving every Microsoft customer and partner in one of the most critical areas for driving cloud success.

Watch the video below to learn more about the Microsoft Cost Management team:

Join our team.

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don't forget to check out the previous Microsoft Cost Management updates. We're always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow @MSCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. You can also share ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum or join the research panel to participate in a future study and help shape the future of Microsoft Cost Management.

We know these are trying times for everyone. Best wishes from the Microsoft Cost Management team. Stay safe and stay healthy.
Quelle: Azure

Any developer can be a space developer with the new Azure Orbital Space SDK

Earlier this year, we announced our vision to empower any developer to become a space developer through Azure. With over 90 million developers on GitHub, we have created a powerful ecosystem and we are focused on empowering the next generation of developers for space. Today, we are announcing a crucial step towards democratizing access to space development, with the preview release of Azure Orbital Space SDK (software development kit)—a secure hosting platform and application toolkit designed to enable developers to create, deploy, and operate applications on-orbit.

By bringing modern cloud-based applications to spacecrafts we not only increase the efficiency, value, and speed of insights from space data but also increase the value of that data through the optimization of ground communication.

Many of the fundamental technological improvements that have accelerated the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) in the past decade remain untapped by space development missions today. With the Azure Orbital Space SDK, we will help bring those improvements to space through modern agile software deployment, container-based development, use of higher-level languages, and cloud-managed networking. Extending the power of the Azure cloud into space means that spacecraft development will take less time, cost less, and bring more people into the space development ecosystem.

What is the Azure Orbital Space SDK?

The Azure Orbital Space SDK was created to be able to run on any spacecraft and provide a secure hosting platform and application kit to create, deploy, and operate applications on-orbit. This "host platform" runs onboard the spacecraft including a containerized, scalable compute infrastructure with resource and schedule management capabilities.

The application kit provides a set of templates, samples, and documentation to make it easy to get up and running as a space developer with template applications for common workload patterns, such as earth observation image processing. There is also a "virtual test harness" that allows developers to easily test their applications on the ground against an instance of the host platform.

How the Azure Orbital Space SDK is changing what’s possible

By moving the application onboard the spacecraft through the Azure Orbital Space SDK, we enable time and cost savings while radically altering and expanding the capabilities of the spacecraft.

Remote sensing

Remote sensing from space provides the perspective we need to better understand our world and powers commercial, economic, humanitarian, intelligence, and military scenarios—from damage assessments after weather events, to vessel detection, to crop monitoring and land classification.

Most remote sensing satellites have limited connectivity windows and bandwidth to communicate data back to the ground. As the fidelity of sensors increases, the amount of data they generate eclipses the available bandwidth. Being able to prioritize images that are useful, or even being able to send insights rather than the raw data down to the ground significantly reduces costs, accelerates speed, and fundamentally increases the value of the satellite.

Through the Azure Orbital Space SDK, developers can write and host more intelligent applications on-board satellites, meaning that they can capture data and use time more efficiently, and even autonomously reconfigure applications at the ultimate edge. Instead of building a unique solution each time developers deploy a spacecraft application, the Azure Orbital Space SDK creates a common template for performing imaging tasks, making it easier to transfer models and applications from one satellite configuration to another.

Communications

Satellite communications is one of the most well-known and widely used space capabilities. It allows us to watch live events around the world, provides internet and cloud connectivity to remote locations both on earth and in space, and supports the backbone of cellular networks. By bringing applications and intelligent computing on board satellites through the Azure Orbital Space SDK, we enable a more sophisticated management of satellite communications – resulting in lower costs and higher efficiency for satellite-based communication networks

Telecommunications networks have transitioned to software-defined networks and application–centric approaches to manage their communications infrastructures. The inclusion of satellites in 5G standards is the push for satellite networks to follow the same digital transformation. The Azure Orbital Space SDK will provide a compute fabric with networking capabilities for hosting telecommunication workloads, allowing operators to move applications more easily from ground-based cell sites to satellites in orbit, enabling better resiliency and network utilization.

Ultimately, by combining the Azure Orbital Space SDK with our portfolio of Azure Orbital products, we are bringing the power of cloud networking to the edge in space.

Azure Orbital Space SDK Partnerships

In April, we launched the Azure Space Partner Community and unveiled our initial cohort of space community partners, including Loft Orbital, Ball Aerospace and Thales Alenia Space. Today, we are announcing the newest member of our partner community—Xplore—who will help us continue to shape the future of space technologies and services.

Xplore

Xplore provides unique data including optical, video, and hyperspectral imagery via the XCRAFT, its highly capable, multi-sensor satellite. The XCRAFT's sophisticated sensors produce terabytes of data per day and will utilize powerful compute, storage, and communication solutions to deliver the unique insights derived to customers.

Microsoft and Xplore are partnering to use Azure Orbital Space SDK to gather new insights into how edge computing solutions can better enable both government and commercial customers to achieve their mission objectives. Together, our teams will investigate numerous on-orbit compute use-cases from downlink optimization to multi-sensor data fusion.

Loft Orbital

Loft Orbital is a space infrastructure and services company providing customers rapid, reliable, and simplified access to space. Loft has developed a highly modular satellite platform that enables them to provide a truly plug and play path to orbit for customer payloads and missions.

The Microsoft and Loft Orbital partnership will enable developers to easily develop, test, and deploy software-only “virtual payloads” to the Loft Orbital infrastructure. Together we are developing new technologies and products that will enhance the flexibility of on-orbit operations and provide seamless connectivity to the terrestrial cloud.

