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Build a data-driven culture to accelerate innovation

Organizations today must embrace a data-driven culture or risk being left behind. A recent Harvard Business Review survey found organizations with data-driven cultures improve revenue by four times and unlock rich insights to drive meaningful business transformation and customer satisfaction.

As organizations evolve, new tools and resources are needed to enable them to harness the power of their data anywhere and to build a data-driven culture.

Transform data into insights

A data-driven culture requires the ability to derive timely and accurate business insights across all data. Modern organizations require analytics services that aren’t limited by data types, processing engines, organizational boundaries, or data skills.

Today, we announced Azure Synapse Analytics, a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs. We have evolved the same industry-leading SQL Data Warehouse to a new level of performance and capabilities. Organizations can continue running existing data warehouse workloads in production today with Azure Synapse Analytics and will automatically benefit from new capabilities which are in preview.

The deepest insights often emerge when organizations enrich their data with that of their customers and partners. Today, Microsoft Azure Data Share is generally available, enabling simple data sharing across organizational boundaries. Organizations can maintain a single pane of glass over all data sharing relationships, easily specify terms of use, and manage data access in an open and secure way.

Finally, data flows in Azure Data Factory transform Azure Data Factory into a truly comprehensive exract, transform, and load (ETL) offering with code-free and code-first data ingestion, preparation, and transformation capabilities in a simple, visual interface.

Azure’s analytics services offer organizations unmatched performance to reason over all their data, while giving them the peace of mind they have come to expect from Azure around data governance, security, and compliance.

Innovation anywhere with Azure

Azure is committed to empowering organizations to build on their terms with flexibility and choice, and that includes the freedom to operate anywhere. Today’s announcement of Azure Arc enables organizations to run Azure data services anywhere, be it on-premises, multi-cloud, or edge environments. This unlocks cloud automation benefits, always up-to-date innovation, and unified management across on-premises and cloud. Azure Arc is available in preview for Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale, with additional Azure data services coming in the future.

We are also extending the power of SQL to the edge with the preview of Azure SQL Database Edge. Azure SQL Database Edge brings data streaming, storage, full time series support, and AI capabilities to edge computing scenarios.

SQL Server keeps getting better

SQL Server 2019, now generally available, acts as the hub for an organization's entire data estate, including support for Apache Spark and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) to create a data lake on a unified platform with AI built-in. SQL Server 2019 provides organizations with a single view to seamlessly reason over all their data, including structured, unstructured, and new data sources (Oracle, Teradata, MongoDB, and more).

As organizations think about modernizing their SQL workloads in the cloud, SQL runs best on Azure. Azure SQL Database offers a fully managed, evergreen cloud database service from the company that has developed and perfected SQL over the past 25 years. An independent GigaOm study showed Azure SQL Database as the clear leader in price-performance, with up to 86 percent cost savings versus competitors.

Future-ready innovation

Building the confidence to invest in becoming a data-driven enterprise is much easier when organizations can trust their cloud to support their innovation today and their product vision for tomorrow. Microsoft continues to invest in advancing its Azure database capabilities across SQL, NoSQL, and open source, so organizations can be future-ready.

With today’s announcement of the preview of Azure SQL Database integration with Power Apps and Azure Stream Analytics, organizations can quickly create low-code applications connected to Azure SQL Database and transform data in real-time. Azure is the only cloud with serverless SQL, with Azure SQL Database serverless now generally available, making Azure SQL Database even more cost-effective and easy to manage. The expansion of available compute and memory options on Azure SQL Database delivers even more mission-critical performance. Azure open source relational databases are future-ready with the addition of support for 20,000 IoPs, and reserved instance purchase options.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale, now generally available, unleashes high-performance horizontal scaling for PostgreSQL workloads requiring sub-second response times and virtually limitless storage—up to 100 TB—with no need to rearchitect applications.

Finally, we continue to expand the capabilities and value of Azure Cosmos DB with the preview of autopilot mode, enabling automatic management of provisioned throughput for unpredictable or "spikey" workloads, while maintaining service-level agreements (SLAs) and high performance.

Ready to start building your data-driven culture?

When it comes to building a data-driven culture to drive meaningful outcomes within your organization, Azure has you covered with unmatched analytics, a true hybrid experience, and future-ready innovation.

