Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Microsoft named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide

We are excited that for the fifth consecutive time Gartner has positioned Microsoft as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide. We believe this placement is a testament to our continued investments in customers' integration needs.

An integration solution for all developers

Enterprise business depends on all kinds of applications—packaged, software as a service (SaaS), and custom-built. Business value is realized when these applications integrate with each other. Microsoft’s enterprise integration offering, Azure Integration Services, brings these varied applications together—empowering organizations to create differentiated customer and partner experiences. What’s more, this integration extends beyond the traditional organization boundaries—encompassing applications from suppliers, customers, and business partners.

Every enterprise integration use case is different. Azure Integration Services provides a comprehensive set of services that can be used standalone or in combination to build an integration solution that meets our customers' unique needs.

Both professional and citizen developers can leverage the power and flexibility of Azure Integration Services to create business value. With support for Azure Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extensions, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, App Insights, and Azure Monitor, we bring an intuitive user experience to professional developers on the platform of their choice. When used in conjunction with Microsoft Power Platform, citizen developers can also build a breadth of integration solutions for low-code application development.

As a part of the larger Azure platform, we provide seamless integration and access to all the additional Azure services. The flexibility to only pay for what you need makes Azure Integration Services a cost-effective and agile solution. Customers can get started without any license commitment or upfront purchasing and scale seamlessly with their integration needs and usage.

Powering our customers’ digital transformation initiatives

Enterprise integration is the cornerstone of digital transformation initiatives. Azure Integration Services is on a mission to bring your technology investments together, be it on-premises or in the cloud. It enables businesses to embrace new applications while still maintaining connectivity with their legacy systems via hybrid app integration and full lifecycle API management.

Cargolux, Europe’s biggest all-cargo airline, accelerated its digital transformation using Azure Integration Services. Our integration solution has enabled Cargolux to build a digital ecosystem and generate value for both their internal teams and their customers. Cargolux now exposes services supporting flight operations, airplane maintenance, and cargo management programmatically using Azure API Management offering secure customer access for fast, automated transactions.

“Through Azure API Management, we can provide direct API connection to our environment for customer systems so that they can do direct bookings on the spot. It’s opened up a new world in helping customers get their cargo onto our planes.”—Alfons Seesink, Chief Technology Officer, Cargolux

Modernize workflows with low or no code

Many enterprises customers like Manulife and DHL have chosen Azure Logic Apps to boost their developer productivity by automating their business-critical workflows. This was all made possible by over 600 out-of-the-box Azure Logic Apps connectors to Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, SAP, Twitter, and more that help seamlessly connect data, events, and resources across applications and systems—without writing any code. Additionally, the solution also provides the extensibility to write custom connectors.

“With Logic Apps, everything communicates without errors. It took me just a few hours to get the first proof of concept out. Now we use it to automate so many of our business processes.” —Rohit Mistry, Infrastructure Analyst, Manulife

“With the integration capabilities we’ve gained through Azure, employees can now simplify or eliminate the most tedious parts of their jobs and contribute in more valuable ways.” —Fekko Roelofs, Program Manager Robotics Hub & Resource Orchestration at DHL Supply Chain, DHL

Coca-Cola used custom-built Azure Logic Apps connectors to automate their bottling operations, internal and external order processing, and connecting data across systems, accelerating its time-to-market.

“We also value the extensibility of the platform, enabling us to build and integrate custom connectors.” —Jared Simmons, Systems Analyst, Coca-Cola

Succeeding together

The exponential rise in the data, applications, and systems in use at enterprises can make enterprise integration a daunting undertaking. Azure Integration Services is here to help. Our battle-hardened solution coupled with our enterprise-wide expertise makes us a unique partner on your digital transformation journey. Learn how organizations like yours use Azure Integration Services to accelerate their digital transformation journeys.

Download a complimentary copy of the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide to learn why Microsoft is named a Leader.

 

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide, Keith Guttridge, Andrew Comes, Saikat Ray, 24 January 2023 . The report was earlier named as Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service.

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

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Gartner Reprint.

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

Azure Native New Relic Service: Full stack observability in minutes

Digital transformation across organizations has led to workloads shifting to multicloud and hybrid-cloud environments. Modern organizations are increasingly adopting cloud-native technologies including containers, microservices, serverless, and more.