Earlier this year Microsoft and Loft conducted a successful test of demonstrating the integration of Loft spacecraft with the Azure Orbital Ground station.  Next year, we’ll build upon this success with the launch of YAM-6, a dedicated free-flying orbital testbed for customers to explore how our joint space infrastructure, connectivity, and on-orbit compute technologies will make access to space even easier than before.

Ball Aerospace

Ball Aerospace is a systems integrator with a heritage of designing and building government satellite programs and mission applications. Ball continues to innovate on behalf of its customers by combining their long expertise in exquisite satellite systems with modern tools and processes, enabling a more agile approach to space mission development and operations.

Together, Ball Aerospace and Microsoft are collaborating on the execution of series of on-orbit testbed satellites showcasing this highly agile future. These missions will leverage the Azure Orbital Space SDK to demonstrate modular and reconfigurable on-orbit processing technologies, necessary to support the complex missions for the United States Government.  The new software and hardware technologies demonstrated in these testbeds will unlock new capabilities for customers, granting the ability to support future concepts for smaller, agile, multi-mission capabilities across all federal space programs.

Thales Alenia Space

Thales Alenia Space is a leader in orbital infrastructures and is developing high-power, edge-computing solutions for space.

Microsoft is partnering with Thales Alenia Space to demonstrate and validate on-orbit compute technologies for multiple remote-sensing applications.   Our team’s future orbital testbed, launching to the International Space Station (ISS) in late 2023, brings together Thale’s edge computing hardware and Microsoft’s Azure Orbital Space SDK platform with visible and hyperspectral sensors, empowering the next generation to explore how space and on-orbit compute can improve our world. Developers on our platform will explore different on-orbit compute use cases, from AI-based hyperspectral image processing and to multi-sensor fusion algorithms, both computationally demanding workloads that benefit from Thales Alenia’s high-performance edge compute architecture.

In collaboration with Microsoft Research (MSR), Microsoft, and Thales Alenia Space, we are reducing the barriers for research in space through a range of outreach initiatives. One such initiative is the new Azure Space Academic Outreach program, that will work with research teams in remote sensing, computer vision, and climate science to demonstrate the potential of next-generation on-orbit compute for Earth observation. The first pilots exploring this program are the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center; however, we hope to open this up to more participants over the coming year.

What we’ve done and what’s coming next

The Azure Orbital Space SDK is a key part of the Azure Space portfolio and joins our investments together to create a value chain that is unique in the industry today—from space to ground to cloud. Over the past two years we’ve moved from a vision of combining the power of the cloud with the possibilities of space, into a reality with the launch of our our Azure Orbital Ground Station, the recently announced Azure Orbital Cloud Access, and today the Azure Orbital Space SDK.  Integral to Microsoft‘s approach across these announcements has been partnership, and we have partnered with space industry leaders to deliver incredible value to our customers, with most recently the partnership with DIU to support their hybrid space architecture and the development of the internet of space.

The Azure Orbital Space SDK will change what is possible onboard spacecraft, but also more importantly change the applications and insights we gather on earth and inform critical decisions and communications across the planet.

Learn more

For space companies interested in applying for preview access to Azure Orbital Space SDK, reach out to the Azure Space Partner Community. 
For universities interested in participating in on-orbit research for climate science, please reach out to the Azure Space Academic Outreach Program.
To learn more about Azure Space view our solution page.

Quelle: Azure

Microsoft named a Leader in 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management

We are excited to share that Gartner® has positioned Microsoft as a Leader in the 2022 Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management. This year’s placement marks the third consecutive year Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader. We believe our placement is a testament to our deep understanding of customer needs, strong customer adoption, positive feedback, and continued investments in building a differentiated platform.

Powering our customers’ digital transformation initiatives

APIs are critical to drive digital transformations in modern organizations. Thousands of the world’s largest enterprises trust Azure API Management to build, secure, and scale their API initiatives. With over a million APIs published on the Azure API Management platform today – it is a battle-hardened, production-ready, and highly scaled platform that stretches from on-premises to multicloud. Our customer use cases span a broad range from modernizing legacy applications to adopting API-first strategies to deliver innovations faster, create new revenue streams, and generate value for their customers and partners. Wegmans, a supermarket chain that re-invented the shopping experience in less than eight weeks, and Vipps, a leading Norwegian mobile payment provider that made mobile payments a norm, are examples of customers that are supercharging their digital transformation journey with the Azure API Management platform.

Delivering new capabilities for Azure API Management

Here are a few highlights of our latest features that are helping drive superior business outcomes for our customers around the world:

Support for new API types: Customers can now publish existing WebSocket and GraphQL backends as APIs in Azure API Management with high-fidelity experience in both Azure and the developer portal.
Support for hybrid and multicloud API management: To allow our customers to harness the power of hybrid or multicloud, we’ve enhanced the self-hosted gateway feature making it easier to efficiently and securely manage APIs hosted on-premises and across clouds from a single API Management service in Azure.
Security enhancements: Security is top of mind for all our customers, and we have added several new features—private links, managed certificates, authorizations to configure, store and swap authorization tokens, and more additions that help fortify their security and compliance posture.
Geographic expansion of existing Azure API Management availability regions: We have added four more regions to Europe and China, making Azure API Management available across 58 Azure regions.

Partnering for success on your digital transformation journey

Microsoft is committed to accelerating the pace of digital transformation for our customers.

Learn how organizations like yours use Azure API Management to accelerate their digital transformation journeys.
Download a complimentary copy of the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management to learn why Microsoft is named a Leader.

