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Microsoft named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General-Purpose Computer Vision AI Software Platform 2022 Vendor Assessment

I am thrilled to announce that Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General-purpose Computer Vision AI Software Platform 2022 Vendor Assessment (doc #US49776422, November 2022).

The IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market, and business execution in the short term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3–5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the icons.

Built on a foundation of deep learning and AI research, Azure Cognitive Services for Vision are designed to be flexible and scalable to meet the needs of a wide range of customers. Our Vision services offer a collection of prebuilt and custom APIs for image and video analysis, text recognition, facial recognition, image captioning, model customization, and more, that developers can easily integrate into their applications. We have been actively contributing to the computer vision research community, further advancing the field and encouraging democratization access to cutting-edge computer vision technology.

Where we excelled

The IDC MarketScape report evaluated Microsoft’s strategies and capabilities and positioned Microsoft in the Leaders Category. I believe this recognition is a testament to Microsoft's commitment to deliver cutting-edge, responsible, and customer-centric AI products to organizations of all sizes and across all verticals.

1) Enabling customers with cutting-edge technology

I believe one of the key strengths that sets us apart is our ability to help customers commercialize cutting-edge technology. For example,

Uber uses vision service’s facial recognition to support security.
H&R Block uses text recognition to transform tax returns.
KPMG uses text, image, and video analysis to help banking customers identify financial risks. 
Territorium to build and deliver a remote proctoring platform and verify student identity.

Recent advancements, such as Dall-E and Florence, have solidified Microsoft’s position as a leader in the industry. Additionally, our OCR and Azure Form Recognizer capabilities have been significantly enhanced, supporting over 300 languages and a broad set of pre-built and custom form models including contracts, invoices, W2s, ID documents, receipts, business cards and upgraded handwriting and customization capabilities. We’ll continue to integrate the latest OpenAI language models with our Vision services to enable deep knowledge queries, further advancing our solutions for customers.

2) Responsible AI

I believe responsible AI is another area where we excel. Microsoft is committed to ethical and transparent AI and has implemented robust processes to ensure our products and services align with industry standards and regulations. Our AI principles, which include fairness, reliability, and safety, guide our development and deployment of AI solutions. We recognize that responsible AI is a journey and are not afraid to make changes based on findings and customer feedback. For example, in June 2022, we announced and implemented the new Responsible AI Standard with additional safeguards and fairness testing and tooling, including a new API that helps developers determine whether an image is suitable for facial recognition, and we shared our plan to phase out emotion detection AI to protect sensitive attributes from being misused—including subjecting people to stereotyping, discrimination, and unfair denial of services.

3) Customer and partner ecosystem

I believe our strong customer and partner ecosystem is also a major differentiator. We have a global network of, partners, service providers, and ISVs that trust and rely on our technology to power their businesses. We work closely with them to understand their unique needs and develop tailored solutions that drive measurable results while supporting their ability to experiment, adopt, and scale Vision service offerings.

As computer vision and AI continue to play an increasingly important role in the digital era, we are well-positioned to help organizations of all sizes and across all verticals leverage the power of computer vision to improve productivity, efficiency, safety, sustainability, and inclusivity. From search engine optimization with image captioning to anomaly detection, facial recognition for identity verification, radiology, or autonomous driving, our platform can support a wide range of use cases and deliver insights that drive business value.

I believe being recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape validates our team's efforts to deliver cutting-edge, responsible, and customer-centric solutions. We will continue to invest in R&D and work closely with our customers and partners to drive the next generation of AI-powered innovation.

Learn more about how Azure AI and Computer Vision lead the way

For more information, please review the IDC MarketScape: General-Purpose Computer Vision AI Software Platforms 2022 Vendor Assessment and discover how our platform can help your organization unleash the power of computer vision. 
Quelle: Azure

Lessons learned optimizing Microsoft’s internal use of Azure

At Microsoft, we learned a lot from moving our internal operations to Microsoft Azure, lessons we use to make our cloud products work better for our customers. As a top user of Azure, we understand our customers’ obstacles and constraints. Just like them, we’re under pressure to "do more with less" in these challenging fiscal times. As such, we're sharing our story of first migrating to Azure, and then optimizing our usage to bring our costs down. Our goal is to help our customers do the same—help them migrate to the cloud, optimize their cloud costs, and strategically invest in projects to boost their growth.

“It’s exciting to talk about our own IT journey, our migration, our optimization, [and] how we’re reinvesting in the different types of solutions that are possible within the cloud, compared to how we did things before." —Pete Apple, Principal TPM Architect at Microsoft

After helping Microsoft migrate to Azure, Apple is now spending his time helping the company get more out of being on the cloud. "We continue to shift [how] we think about the technology, the processes, the ways that we enable our internal customers and our employees to be successful in their day-to-day work and have less friction," Apple says.

Being Microsoft’s customer zero

Many people think we get all our Microsoft technology and solutions for free, but that’s not the case when it comes to Microsoft Azure—we pay full price for it, just like any customer.

“When I talk to customers, they’re always a little bit surprised to hear that we pay the same rates for Azure that they do. We operate with the same licensing, the same pricing, which is really, really important. This informs the role we play as customer zero, when we’re having our own experiences with Azure. We work on improvements with the product group—before our customers can possibly have a bad experience." — Heather Pfluger, General Manager of Infrastructure & Engineering in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience.

Paying full price keeps the pressure on Pfluger’s team to be as efficient as possible with the company’s internal use of Azure. “Like any customer, we must consider competing timelines, optimization goals, and all relevant budgets,” she says. “As customer zero, we not only use Azure cloud services for our business needs—like any other enterprise—but also, we constantly harness our knowledge and insights to envision the right experience in the first place.”

Being Microsoft’s customer zero gives Pfluger and her team the opportunity to give feedback to our product teams, which they use to make improvements that benefit our external customers. We evaluate our solutions to help make sure they meet various global requirements relating to security, privacy, and overall compliance.

Optimizing our cloud costs

Like our customers, we’re feeling pressure to reduce our costs during these challenging economic times. One way we’re doing that is by being efficient with our internal use of Microsoft Azure.

Pfluger was looking for ways to cut costs and says, “The first place we went to was Azure.” The information needed to find ways to trim was easily accessible within her team’s Azure dashboards.

“All of the data was there,” Pfluger says, explaining that there are many optimization levers within Azure that customers can pull. “We saved a tremendous amount of money just by reviewing our Azure spend and by using the tools available to us.”

Our Azure product team is trying to help us, and all our customers get more out of their Azure subscriptions. They’re focused on helping customers understand and forecast their costs, use data to optimize their workloads, use proactive cost-management practices to deploy fixes as quickly as possible, and leverage auditing to identify opportunities to fine-tune their operations even more.

Learn more about optimizing your Azure migration

Read this Azure optimization blog post to get more detail on our internal cloud journey here at Microsoft.
Quelle: 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.

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Quelle: Azure