Explore the full list of Microsoft Ignite announcements.

Azure. Invent with purpose.
Quelle: Azure

Empowering developer velocity with the most complete toolchain

Today every company is a software company. Across all industries from retail to healthcare to financial services and more, software is at the heart of every company’s strategy. According to a recent study by ISACA, 91 percent of business leaders saw digital transformation as a way of sparking innovation and finding efficiencies for their organizations.

A key catalyst for digital transformation is developers. Developers are the builders of our era, creating the ideas and writing the code that enables digital transformation for organizations around the world. To become a digital company, every company must build a culture that empowers developers to achieve more.

Organizations that successfully empower developers realize developer velocity, enabling developers to create more, innovate more, and solve more problems. Developer velocity is not just about speed, but about unleashing developer ingenuity, turning developers’ ideas into software with speed and agility to support the needs of your customers and the business.

Developer velocity means enabling developers to:

Build productively
Collaborate globally and securely
Scale innovation

Microsoft is committed to delivering solutions designed for developers and development teams to support your digital transformation journey in each of these areas, so you can innovate with purpose.

Build productively

Microsoft’s developer DNA is expressed through our tools, enabling developers to be more productive without changing the way you work while exposing you to technologies, such as Kubernetes, AI, and DevOps, along the way. With support for every language and framework, developers can build on your terms, and deploy where you want.

Our mission with Visual Studio is to provide tools for every developer and today, according to a recent survey from Stack Overflow, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio are the most popular development environments and tools used across the developer ecosystem. But we’re not stopping here. We know from talking with developers every day that software development is a constantly evolving craft. The way developers work is changing and we’re investing in tools that reflect modern workflows and practices.

For example, IntelliCode uses AI to bring the knowledge of the open source community into your code editor as you type. IntelliCode can suggest completions for whole lines of code. It can help simplify repetitive and tedious tasks like code refactoring. It can even help propagate best practices across your whole development team.

One of the biggest pain points in the developer’s job is to set up a new dev box. Whether you’re onboarding to a new team, starting a new project, or switching between tasks across different codebases, developers can spend hours setting up development environments. To help developers focus on what matters, today we’re announcing the preview of Visual Studio Online, which leverages the power of the cloud to make it easy to create and share dedicated development environments on-demand. You can create a pre-configured, isolated environment for each project, each repo, each task—in minutes. It doesn’t use any local resources and is accessible from any device. Visual Studio Online is now available for Visual Studio Code in preview and Visual Studio in preview. To learn more and sign up for the preview, view the announcement blog post.

Collaborate globally and securely

Software development is a team sport, and collaboration with peers and knowledge sharing within the team is fundamental. And, the increased pressure to continuously innovate challenges teams to move with more agility to redefine software delivery processes and to breakdown silos between development and operations.

At Microsoft, we know these challenges well as we too had to transform. We understand that the adoption of DevOps is an ongoing journey that requires a culture change and that change can be hard. As our customers walk a similar path, we want to help you realize the benefits we have seen from this transformation. We’re excited to share our experiences and learnings through the DevOps journey stories of Microsoft teams who have changed the way they work and have enabled this transformation with the support of technology.

We also know that developers solve problems with the support of the community both within and outside of your organizational boundaries. Last year, Microsoft completed the acquisition of GitHub, the home of open source and the largest developer communities on the planet, with over 40 million developers. GitHub transformed collaboration with a git hosted solution focused on community, creating the home where developers come together and work together.

Open source has also become instrumental in accelerating innovation. According to a recent report by Synopsys, 99 percent of codebases with over 1,000 files contain open source components. While this enables developers to innovate with speed, this also introduces new responsibilities like how to create and consume open source in a secure and trusted way. With GitHub, developers have tools, best practices, and infrastructure to help make software development secure. For example, developers get automatic security fixes for dependencies in your projects. GitHub’s recent acquisition of Semmle, a semantic code analysis engine, allows developers to detect vulnerabilities as part of your developer workflows to prevent vulnerabilities before they are ever released.