 

 

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management, Shameen Pillai, Kimihiko Iijima, Mark O'Neill, John Santoro, Paul Dumas, Akash Jain, 14 November 2022.

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved .

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Quelle: Azure

Expanding AI technology for unstructured biomedical text beyond English

The health industry is embracing the power of big data, cloud computing, and clinical analytics, harnessing data to deliver insights that can improve care and efficiency. Still, unstructured text remains a challenge—made even more complex by barriers of language. Doctors’ notes and other unstructured text are often left unreferenced, are hard to parse and learn from, and are difficult to extract insights from, which leads to missed opportunities for diagnosis and better care.

Microsoft recognizes the need to enable healthcare organizations worldwide to gather insights from this data—for better, faster, and more personalized care, and to improve health equity. With Text Analytics for Health, a part of Azure Cognitive Services, healthcare organizations around the world can now extract meaningful insights from unstructured text in seven languages and process it in a way that enables clinical decision support like never before. Moving beyond English, Text Analytics for Health has now released six additional languages in preview—Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Hebrew—making this groundbreaking technology that helps extract insights from multilingual unstructured clinical notes accessible to more health organizations globally. This marks the first of its kind Natural Language Processing (NLP) service that holistically supports analysis of unstructured biomedical data in multiple languages and was developed with a federated learning approach. Most health technology is limited to the English language, making it inaccessible to millions of people and countries where English is not the primary language. Releasing NLP technology in multiple languages is a huge step forward in bridging the gaps in health equity created by language barriers and ensuring that access and quality of health care is not determined by one’s ability to speak and understand English.

Text Analytics for Health uses powerful NLP to detect and identify medical terms in text, classify them and associate them with standard clinical coding systems, as well as infer semantic relationships and assertions in the data, enabling deeper contextual understanding. This opens a world of possibilities for providers, payors, life sciences, and pharmaceutical companies, allowing them to unify data points from unstructured text with structured data, and enabling them to surface key insights, identify risks, automate form-filling, or match clinical trials to patients for better sourcing of candidates—based on comprehensive data including unstructured clinical text.

Training the NLP model for different languages

One of the challenges for an NLP service comes in moving past English—in aiming to analyze text from different languages. This is what Microsoft’s team aimed to do—the goal was to empower all health organizations, no matter the language their text is in. The unique challenges come from the need to train AI models for multiple languages, as well as adjust to country-specific needs. Syntax is different between languages, especially when it comes to non-Latin languages. Languages have different semantics and boundaries, especially those with rich morphology or compound words. Vocabularies are different, jargon is country-specific, and even coding systems differ by country. Words are often borrowed from other languages, leading to text that contains a mixture of multiple languages. Written text is a mixture of colloquialisms, local medical terms, and shorthand that is country-specific. Training models to understand these differences and then evaluating those models required significant amounts of clinical data and working with subject matter experts in different languages.

Leumit Health Services, one of the four national health funds in Israel, worked closely with Microsoft's R&D team to train the TA4H model for the Hebrew language. Israel has a unique and robust healthcare system where every individual’s records are stored in electronic medical records (EMR) and all citizen residents are required to join one of the four designated HMOs as per law. The health data available is rich, diverse, and provides a great starting point for research and analysis.

Leumit Health Services had over 130 million patient records in their EMR that could be used for training the Text Analytics for Health multilingual model for Hebrew. The challenge was—how to allow Microsoft access to de-identified data for training purposes in a manner that protected the privacy and security of the customer’s health information. The answer was in a Federated Learning approach—meaning data never left Leumit’s trust boundary and Microsoft was never exposed to patient’s health information. Leumit created a separate subscription in Azure with strict access permissions where Microsoft installed its federated learning infrastructure and tools. Leumit then put in de-identified data needed for the research and Microsoft developers triggered the model training in a federated learning setup on that de-identified data—all the while, this data never left their subscription, and the developers were never able to see any identifying details of the data.

Leumit then became one of the first customers to test the Text Analytics for Health model for clinical Hebrew, which is challenging since it often includes Hebrew and English words in the same sentence. The use case was trying to see if the Text Analytics for Health model could analyze free text from medical visits to identify predictors of strokes in patients. Preliminary results are very encouraging and positive—showing the model has ability to parse through both the Hebrew and English clinical statements and analyze them in a way that could help identify various potential indicators of stroke. This could help care providers set up early warning mechanisms and provide more personalized care for a variety of acute conditions.

“Using Microsoft’s Hebrew NLP, we will be able to analyze our 20 years of EMR data and patient-to-doctor messages to develop tools that will save physicians time and will reduce their burnout in a post-Covid-19 world."—Izhar Laufer, Head of Leumit Start.

Figure 1: Analysis of Hebrew unstructured biomedical text using Text Analytics for Health

Figure 2: Analysis of Hebrew unstructured biomedical text using Text Analytics for Health

 

Analyzing unstructured text for Real-World Data

The challenge of unstructured data is even greater in the research world with the use of Real-World Data (RWD). In Brazil, amongst other places, the lack of a standard for interoperability and data collection leads to a lot of unstructured data—field reports, doctors' notes, and even laboratory exam results. This slows down the process of research and analysis for providers such as Grupo Oncoclínicas. Founded in 2010, Grupo Oncoclínicas is the largest oncology treatment provider in the private sector in Brazil, with 129 units in 33 cities—including clinics, genomics and pathology laboratories, and integrated cancer treatment centers.