With the growing complexity of distributed applications deployed on a cloud-native landscape, can organizations survive without the right observability in place?

It would be like flying an airplane blindfolded.

Businesses are in acute need of observability capabilities like Application Performance Management (APM), infrastructure monitoring, logs management, error tracing, and more to monitor, optimize, and troubleshoot their applications and infrastructure.

At the same time, organizations continue to prefer using software and services which they are familiar with and trust. To meet customers where they are, Microsoft partners closely with market-leading software as a service (SaaS) offerings and enables their use as part of the overall customer solution on our globally trusted cloud platform—Microsoft Azure.

Partnering with New Relic

New Relic, a leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for 10 consecutive years in Application Performance Management and Observability, is one such partner on Azure.

"Observability is essential in today's modern, multicloud world. Whether our customers are running applications on data centers, embracing the public cloud, or running things at the edge, they need observability to take a look across all those systems. Today's news brings together more than a decade of innovation between New Relic and Microsoft, to bring the power of full stack observability to Microsoft developers, so they can accelerate enterprise cloud migration and multi-cloud initiatives.” —Bill Staples, New Relic CEO

Modern cloud-native environments warrant that organizations adopt a data-driven approach for their incident and threat response. When failures occur, identification, understanding, and resolution of the root cause of the issue is extremely time-critical for development teams.

Currently, to leverage New Relic for observability, you go through a complex multistep process to set up credentials, event hubs, and custom code, thus impacting your productivity and efficiency. To alleviate this challenge, we partnered with New Relic to create a seamlessly integrated solution on Azure that’s now available on the Azure marketplace.

Azure Native New Relic Service makes it effortless for developers and IT administrators to monitor their cloud applications. With this new offering, you can:

Create a New Relic account in the cloud with just a few clicks. Azure Native New Relic Service is a fully managed offering that enables easy onboarding and removes the need to set up and operate monitoring for your infrastructure.
Seamlessly ship logs and metrics to New Relic. Integrated right within the create experience, and also a part of the configuration, you can set up auto discovery of resources within an Azure subscription to monitor logs and metrics. You no longer need to go through the tedious process of setting up event hubs and writing custom code.
Bulk install New Relic Agent on virtual machines (VMs) and App Services through a single click. This then ships logs and metrics from your host infrastructure and processes to New Relic.
Get unified billing for all the resources you consume on Azure including New Relic, from the Azure marketplace.

"Application performance monitoring and full stack observability are mission critical for cloud transformation of enterprises of all sizes. With the Azure Native New Relic Service, Microsoft and New Relic have together, enabled a thoughtfully integrated, seamless, first-class experience for these enterprises everywhere. In just a few clicks, developers and admins can now effortlessly set up and monitor their cloud applications leveraging the power of New Relic on Azure.” —Balan Subramanian, Partner Director of Product Management, Azure Developer Experiences

Get started with Azure Native New Relic Service:

Let’s now look at how you can set up and configure Azure Native New Relic Service.

Subscribe to the Azure Native New Relic Service: You can easily find and subscribe to the offering in the Azure marketplace:

Create a New Relic resource on Azure: Once the New Relic offer is subscribed, you can easily create a New Relic resource in a few simple steps from the Azure portal. Using this, you can configure and manage your New Relic accounts within the Azure portal.

Configure Metrics and Logs Monitoring: Configure which Azure resources send metrics and logs to New Relic using simple include/exclude resource tag rules.

Install New Relic Agent on VMs: Once the New Relic resource is created, you can manage bulk install and uninstall of New Relic agent on multiple Linux or Windows VMs with a single click.

Install New Relic Agent on App Services: Similarly, you can install New Relic agent on multiple Windows App Services in one go.

Besides creating a New Relic resource, you can also link with existing New Relic accounts for monitoring resources across multiple Azure subscriptions. Not only that, you can also set up multiple resources under a single organization to unify billing and user management. To learn more, refer to the Azure Native New Relic Service documentation.

Learn more about Azure Native New Relic Service

Subscribe to the preview of Azure Native New Relic Service available in the Azure Marketplace.
Learn more about the New Relic integration with Azure.

Quelle: Azure

Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service provides seamless, secure data storage

The amount of data created and consumed is expected to grow exponentially over the next decade. This proliferation has radically changed enterprise data storage requirements. Today, enterprises are in search of storage solutions with unlimited capacity and performance scaling capabilities alongside their core requirements of data security and availability.