Finally, Microsoft is building integrations to GitHub making the developer experience seamless. Visual Studio Code’s integration with GitHub pull requests makes it easy to review source code inside the editor, where it was written. Developers can connect your GitHub repositories to Azure Boards to use kanban boards, backlogs, and dashboards for flexible work tracking. We’ve built upon GitHub Actions with GitHub Actions for Azure to make it easy to deploy to Azure environments such as Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service.

Scale your innovation

Sparking innovation to enhance customer experiences and line-of-business applications is top of mind for every business leader. Whether your company is building web, mobile, IoT, or mixed reality experiences, innovation is key to the future success of your organization.

Microsoft Azure offers over 100 services that help your organization drive and scale innovation to achieve your business outcomes. Developers have the freedom to create and run applications on a massive, global network using your preferred tools and frameworks. More and more, our customers are turning to Azure serverless technologies to build cloud-native applications designed to respond quickly to market signals, reduce costs, and move faster throughout the development cycle. Direct.One, Maersk, and Shell rely on Azure serverless and fully managed services to delight customers every day. Today, more than two million applications run on the Azure serverless platform.

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of serverless capabilities to better serve the needs of our customers. With PowerShell support for Azure Functions, operations teams can now set up serverless automation processes and take advantage of the event-driven programming model for infrastructure management and scripting tasks across Azure and hybrid environments. To make serverless a real design choice for the most demanding and mission-critical applications, the Azure Function Premium plan makes cold start a thing of the past. It allows for more powerful hardware, increased control on the minimum and maximum number of instances for more predictable costs, and the ability of pre-warming resources for optimal performance.

Containers and Kubernetes are central to cloud-native application patterns. Forrester recently recognized Azure as a leader for enterprise container platforms, offering the strongest developer experience and global reach. To further support the development of mission-critical workloads with strenuous requirements around reliability and scalability, today we’re announcing the general availability of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) support for availability zones, cluster-level autoscaling, multiple node pools, and a preview of Azure Security Center integration for Azure Kubernetes Service for container image vulnerability assessment and Kubernetes cluster threat protection. To learn more about these capabilities and more Azure Kubernetes Service innovations announced today, check out all of the Azure updates. And, to simplify containerized application development for Java developers, we are announcing the preview of Azure Spring Cloud built, operated, and supported in partnership with Pivotal. Azure Spring Cloud is built on top of Azure Kubernetes Service and abstracts away the complexity of infrastructure management and Spring Cloud middleware management.

To realize innovation goals, organizations need to focus on and scale developers’ investments. According to a recent survey by Indeed, over 86 percent of organizations struggle to hire all of the technical talent needed to build applications. Microsoft Power Apps, a low-code tool for citizen developers, expands the pool of people empowered to build applications. With the combination of Power Apps and Azure, citizen developers can easily build business apps that can be centrally managed through IT and easily extended by developers using Azure Functions or APIs to scale innovation across your organization.

Developers are the key to your digital transformation. Empowering developers with the latest technologies and tools is critical to the future success of your organization. Today’s announcements highlight Microsoft’s commitment to ensure every developer has cutting-edge tools to create the next generation of applications and drive innovation with developer velocity.

We have even more to share at Microsoft Ignite. Be sure to tune into Scott Hanselman’s keynote at 9:00 AM EST on Tuesday, November 6th to learn how to build an application in Azure using your language of choice such as Java, PHP, Node.js, .NET, or Python. Make sure to download the code and have fun defeating our bot after the session!

Azure. Invent with purpose.
Quelle: Azure

Companies of all sizes tackle real business problems with Azure AI

There are incredible transformations happening across industries through the application of AI. We have a front row seat with customers who are successfully digitizing core business processes and creating more engaging and personalized customer experiences. With Microsoft’s AI platform, Azure AI, our vision continues to center on helping our customers innovate with purpose, using productive, enterprise-scale, secure solutions. This vision is made stronger by recent partnerships like our investment in OpenAI to develop a hardware and software platform that extends Microsoft Azure capabilities in large-scale AI systems.

Today, through a number of AI innovations, we continue making it easier for organizations to adopt and apply AI in a way that meets their needs, where ever they are in their AI journey. Product updates include new capabilities in Microsoft Azure Machine Learning that boost the productivity of developers and data scientists of all skill levels, new innovations in Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services and Microsoft Azure Bot Service to simplify the creation of AI apps and agents, and new enhancements to Azure Cognitive Search to enable the development of knowledge mining applications.