With the help of Dataside, a Microsoft partner in Brazil, OncoClinicas is using Microsoft’s Text Analytics for Health to extract data from non-structured fields like medical notes, anatomic pathology, and genomic and imaging reports like MRIs. This data is then used for various use cases such as clinical trial feasibility, a better understanding of the scenarios for pharmacoeconomics, and gaining a deeper understanding of group epidemiology and outcomes of interest.

Figure 3: Analysis of Portuguese unstructured biomedical text using Text Analytics for Health

“Text Analytics for Health was a turning point for Grupo Oncoclínicas to scale our processes and to structure our clinical notes, exam reports and field analysis, which previously only depended on manual curation. Having a solution that works in Portuguese is key—most global solutions tend to only cater to English, thereby neglecting other languages. Accuracy in the native Portuguese allowed us to maintain a high level of accuracy while analyzing the unstructured text.”—Marcio Guimaraes Souza, Head of Data and AI at Groupo OncoClinicas.

Analysis and structuring to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®)

The Italian Vita-Salute San Raffaele University and IRCCS San Raffaele Hospital are building the healthcare of the future by leveraging Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence(AI) services. With Text Analytics for Health, the hospitals can classify, standardize, and analyze the enormous amount of clinical data available at the hospital in order to create an innovative digital platform for data management. Using this platform, the hospital’s physicians can gain important clinical insights about their patients and provide more personalized care. One of the use cases that is currently being developed using this data platform is for allowing the selection of patients eligible for immunotherapy for non-small cell lung cancer. Medical staff can leverage the analysis of AI solutions to increase the success rate of therapy by matching the relevant treatment to the most eligible patients.

“Text Analytics for Health has played a key role in analyzing the enormous amount of unstructured clinical data that we have at the hospital. We are also using the FHIR structuring capability, which allows greater interoperability with other hospital systems. Having Text Analytics for Health available in Italian now allows us to expand our capabilities even further to offer our patients the best possible care.”—Professor Carlo Tacchetti, Professor of Human Anatomy, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, and coordinator of the project.

Figure 4: Analysis of Italian unstructured biomedical text using Text Analytics for Health

Do more with your data with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

With Text Analytics for Health, health organizations can transform their patient care, discover new insights and harness the power of machine learning and AI by leveraging unstructured text. Microsoft is committed to delivering technology that enables your data for the future of healthcare innovation with new features in the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

We look forward to being your partner as you build the future of health.
•    Learn more about Text Analytics for Health.
•    Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

®FHIR is a registered trademark of Health Level Seven International, registered in the U.S. Trademark Office, and is used with their permission.
Quelle: Azure

NBA and Microsoft team up to transform fan experiences with cloud application modernization

There’s nothing quite like watching a basketball game and cheering on your favorite team as they battle it out for points before the buzzer sounds. From the players and employees to the technology, all need to work in lockstep to deliver a truly immersive experience.

As fans, we expect personalized experiences that bring the virtual world and the real world together on and off the court. This means brand new viewing experiences and virtual reality, real-time highlights of our favorite basketball games, and seamless ways to connect with other fans (and rivals!) when we want, how we want.

Having the right technology partner and cloud-based app transformation strategy is necessary to help organizations like the National Basketball Association (NBA) continue to deliver such unforgettable experiences and exceed fan expectations. Successful app modernization requires teamwork, which is why we’re proud to share our latest customer story featuring our partnership with the NBA.

Inside the customer playbook: NBA’s IT Application Development Group

Our latest customer story takes you into the world of the NBA’s IT Application Development Group, a dedicated team responsible for developing and maintaining the NBA's applications for internal and external users. The NBA leveraged Microsoft Azure application platform services for app modernization to accelerate the time to market of apps for multiple use cases that have elevated the NBA experience wherever fans, referees, and employees engage.

This process involved consolidating the apps and data the NBA was running from multiple locations into one place, including those that were on-premises. Modernizing a large app estate requires the NBA’s IT Application Development Group to plan for many tasks, from configuration and security to provisioning and scaling, and optimizing the networking and storage needs. Utilizing cloud technologies such as Azure App Service enabled the NBA to accelerate time to market by offloading these routine but important tasks to a fully managed application platform. They further streamlined the app development process with low-code and no-code capabilities using Azure and PowerApps.

How did this translate for fans, referees, and employees? Here’s a sneak peek of the use cases that you can read in detail in our customer story:

Fans: See how the NBA used virtual simulations and digital in-game experiences, to ensure fans felt connected to the game (and one another) when gathering in person was still difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Referees (but really, fans!): Learn about REPS (Referee Engagement and Performance System), an app designed to aid referees and management in evaluation, collaboration, training, and development to ensure game consistency—and no bad calls.

Employees: Discover NBAOne, an internal mobile-first app the NBA created for its 1,800 employees consolidating no fewer than 50+ different applications into a single-sign-on experience. This simple-to-use app helped employees do everything from booking game tickets to marking time off, significantly improving their day-to-day employee experience.

Achieving a faster time to market

When it comes to delivering new experiences, we know that faster time to market is what keeps customers coming back. Azure brings not only the technology but also a number of fully managed services to support faster app and data modernization at scale:

Leverage fully managed application and data services such as Azure App Service, Azure Spring Apps, Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, and Azure Cosmos DB.
Quickly deploy line of business apps with low-code application development using Power Apps and Azure.
Build on containers with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Manage continuous deployment and development workstreams with AzureDevOps.
Get unmatched technical expertise through Microsoft United Support.

As a versatile platform with global scale, built-in security, and high availability, Azure is the all-star in your playbook to accelerate time-to-market with modern apps.