Azure cloud services have been the backbone for enterprises in their digital transformation journey. With Azure cloud services, enterprises can reduce storage costs and have access to high-availability storage products with disaster recovery capabilities. We are happy to announce that the storage suite of Azure products has grown with the addition of Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service. You can subscribe to this service via the Azure marketplace.

Qumulo is the industry leader in Distributed File System and Object Storage. Qumulo provides a highly scalable, highly performant, and simple-to-use cloud-native filesystem that supports a wide variety of data workloads via standard protocols (NFS, SMB, FTP, and S3). Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service provides seamless integration between Qumulo and Azure and enables Qumulo’s distributed file system as a native service on Azure.

“Our commitment to delivering simplicity at scale starts with the initial deployment and onboarding experience of our customers. The availability of the Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service directly from the Azure portal creates a more streamlined procurement process for customers looking to store and manage unstructured data in the cloud at massive scale." —Kiran Bhageshpur, CTO of Qumulo

Native integration means that customers can deploy Qumulo in less than 15 minutes. Customers no longer need to set up virtual network peering to connect to Qumulo. In fact, with this integration, virtual network peering charges have been eliminated, as Qumulo is connected via private access to the customer’s chosen virtual network. The data is stored and processed by the service in the same region as the virtual network and customers can easily leverage their own network policies with Qumulo’s enterprise-scale filesystem.

Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service provides the following key capabilities:

Seamless onboarding—Easily onboard and use Qumulo as a natively integrated service on Azure.
Unified billing—Get a single bill for all resources you consume on Azure, including the Qumulo service.
Private access to virtual network—The service is directly connected to your virtual network and provides access to a fully managed Qumulo Scalable File service from the virtual network of your choice.

“Azure Native ISV Services enables enterprises to provision and use select ISV solutions on Azure with a seamless, first-class experience. With the public preview launch of Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service, we expand Azure’s storage offerings with Qumulo’s exabyte-scale data service. With this integration, enterprises can easily create and manage a multi-petabyte-scale file system in a single namespace on Azure. We are really excited about partnering with Qumulo and integrating their data services into Azure" —Balan Subramanian, Partner Director of Product Management, Azure Developer Experiences

Get started with Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service:

1. Prerequisite—Create a delegated subnet in a virtual network of your choosing and add network security group details as per your enterprise policy.

 

2. Subscribe to Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service on the Azure Marketplace.

3. Seamlessly create a Qumulo resource by entering the required details about the file in the Basics tab.

4. In the Networking tab, provide the details of the virtual network and the previously created delegated subnet. Click on Review + create to create the filesystem.

Learn more

Marketplace offer: Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service.
Azure Native Qumulo Scalable File Service overview.
Sign up for Azure today.

Quelle: Azure

What's new in Azure Data & AI: Empowering retailers to streamline operations and accelerate time to value

The new year brings opportunity for thoughtful reflection about the past year, both personally and professionally. 2022 was a year of firsts for me—first time having clam chowder at Pike Place Market as a local, first time going shopping for heels with my daughter, and first time delivering an Azure keynote at Inspire as a Microsoft employee when pre-COVID-19, I was a Partner listening in the audience. And here is another first; the start of a new blog series where I plan to share more about noteworthy and inspiring data and AI innovations we are releasing across Microsoft. Given the National Retail Federation’s Big Show this week, I’ll also highlight how these innovations impact retail.

Let’s explore what’s new for Azure Data & AI this month:

Microsoft underscores resilient retail at NRF

A bellwether for economic and societal trends, the retail industry continues to be on the front line of adaptive innovation. And rather than trying to predict the future, retailers are working to achieve greater business agility necessary to thrive in it. This means that, like Majid Al Futtaim Retail, they automate tedious processes so employees can focus on higher-value tasks. Like Grupo Bimbo, they unify disparate data points in real time so that employees can access a central source of truth when and where they need it. And, like CCC Group, they stay laser-focused on delivering differentiated customer experiences to build loyal fans. Across each of these organizations, data is seen as an accelerant for growth, powering more personalized customer experiences, cost-efficient supply chains, and proactive responses to market trends.

Business agility requires people, processes, and technologies to work in harmony, and to align on how massive amounts of data are managed, analyzed, and actioned to respond to market demands. Increasingly, these efforts focus on driving sustainable growth that limits carbon emissions, for example by using machine learning to more accurately forecast demand to reduce excess inventory and waste.