Choose your modern apps transformation strategy

Every customer is a potential fan, and when it comes to choosing the right technology partner, accelerating time to market, enabling higher productivity, and global scale are factors that deliver memorable customer experiences time and time again. We’re thrilled to have the NBA partner with Azure on this important mission and love the opportunity to this customer story.

Is your organization exploring app modernization? Learn more about Application and data modernization and how Azure can help you accelerate time to market to deliver incredible experiences.
Quelle: Azure

AI and the need for purpose-built cloud infrastructure

The progress of AI has been astounding with solutions pushing the envelope by augmenting human understanding, preferences, intent, and even spoken language. AI is improving our knowledge and understanding by helping us provide faster, more insightful solutions that fuel transformation beyond our imagination. However, with this rapid growth and transformation, AI’s demand for compute power has grown by leaps and bounds, outpacing Moore’s Law’s ability to keep up. With AI powering a wide array of important applications that include natural language processing, robot-powered process automation, and machine learning and deep learning, AI silicon manufacturers are finding new, innovative ways to get more out of each piece of silicon such as integration of advanced, mixed-precision capabilities, to enable AI innovators to do more with less. At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and with Azure’s purpose-built AI infrastructure we intend to deliver on that promise.

Azure high-performance computing provides scalable solutions

The need for purpose-built infrastructure for AI is evident—one that can not only scale up to take advantage of multiple accelerators within a single server but also scale out to combine many servers (with multi-accelerators) distributed across a high-performance network. High-performance computing (HPC) technologies have significantly advanced multi-disciplinary science and engineering simulations—including innovations in hardware, software, and the modernization and acceleration of applications by exposing parallelism and advancements in communications to advance AI infrastructure. Scale-up AI computing infrastructure combines memory from individual graphics processing units (GPUs) into a large, shared pool to tackle larger and more complex models. When combined with the incredible vector-processing capabilities of the GPUs, high-speed memory pools have proven to be extremely effective at processing large multidimensional arrays of data to enhance insights and accelerate innovations.

With the added capability of a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect fabric, scale-out AI-first infrastructure can significantly accelerate time to solution via advanced parallel communication methods, interleaving computation and communication across a vast number of compute nodes. Azure scale-up-and scale-out AI-first infrastructure combines the attributes of both vertical and horizontal system scaling to address the most demanding AI workloads. Azure’s AI-first infrastructure delivers leadership-class price, compute, and energy-efficient performance today.

Cloud infrastructure purpose-built for AI

Microsoft Azure, in partnership with NVIDIA, delivers purpose-built AI supercomputers in the cloud to meet the most demanding real-world workloads at scale while meeting price/performance and time-to-solution requirements. And with available advanced machine learning tools, you can accelerate incorporating AI into your workloads to drive smarter simulations and accelerate intelligent decision-making.

Microsoft Azure is the only global public cloud service provider that offers purpose-built AI supercomputers with massively scalable scale-up-and-scale-out IT infrastructure comprised of NVIDIA InfiniBand interconnected NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Optional and available Azure Machine Learning tools facilitate the uptake of Azure’s AI-first infrastructure—from early development stages through enterprise-grade production deployments.

Scale-up-and-scale-out infrastructures powered by NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking rank amongst the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. Microsoft Azure placed in the top 15 of the Top500 supercomputers worldwide and currently, five systems in the top 50 use Azure infrastructure with NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Twelve of the top twenty ranked supercomputers in the Green500 list use NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs.

Source: Top 500 The List: Top500 November 2022, Green500 November 2022.

With a total solution approach that combines the latest GPU architectures, designed for the most compute-intensive AI training and inference workloads, and optimized software to leverage the power of the GPUs, Azure is paving the way to beyond exascale AI supercomputing. And this supercomputer-class AI infrastructure is made broadly accessible to researchers and developers in organizations of any size around the world in support of Microsoft’s stated mission. Organizations that need to augment their existing on-premises HPC or AI infrastructure can take advantage of Azure’s dynamically scalable cloud infrastructure.

In fact, Microsoft Azure works closely with customers across industry segments. Their increasing need for AI technology, research, and applications is fulfilled, augmented, and/or accelerated with Azure’s AI-first infrastructure. Some of these collaborations and applications are explained below:

Retail and AI

AI-first cloud infrastructure and toolchain from Microsoft Azure featuring NVIDIA are having a significant impact in retail. With a GPU-accelerated computing platform, customers can churn through models quickly and determine the best-performing model. Benefits include:

Deliver 50x performance improvements for classical data analytics and machine learning (ML) processes at scale with AI-first cloud infrastructure.
Leveraging RAPIDS with NVIDIA GPUs, retailers can accelerate the training of their machine learning algorithms up to 20x. This means they can use larger data sets and process them faster with more accuracy, allowing them to react in real-time to shopping trends and realize inventory cost savings at scale.
Reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for large data science operations.
Increase ROI for forecasting, resulting in cost savings from reduced out-of-stock and poorly placed inventory.

With autonomous checkout, retailers can provide customers with frictionless and faster shopping experiences while increasing revenue and margins. Benefits include:

Deliver better and faster customer checkout experience and reduce queue wait time.
Increase revenue and margins.
Reduce shrinkage—the loss of inventory due to theft such as shoplifting or ticket switching at self-checkout lanes, which costs retailers $62 billion annually, according to the National Retail Federation.

In both cases, these data-driven solutions require sophisticated deep learning models—models that are much more sophisticated than those offered by machine learning alone. In turn, this level of sophistication requires AI-first infrastructure and an optimized AI toolchain.