We know cloud technologies like databases, containers, and AI can enable more accurate decisions, but it can be challenging to ensure these technologies speak to each other in the right way at the right time on a global scale. This is where Azure and the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform—the description we use to refer to all of the Data & AI Azure products and services we offer shine. With managed databases like Cosmos DB, analytics services like Azure Synapse, and leading AI offerings, retailers can take advantage of the “by design” integration the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform offers, which means they are able to invest more time in creating value rather than integrating and managing their data estate.

The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform came to life through new immersive demo experiences this year at NRF and I’m going to briefly highlight what we showcased at the conference. Earlier this week at NRF, Microsoft’s Alysa Taylor and Shelley Bransten spoke on the topic of Resilient Retail and shared examples of organizations digitizing their businesses to do more with less. You can read more about their talks on our Industry blog.

Microsoft also met with customers at our NRF booth to discuss strategies for making sense of all their data. For example, these two demos highlight how tight integrations between data, analytics, and AI can help make resilient retail a reality.

Wide World Importers (WWI), a global supermarket chain, wants to maximize the value of their data estate. By using Azure Synapse pipelines with Cosmos DB, they get real time insights which are automatically shared with the right decision makers through tools like Azure Data Explorer and Power BI. They’re able to track their supply chain data in real time and use predictive AI to reduce costs. They’re also able to govern their data estate from a single application one pane of glass using Microsoft Purview.

Next, Wide World Importers taps into the power of Azure AI to build a more connected customer experience. They use Azure Form Recognizer to detect and redeem promotional offers. Azure Cognitive Search helps customers find product information more quickly by recognizing their search intent and helps WWI deliver more personalized recommendations. Pre-built AI capabilities, such as speech recognition and computer vision, also differentiate the shopping experience and provide a more accessible flow.

The general availability of Azure OpenAI Service 

As Eric Boyd mentioned in his blog, we announced the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service as part of our ongoing partnership with OpenAI. Azure OpenAI Service provides a commercialization platform for businesses to leverage advanced AI models like GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL*E to create innovative applications. Customers of all sizes across industries are using Azure OpenAI Service to do more with less, improve experiences for end users, and streamline operational efficiencies. 

Microsoft Responsible AI Dashboard now available

The digitization of retail enables retailers to meet customer expectations with increasing precision, from providing personalized recommendations online to restocking inventory based on computer vision in physical stores. Shoppers expect the technology behind their retail experience to apply data and AI responsibly. In December, we began rolling out our new Responsible AI dashboard in Azure Machine Learning, which includes capabilities like fairness assessment, interpretability, error analysis, and causal inferencing. And today, we are excited to announce the general availability of the Microsoft Responsible AI dashboard. Retailers can leverage the Responsible AI dashboard to optimize the shopper’s experience as well as build trust and positive perception for their brands.

See how you can learn more about Responsible AI.

Full text search capabilities come to Azure Cosmos DB for Apache Cassandra

Azure Cosmos DB has seen tremendous momentum within the retail industry, given its ability to automatically and instantly scale when traffic is unpredictable without sacrificing performance or cost efficiency. Microsoft runs both the Windows store and Xbox Live on Azure Cosmos DB for this very purpose. This month, we’re announcing several performance enhancements to Azure Cosmos DB to make it easier and faster for developers to query data stores in Azure Cosmos DB. These include the ability to do full text searches in Azure Cosmos DB for Apache Cassandra through a native integration with Azure Cognitive Search, and support for GraphQL and REST through Data API builder.

For more technical detail about these and other updates to Azure Cosmos DB, visit our developer blog.

JSON support for Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise generally available

Support for JSON documents in Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise tiers, delivered via the RedisJSON module, has been made generally available as of November 2022. This turns Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise into a high-performance NoSQL document store and drives efficiency for developers to modernize their applications. The new RedisJSON module update is well suited to retail customers looking to store, search, and index product catalogs and shopper data via a single atomic operation.

To learn more on Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise and the RedisJSON module please check out the blog.

Microsoft named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines

In December, Microsoft was named a leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines, which evaluates the capabilities of various vendors in the market for providing enterprise-scale search for app development. Organizations benefit, no matter the industry, but Cognitive Search is an exceptionally powerful tool for retailers, helping them to quickly find and analyze data related to customer behavior, sales, and inventory. It can also be used to personalize the shopping experience for individual customers based on their past interactions and preferences.