Customer story (video): Everseen and NVIDIA create a seamless shopping experience that benefits the bottom line.

Manufacturing

In manufacturing, compared to routine-based or time-based preventative maintenance, proactive predictive maintenance can get ahead of the problem before it happens and save businesses from costly downtime. Benefits of Azure and NVIDIA cloud infrastructure purpose-built for AI include:

GPU-accelerated compute enables AI at an industrial scale, taking advantage of unprecedented amounts of sensor and operational data to optimize operations, improve time-to-insight, and reduce costs.
Process more data faster with higher accuracy, allowing faster reaction time to potential equipment failures before they even happen.
Achieve a 50 percent reduction in false positives and a 300 percent reduction in false negatives.

Traditional computer vision methods that are typically used in automated optical inspection (AOI) machines in production environments require intensive human and capital investment. Benefits of GPU-accelerated infrastructure include:

Consistent performance with guaranteed quality of service, whether on-premises or in the cloud.
GPU-accelerated compute enables AI at an industrial scale, taking advantage of unprecedented amounts of sensor and operational data to optimize operations, improve quality, time to insight, and reduce costs.
Leveraging RAPIDS with NVIDIA GPUs, manufacturers can accelerate the training of their machine-learning algorithms up to 20x.

Each of these examples require an AI-first infrastructure and toolchain to significantly reduce false positives and negatives in predictive maintenance and to account for subtle nuances in ensuring overall product quality.

Customer story (video): Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA gives BMW the computing power for automated quality control.

As we have seen, AI is everywhere, and its application is growing rapidly. The reason is simple. AI enables organizations of any size to gain greater insights and apply those insights to accelerating innovations and business results. Optimized AI-first infrastructure is critical in the development and deployment of AI applications.

Azure is the only cloud service provider that has a purpose-built, AI-optimized infrastructure comprised of Mellanox InfiniBand interconnected NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs for AI applications of any scale for organizations of any size. At Azure, we have a purpose-built AI-first infrastructure that empowers every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Come and do more with Azure!

Learn more about purpose-built infrastructure for AI

Watch the Understanding AI and AI Infrastructure webcast.
Read the An AI-First Infrastructure and Toolchain for Any Scale whitepaper.
Read the Accelerating AI and HPC in the Cloud whitepaper.
Learn more about Azure HPC + AI.
Keep up to date on the Azure + NVIDIA partnership and offerings. 

Quelle: Azure

Announcing new capabilities for Azure Firewall

We are happy to share several key Azure Firewall capabilities that are now generally available as well as updates on recent important releases into general availability (GA) and preview.

New GA regions in Qatar central, China East, and China North
IDPS Private IP ranges now generally available.
Single Click Upgrade/Downgrade now in preview.
Enhanced Threat Intelligence now in preview.
KeyVault with zero internet exposure now in preview.

Azure Firewall is a cloud-native firewall as a service offering that enables customers to centrally govern and log all their traffic flows using a DevOps approach. The service supports both application and network-level filtering rules and is integrated with the Microsoft Threat Intelligence feed to filter known malicious IP addresses and domains. Azure Firewall is highly available with built-in auto-scaling.

New GA regions in Qatar central, China East, and China North

We are happy to announce that Azure Firewall Standard, Azure Firewall Premium, and Azure Firewall Manager are now generally available in three new regions: Qatar Central, China East, and China North.

With these three new regions, Azure Firewall is now available in 38 regions worldwide!

IDPS Private IP ranges now GA

A network intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS) allow you to monitor network activities for malicious activity, log information about this activity, report it, and optionally attempt to block it.

In Azure Firewall Premium IDPS, Private IP address ranges are used to identify traffic direction (inbound, outbound, or internal) to allow accurate matches with IDPS signatures. By default, only ranges defined by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) RFC 1918 are considered private IP addresses. To modify your private IP addresses, you can now easily edit, remove, or add ranges as needed.

Single Click Upgrade/Downgrade (preview)

With this new capability, customers can easily upgrade their existing Firewall Standard SKU to Premium SKU as well as downgrade from Premium to Standard SKU. The process is fully automated and has zero service downtime.
In the upgrade process, users can select the policy to be attached to the upgraded Premium SKU. Either by using an existing Premium Policy or by utilizing their existing Standard Policy. Customers can utilize their existing Standard policy and let the system automatically duplicate, upgrade to Premium Policy, and attach it to the newly created Premium Firewall.

This new capability is available through the Azure portal as seen in the screenshot below, as well as via PowerShell and Terraform.

Enhanced Threat Intelligence (preview)

Threat Intelligence is information an organization uses to understand the threats that have, will, or are currently targeting the organization. This info is used to prepare, prevent, and identify cyber threats looking to take advantage of valuable resources. Azure Firewall Threat intelligence information is sourced from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence feed, which includes multiple sources including the Microsoft Cyber Security team.

Threat Intelligence-based filtering can be enabled for your firewall to alert and deny traffic from/to known malicious IP addresses and FQDNs. With the new enhancement, Azure Firewall Threat Intelligence has more granularity for filtering based on malicious URLs. This means that customers may have access to a certain domain through a specific URL in this domain will be denied by Azure Firewall if identified as malicious.

For optimal granularity, customers can utilize Threat Intelligence allow list to bypass threat intelligence validation on trusted FQDNs, IP addresses, ranges, and subnets.

In HTTPS, the URL is encrypted, thus customers can utilize Azure Firewall Premium TLS inspection to allow URL-based Threat Intelligence also for their encrypted traffic.

With Azure Firewall IDPS, Threat Intelligence, and TLS inspection, customers can improve their security posture to become better protected against future threats.

KeyVault with zero internet exposure (preview)

In Azure Firewall Premium TLS inspection, customers are required to deploy their intermediate CA certificate in Azure KeyVault. Now that Azure firewall is listed as a trusted Azure KeyVault service, customers can eliminate any internet exposure of their Azure KeyVault.

At Microsoft, we are constantly evolving Azure Firewall to meet our customers’ needs and help them strengthen their security and gain efficiencies. Last month, we announced the preview of Policy Analytics for Azure Firewall, which helps improve your security posture by providing critical insights and recommendations for optimizing firewall rules. We also recently announced the preview of Azure Firewall Basic, a new SKU of Azure Firewall designed to meet the needs of SMBs by providing enterprise-grade protection of their cloud environment at an affordable price point. We plan to share further enhancements to Azure Firewall very soon, including new troubleshooting capabilities. Please stay tuned!

Learn more

Get started with Azure Firewall.
Azure Firewall Documentation.
Azure Firewall Preview Features.
Azure Firewall Premium.
Azure network security resources.

Quelle: Azure

Empowering ISVs to build and sell with the Microsoft Cloud

Today, we are hosting our first-ever Marketplace Summit and giving every ISV and software as a service (SaaS) provider a virtual front-row seat to learn how to maximize marketplace opportunity and do more with less.

While we enter uncertain economic times, cloud budgets remain durable and SaaS retains its growth trajectory as customers look to prioritize investments. Gartner estimates $177 billion in SaaS spend by the end of the year and these numbers continue to grow. To help ISVs capitalize on this SaaS opportunity, we are excited to announce that the ISV Success program is now globally available and in public preview. This simplified path supports ISVs as they build across the Microsoft Cloud, including Azure, Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and our end-to-end security suite.

The value of Microsoft partnership

Built within the foundation of the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program, the ISV Success program is the simplified path forward for all ISVs. As SaaS providers look to innovate, there is tremendous value in partnership. According to IDC, Microsoft partners that build software earn $10.11 for every $1 dollar of Microsoft revenue. ISVs can start to realize profitability by not only building their solution with the Microsoft Cloud but by selling through the commercial marketplace. By embracing the marketplace as a central go-to-market strategy, ISVs can reach Microsoft customers, simplify sales, and unlock growth by attaching to a low-touch or no-touch sales channel that’s available 24/7.

Palo Alto Networks, an early adopter to the marketplace, sells its security offerings through the commercial marketplace and experienced transaction growth of more than 300 percent last year in marketplace sales—creating a persistent, always-on revenue stream.

"Leveraging the Microsoft commercial marketplace makes it easier and faster for customers to procure cybersecurity solutions from Palo Alto Networks—unlocking growth at an unprecedented rate," notes Prem Iyer, Vice President of Ecosystem Partners at Palo Alto Networks. "As customers continue to move to public cloud, we’re now able to hit every market segment from SMB to large enterprise, all through the marketplace."

Support for every ISV, at every stage

The ISV Success program is dedicated to offering support across the application growth cycle—from building on Microsoft Cloud, publishing to marketplace, and growing through go-to-market channels.

Public preview marks the consolidation of Marketplace Rewards into the ISV Success program. This creates one single, easy-to-use benefits offering that’s housed within the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program to support ISVs and SaaS providers across the application lifecycle. With Marketplace Rewards, ISVs get listing optimization, best-in-class marketing support, and additional cloud credits based on sales—the more you sell, the more you earn.

ISVs that use Marketplace Rewards see a five-times increase in sales compared to those that don’t

Additionally, we are excited to expand the offerings within the ISV Success program. For solutions with a high volume of projected Azure consumption, participants can qualify for additional cloud credits and up to 50 hours of one-to-one consultations. Holistically, the ISV Success program has a retail value of $126,000 USD for the core offering and $146,000 USD for the expanded. The expanded offering will be entering private preview soon.

Early successes

In preview, we welcomed nearly 2,000 ISVs into the ISV Success program. I recently sat down with a few participants to hear about how they are innovating with Microsoft Cloud and are getting to market quicker by listing on the marketplace.

Akouo: By tapping into the resources of the ISV Success program, Akouo’s team of 12 has moved the application from development in October of 2021 to a transaction-ready solution that will soon be listed on the commercial marketplace. With the ISV Success program, they are receiving high-touch support as it builds its solution across the entire Microsoft Cloud and they are fully committed to marketplace as its go-to commerce platform.

“From day one of deciding to be 100 percent Microsoft, we have been reassured every step along the way that we made the right choice. The ongoing accessibility and support from the ISV Success program has been a game changer for us.”—James Anderson, Chief Executive Office, Akouo Technologies

Aviatrix: Aviatrix participated in the ISV Success program and significantly accelerated and expanded the adoption of their Aviatrix Intelligence Cloud Networking solution. The ISV Success program accelerated their time to market—their listing went live in May of 2022, and by July, revenue is flowing in that requires no sales engagement. Simply having their solution available on marketplace has opened an automated and new revenue channel.

“The adoption of Aviatrix Intelligent Cloud Networking has been accelerated with the ISV Success program. With the program’s support, enterprise customers can deploy business-critical applications in the cloud through training resources and powerful tools. By going to market through the commercial marketplace, we have been able to gain access to millions of Microsoft customers across the globe and land sales directly through Azure Marketplace.”—Shahzad Ali, VP Solutions Architecture, Aviatrix

Maidenhead Bridge: Based in England, Maidenhead Bridge is a small, six-year-old company with a suite of Cloud Security Connector solutions that allow customers to connect to cloud security gateways without hassle. With the ISV Success program, they’ve tapped benefits for help with onboarding to Azure Marketplace and now boast 250 new customers worldwide, including government bodies and large enterprise pharma and finance.