Learn more and download the report.

Customers innovating with Azure Data & AI

I’d like to close my inaugural “what’s new” blog post with my favorite way of making everything I’ve covered above actionable—by sharing examples of our customers succeeding. I share them as a way of helping spark the understanding—maybe even a little imagination—so that others can better envision how this amazing new Data & AI technology can be used in their own organizations.

I hope you enjoyed reading this month’s edition of what’s new in Azure Data & AI. We look forward to sharing more insights and inspiration in the months ahead. If you have a question or idea you’d like to hear perspective on, please share in the comments section.

Grupo Bimbo transforms the data analysis of commercial areas with Microsoft Solutions

Mexico—The global baking company carries out hundreds of thousands of transactions globally and needed a way for collaborators to quickly access and act on insights to improve sales. By adopting Power BI and Azure Synapse, Grupo Bimbo was able to unify internal and external data, increase business agility, and democratize insights for increased productivity across the organization. Read the full Case Study.

How online marketplace CDON used AI to become a market leader

Sweden—CDON began as a small online retailer of CDs, DVDs, and games and quickly became the Nordic’s largest online marketplace. When CDON realized legacy technologies were holding it back, the company looked to Azure to accelerate its innovation and scale. Now their developers use Azure Cognitive Search, Azure DevOps, and other services to better understand the user experience on their website and increase personalization for better performance. Read the full CDON Case Study.

How AEON Group increased profits and maximized inventory with data and AI

Japan—Since opening its first store in December 2005, Maibasuketto, a member of the AEON Group's supermarket business, has expanded its footprint at a pace of 100 stores every year. To ensure its growth was sustainable, the company embarked on an initiative to optimize store ordering and operations using Azure Cognitive Services, maximizing supply chain and inventory based on selling patterns throughout the day. Read the full AEON Group Case Study.

How Fashable reimagines fashion design with Azure Machine Learning and PyTorch

Portugal—Using Azure Machine Learning, Fashable created an AI application that generates original clothing designs to quickly get a pulse on consumer preferences. This helps fashion companies understand customer demand, get to market faster, and reduce clothing waste by only producing what they know will sell. Read the full Fashable Case Study.

WTW accelerates delivery time with Azure Migration and Analytics

United Kingdom—Operating in more than 140 countries with over 40,000 employees, Willis Towers Watson (WTW) has decades of experience working with the world’s largest loyalty programs. To efficiently govern the exponential growth in data for these programs and apply innovations in advanced analytics and AI, WTW moved its workload to Azure. Now their employees have more time to focus on uncovering insights for clients. Read the full WTW Case Study.

Quelle: Azure

General availability of Azure OpenAI Service expands access to large, advanced AI models with added enterprise benefits

Large language models are quickly becoming an essential platform for people to innovate, apply AI to solve big problems, and imagine what’s possible. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Azure OpenAI Service as part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to democratizing AI, and ongoing partnership with OpenAI.

With Azure OpenAI Service now generally available, more businesses can apply for access to the most advanced AI models in the world—including GPT-3.5, Codex, and DALL•E 2—backed by the trusted enterprise-grade capabilities and AI-optimized infrastructure of Microsoft Azure, to create cutting-edge applications. Customers will also be able to access ChatGPT—a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 that has been trained and runs inference on Azure AI infrastructure—through Azure OpenAI Service soon.

Empowering customers to achieve more

We debuted Azure OpenAI Service in November 2021 to enable customers to tap into the power of large-scale generative AI models with the enterprise promises customers have come to expect from our Azure cloud and computing infrastructure—security, reliability, compliance, data privacy, and built-in Responsible AI capabilities.

Since then, one of the most exciting things we’ve seen is the breadth of use cases Azure OpenAI Service has enabled our customers—from generating content that helps better match shoppers with the right purchases to summarizing customer service tickets, freeing up time for employees to focus on more critical tasks.

Customers of all sizes across industries are using Azure OpenAI Service to do more with less, improve experiences for end-users, and streamline operational efficiencies internally. From startups like Moveworks to multinational corporations like KPMG, organizations small and large are applying the capabilities of Azure OpenAI Service to advanced use cases such as customer support, customization, and gaining insights from data using search, data extraction, and classification.

“At Moveworks, we see Azure OpenAI Service as an important component of our machine learning architecture. It enables us to solve several novel use cases, such as identifying gaps in our customer’s internal knowledge bases and automatically drafting new knowledge articles based on those gaps. This saves IT and HR teams a significant amount of time and improves employee self-service. Azure OpenAI Service will also radically enhance our existing enterprise search capabilities and supercharge our analytics and data visualization offerings. Given that so much of the modern enterprise relies on language to get work done, the possibilities are endless—and we look forward to continued collaboration and partnership with Azure OpenAI Service."—Vaibhav Nivargi, Chief Technology Officer and Founder at Moveworks.

“Al Jazeera Digital is constantly exploring new ways to use technology to support our journalism and better serve our audience. Azure OpenAI Service has the potential to enhance our content production in several ways, including summarization and translation, selection of topics, AI tagging, content extraction, and style guide rule application. We are excited to see this service go to general availability so it can help us further contextualize our reporting by conveying the opinion and the other opinion.”—Jason McCartney, Vice President of Engineering at Al Jazeera.

“KPMG is using Azure OpenAI Service to help companies realize significant efficiencies in their Tax ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) initiatives. Companies are moving to make their total tax contributions publicly available. With much of these tax payments buried in IT systems outside of finance, massive data volumes, and incomplete data attributes, Azure OpenAI Service finds the data relationships to predict tax payments and tax type—making it much easier to validate accuracy and categorize payments by country and tax type.”—Brett Weaver, Partner, Tax ESG Leader at KPMG.

Azure—the best place to build AI workloads

The general availability of Azure OpenAI Service is not only an important milestone for our customers but also for Azure.

Azure OpenAI Service provides businesses and developers with high-performance AI models at production scale with industry-leading uptime. This is the same production service that Microsoft uses to power its own products, including GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer that helps developers write better code, Power BI, which leverages GPT-3-powered natural language to automatically generate formulae and expressions, and the recently-announced Microsoft Designer, which helps creators build stunning content with natural language prompts.

All of this innovation shares a common thread: Azure’s purpose-built, AI-optimized infrastructure.

Azure is also the core computing power behind OpenAI API’s family of models for research advancement and developer production.

Azure is currently the only global public cloud that offers AI supercomputers with massive scale-up and scale-out capabilities. With a unique architecture design that combines leading GPU and networking solutions, Azure delivers best-in-class performance and scale for the most compute-intensive AI training and inference workloads. It’s the reason the world’s leading AI companies—including OpenAI, Meta, Hugging Face, and others—continue to choose Azure to advance their AI innovation. Azure currently ranks in the top 15 of the TOP500 supercomputers worldwide and is the highest-ranked global cloud services provider today. Azure continues to be the cloud and compute power that propels large-scale AI advancements across the globe.

Source: TOP500 The List: TOP500 November 2022, Green500 November 2022.

A responsible approach to AI

As an industry leader, we recognize that any innovation in AI must be done responsibly. This becomes even more important with powerful, new technologies like generative models. We have taken an iterative approach to large models, working closely with our partner OpenAI and our customers to carefully assess use cases, learn, and address potential risks. Additionally, we’ve implemented our own guardrails for Azure OpenAI Service that align with our Responsible AI principles. As part of our Limited Access Framework, developers are required to apply for access, describing their intended use case or application before they are given access to the service. Content filters uniquely designed to catch abusive, hateful, and offensive content constantly monitor the input provided to the service as well as the generated content. In the event of a confirmed policy violation, we may ask the developer to take immediate action to prevent further abuse.

We are confident in the quality of the AI models we are using and offering customers today, and we strongly believe they will empower businesses and people to innovate in entirely new and exciting ways.

The pace of innovation in the AI community is moving at lightning speed. We’re tremendously excited to be at the forefront of these advancements with our customers, and look forward to helping more people benefit from them in 2023 and beyond.

Getting started with Azure OpenAI Service

Learn more about Azure OpenAI Service and more about all the latest enhancements.
Apply for access to Azure OpenAI Service. Once approved for use, customers can log in to the Azure portal to create an Azure OpenAI Service resource and then get started either in our Studio website or via code:

How to create an Azure OpenAI Service resource
Quickstart: how to get started generating text

Read the blog: AI and the need for purpose-built cloud infrastructure.
Watch a video with tips on how to get started with Azure OpenAI Service:

Quelle: Azure

Microsoft named a Leader in 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Insight Engines

How your organization can benefit, no matter the industry.