“Microsoft is the only cloud provider that understands ISVs. They know in advance our challenges and struggles to create, publish, promote, and scale our products in Azure Marketplace. With the ISV Success program, Microsoft provides us with invaluable support and training.”—Adrian Larsen, Chief Executive Officer, Maidenhead Bridge

In summary, if your company can benefit from expert guidance to innovate across the Microsoft Cloud and accelerate time to market through the commercial marketplace, we encourage you to join the ISV Success program. To learn more about maximizing the marketplace opportunity, all the Marketplace Summit content will be available on demand. Topics include how to create a cloud-first go-to-market strategy, a deep dive into the marketplace roadmap, tips to land enterprise deals to unlock the Fortune 500, and more.

Learn more

Official Microsoft Blog
ISV Hub
Join ISV Success program
Get marketplace technical guidance

Quelle: Azure

How IoT, AI, and Digital Twins are helping achieve sustainability goals

Organizations striving to improve their sustainability can make progress toward those goals by using the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI technology that monitors and analyzes their use of resources and resulting emissions. However, businesses adopting IoT for other reasons often improve their sustainability as a side benefit as well.

Nearly three-fourths of IoT adopters with near-term sustainability goals view IoT solutions as “very important” for reaching those goals. The combination of sensor devices, edge and cloud computing, and AI and machine learning can provide data and analytical insights into how resources are being used, where leaks or faults are occurring and affecting consumption, and where efficiency can be improved. Additionally, Digital Twins technology can create digital models of real-world equipment, buildings, or even smart cities for more detailed insights into how they can be run more sustainably.

Our recently published e-book, “Improving sustainability and smarter resource use with IoT technology” goes further in-depth on the following insights and case studies about IoT and AI solutions and sustainability.

How digital technology can aid sustainability efforts

With greater awareness of climate change and increasing regulation around activities related to emissions and resource usage, sustainability efforts are becoming an urgent priority at many organizations. Microsoft has established transparent goals and tracking of its progress toward carbon-neutral operations and offers a software solution to help others record and report their environmental impact.

We're also using Microsoft Azure IoT platform tools, to help power solutions in the following sustainability categories:

Efficient energy production and distribution: Digital tools are being applied to help electricity production plants—a significant source of air emissions—operate as efficiently and cleanly as possible. Utilities are using IoT solutions to monitor and manage electricity transmission and distribution grids to achieve maximum efficiency, route additional power as demand fluctuates, and detect outages faster. They’re also helping to remotely control renewable energy facilities such as wind farms. Our customer smartPulse offers a solution designed to manage electricity distribution and trading to give utilities the ability to manage imbalances in a financially favorable way.
Creating smarter, carbon-neutral buildings: The construction and operation of buildings create 38 percent of total energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide around the world, creating an enormous opportunity for smart building solutions to make a notable impact on the carbon footprint of buildings. IoT technology, Digital Twins modeling, and AI have proven especially useful in managing buildings by automating lighting and climate-control systems, as well as modeling the environmental effects of any design or operational changes. Vasakronan, a global leader in sustainability, has adopted IoT and Azure Digital Twins solutions for its commercial and office properties across Sweden, leading to notable energy cost savings.
Improving public infrastructure: Updating infrastructure with IoT technology can make it more sustainable and create other livability improvements, such as increasing safety and reducing excess light pollution. The city of Valencia in Spain saw this when city officials launched a public lighting upgrade. The project included replacing lighting in a national park, where too much light can disrupt wildlife and plants. Light solution provider Schréder and Codit, a cloud integration solutions provider, teamed to upgrade more than 100,000 lighting fixtures and tie in Azure IoT technologies. The city reduced its electricity consumption, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent and saving millions of euros annually.
Agriculture and food production: Data-gathering and analytical technology informs decisions that lead to better environmental practices involving planting, watering, and pesticide use. Computer Vision can detect when weeds or pests are threatening a growing area. Related technology is contributing to the development of more automation at a time when farm labor shortages are becoming more common. The N.C. State Plant Sciences Initiative, for example, is using faster and more efficient data management to tackle agriculture’s biggest challenges, with the aim of creating better predictive food analytics, increasing food safety, and making more productive crops.

Improving business performance at the same time

Beyond the benefits of reducing consumption of natural resources and reining in emissions, sustainability efforts can generate business value. Forty percent of survey respondents in a recent survey said they expect their company’s sustainability programs to generate modest or significant value in the next five years. That value primarily comes from saving energy costs, cutting back on needed materials, and improving operational efficiency.

Get started with sustainable IoT solutions

By combining sustainability goals with innovative solutions, businesses and people can limit their everyday impact on the planet’s resources. Azure IoT can help transform businesses to be more efficient, manage renewable energy production, reduce waste, or accelerate the development and launch of sustainably oriented apps. A range of end-to-end solutions from our ecosystem of partners addresses sustainability in a variety of ways as well.

Learn more from our e-book, “Improving sustainability and smarter resource use with IoT technology,” or discover how Azure IoT can help your organization adopt IoT, AI, and related technologies.

Learn more

Find out more about Microsoft Sustainability in action.
Read the IoT Signals Report.

Quelle: Azure