As the amount of data being generated continues to grow at an exponential rate, it's becoming increasingly important for organizations to have a rich set of tools that can help them make sense of it all. That's where insight engines come in. These powerful solutions apply relevancy methods to data of all types, from structured to highly unstructured, allowing users to describe, discover, organize, and analyze it to deliver information proactively or interactively at the right time, in the right context.

Microsoft has recently been named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines, a report that evaluates the capabilities of various vendors in the market.

Microsoft offers two integrated solutions in this space: Microsoft Search, which is available with Microsoft 365, and Azure Cognitive Search, which is available as a platform as-a-service (PaaS) with Microsoft Azure. These solutions are designed to help professionals and developers build impactful AI-powered search solutions that can solve complex problems and enhance the customer experience by enabling information discovery across the spectrum from unstructured to structured data. Whether you need a turnkey solution to reason over enterprise data or the flexibility to tailor search to specific scenarios, Microsoft has you covered.

Azure Cognitive Search can be used in a variety of industries to improve efficiency and decision-making. Some specific examples of how it can be used include:

Manufacturing: Cognitive Search can be used to help manufacturers quickly find information about production processes, equipment, and materials. It can be applied to structured data scenarios such as part catalogs as well as unstructured content such as equipment manuals, safety procedures, and imagery. 
Energy: Cognitive Search can be used to quickly find information related to exploration, drilling, and production. Geo-location search combined with traditional search input enables discovery experiences to get the most of past and present geological site studies, and extensibility allows incorporating energy industry-specific information.
Retail: Cognitive Search can be used to develop a powerful product catalog search experience for retail web sites and apps. Customizable ranking options, scale capability to handle peak traffic with low latency, and the ability for near-real time updates for critical data such as inventory make it a great fit for the scenario. 
Financial services: Cognitive Search can be used by financial institutions to quickly find data related to investments, market trends, and regulatory compliance. Its sophisticated semantic ranking and question-answering capabilities can enable users to answer business questions faster and more confidently.
Healthcare: Cognitive Search can be used by healthcare organizations to improve patient care, streamline operations, and make better informed decisions by quickly finding and accessing relevant information within electronic medical record systems, providing real-time access to clinical guidelines and evidence-based best practices.

Nearly every user knows what to do when they see a search box. All SaaS applications targeting audiences from consumer to enterprise can greatly benefit from a great search experience over their own data. Azure Cognitive Search can deliver an out-of-the-box solution, inclusive of various multi-tenancy strategies, support for over 50 languages, and a global presence to ensure your solution is delivered in the right location for your customers.

If you're a technical decision maker in one of these industries, or any other industry, and you're interested in learning more about how Microsoft's cognitive search solutions can help you unlock the full potential of your data, you can visit the Azure Cognitive Search website and the Microsoft Search website.

You can also download a complimentary copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines to see how Microsoft is recognized in the space.

 

 

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines, Stephen Emmott, Anthony Mullen, David Pidsley, Tim Nelms, 12 December 2022

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

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Gartner Reprint.

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Quelle: Azure

Microsoft named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Development and Infrastructure Platforms, 2022

Forrester recently published its report, The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Development and Infrastructure Platforms, Global, Q4 2022, placing Microsoft in the “Leaders” category. It’s an honor to be named as one of only two leaders in Forrester’s definitive report on the public cloud development and infrastructure platform market.

The Forrester report recognized Microsoft for its long-term focus on Kubernetes, hybrid, and multicloud capabilities and noted that it is seeking to lead in hybrid and multicloud environments with platform management tools and capabilities. Reference customers praised Microsoft’s service improvements and partnerships. With Microsoft Azure, customers have a trusted cloud partner and the most advanced, highly integrated enterprise IT infrastructure to help them navigate ever-changing environments and achieve business success today, while they build for the future.

Helping developers build any app for any platform

We recognize that developers are the driving engine of innovation. When they are empowered to set up a complete engineering system in seconds, contribute and collaborate with anyone on any device, use the right tool for the job, and integrate with the rest of the organization’s digital estate, organizations can bring innovation to market faster with greater confidence. Azure makes all that possible. For example, with Microsoft Visual Studio, developers can deploy iOS, Android, Windows, Web or embedded apps to wherever they’d like–Azure, hybrid, on-premises and multi-cloud environments. Further, Azure fully supports some of the most popular open source technologies from Linux, to open-sourced databases, to Grafana, allowing organizations to leverage existing investments when running on Azure.

In August, we introduced Microsoft Dev Box, a managed service for developers to create on-demand, high-performance, secure, ready-to-code, project-specific workstations in the cloud, so they can work and innovate anywhere. And we’ve continued to bring new Kubernetes capabilities across Azure, which I’ll cover a little later in this article.

As the range of application development tools continues to grow, we’re seeing a surge in low-code technologies to spur innovation and lower the barrier to entry. Microsoft makes it easy with PowerApps, which provides prebuilt templates, drag-and-drop simplicity, quick deployment and AI-powered assistance, helping anyone create apps using natural language, while enabling the same DevOps practices for low-code tools that customers expect when building trusted enterprise solutions.

In this new world, organizations are harnessing the cloud to create a culture where everyone feels empowered to innovate, while lowering the barrier to creating new types of apps that can take businesses to new heights.

The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform

We’re entering the age of the “intelligent app,” where every app is AI-enabled and adapts to each organization’s modern data capabilities. However; fragmented digital estates make it difficult for organizations to harness their data to add layers of intelligence to their apps.

At our Build event in May, we announced the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform that fully integrates databases, analytics, and governance for a unified data estate. With this integration, organizations can power applications at any scale, get actionable insights from all their data, and properly govern data where it resides. To accelerate time to value, customers can use pre-built, customizable, and production-ready AI models as the building blocks for intelligent solutions with Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Applied AI Services.

As AI becomes more mainstream across organizations, it’s essential that employees have the tools to leverage this technology responsibly. We apply Microsoft's Responsible AI Standards to our product development, and have made it a priority to help customers understand, protect, and control their AI solutions with tools and resources like the Responsible AI Dashboard, bot development guidelines, and built-in tools to help explain model behavior, test for fairness and more.

By unifying and integrating data to create more intelligent apps, customers are opening the door to new innovations never thought possible.

From cloud to edge: Innovate securely, anywhere

More and more organizations are embracing hybrid and multicloud as part of their migration and modernization journeys, and they want to continue this flexible approach in a secure, compliant, reliable, and integrated way. Forrester credits Microsoft with "seeking to lead in hybrid and multicloud environments with platform management tools and capabilities, including the Azure Arc management platform."

Azure Arc operates as a bridge extending across the Azure platform by allowing applications and services the flexibility to run across on-premises, edge, and multicloud environments. One of the key challenges organizations face is securing and managing their distributed environments consistently while building innovative applications using cloud-native technologies.

Recently, we announced new deployment options for Azure Kubernetes Services enabled by Azure Arc so customers can run containerized apps, in addition to many first-party Azure application, data, and machine learning services, anywhere regardless of their location.

They can also take advantage of Azure’s comprehensive security, governance, and management capabilities for their Windows, Linux, SQL Server, and Kubernetes deployments in their datacenters, at the edge, or multicloud.

Azure is the only cloud platform built by a security vendor and ensuring that our customers' data is safe and secure is at the forefront of everything we do. For example, our Defender for Cloud security service spans across all clouds—even AWS and Google Cloud for a seamless, consistent, and secure cloud journey where it leads.

Our deep commitment to our customers is baked into every aspect of our vision and roadmap—to be the trusted partner with the most advanced, yet flexible cloud technologies that enable anyone in any organization to innovate anywhere. It’s an honor to be recognized for that commitment and a great way to usher in the New Year.

Learn more

Read The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Development And Infrastructure Platforms, Global, Q4 2022.
Learn how Toyota employees used low-code to create more than 400 apps to meet business needs.
Learn how Sutherland, a professional services company, built a data-driven culture with Microsoft Azure.
Learn how the National Basketball Association delivers compelling experiences for its fans through intelligent applications. 
Learn how Royal Bank of Canada, the largest bank in Canada, is using Azure Arc–enabled data services to take advantage of always up-to-date cloud-native data services to modernize its large data estate.
Read how a study found a 228 percent ROI when modernizing apps on Azure's platform as a service.

Quelle: Azure