Tremendous customer momentum

We are humbled by the tremendous adoption of Azure AI. Organizations large and small have adopted Azure AI solutions to deploy AI at scale and build with confidence knowing that they own and control their data. With our proven AI technologies, customers like Novartis, Humana, and UPS, as well as others across sectors like manufacturing, retail, aerospace, and animal conservation are deploying Azure AI services to drive meaningful outcomes with AI at scale.

We’re pleased to share that Azure AI now has more than 20,000 active paying customers – and more than 85 percent of Fortune 100 companies have used Azure AI in the last 12 months. In addition, Azure AI customers run over 1 million machine learning experiments per month, use Azure Cognitive Search to process over 6 billion documents per day, run over 5 billion cognitive services transactions per month, and process over 1 billion bot messages per month.

Accelerating machine learning adoption

Our new Microsoft Azure Machine Learning capabilities including the new machine learning designer, automated machine learning enhancements and built-in notebooks are designed to meet the needs of data scientists and developers of all skill levels. New machine learning operations (MLOps) capabilities help data-science and IT teams better collaborate and increase the pace of model deployment with more governance and control. We continue to invest in open ecosystems with support for R and availability of ONNX Runtime 1.0 which simplifies the process of optimizing machine learning models to run a variety of chipsets. You can get started for free with Azure Machine Learning today.

Customers like Schneider Electric are using Azure Machine Learning to significantly minimize worker risk, save time, and lower costs. By leveraging the automated machine learning capabilities within Azure Machine Learning, Schneider Electric reduced the process of identifying the right models for predictive maintenance, from one month to one day.

“All the data scientists on our team enjoy using Azure Machine Learning service. Why? Because it’s fully interoperable with all the other tools they use in their day-to-day work, no extra training is needed, and they get more done faster now.” —Matthieu Boujonnier: Analytics Application Architect and Data Scientist, Schneider Electric

Lexmark is using Azure Machine Learning to glean valuable insights from the data it collects from millions of IoT-enabled printers and make more informed business decisions.

“Our Connected Field Service takes data from our Lexmark IoT Hub, augmented by Azure Machine Learning, and feeds information into Dynamics 365, so we can make predictive diagnostics for individual machines and alert service technicians to be ready.”—Brad Clay, Senior Vice President, Chief Information and Compliance Officer, Lexmark International

The wildlife crime team from Africa’s Peace Parks Foundation (PPF), in partnership with the South African conservation agency Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, is using Azure Machine Learning to monitor and prevent rhino poaching.

Simplifying the development of intelligent apps and agents

Azure Cognitive Services are a comprehensive set of domain-specific, ready-to-use, AI models. Today, we are announcing the general availability of a new Azure Cognitive Service called Personalizer, the industry's first AI service based on reinforcement learning. Personalizer allows businesses to create rich customer interactions by prioritizing the most relevant content and experiences in each customer interaction. New Speech service capabilities are available in preview, including Custom Neural Voice which enables customers to create branded voices using deep neural networks, and the ability to use Office 365 data to automatically create optimized custom speech models. Updates to Text Analytics include the ability to detect and extract personally identifiable information in documents and expanded entity type support for more than 100 named entity types. A new Bot Framework Composer helps simplify the creation of bots through a graphical user interface. You can get started for free with Cognitive Services and Bot Service.

Customers like the European aerospace manufacturer, Airbus, are using Azure Cognitive Services to provide predictive maintenance for mixed aircraft fleets:

“Innovation has always been a driving force at Airbus. Using Anomaly Detector, an Azure Cognitive Service, we can solve some aircraft predictive maintenance use cases more easily.” —Peter Weckesser, Digital Transformation Officer, Defence and Space, Airbus

Spotify is making it easier for anyone to create podcasts with their Soundtrap for Storytellers application. Using Speech Service, Spotify is helping content creators streamline the entire podcast editing process by auto-transcribing podcasters’ audio tracks and allowing them to edit directly within the transcribed document.

In hospitality, Caesars Entertainment, which operates brands including Harrah’s, Caesars, and Horseshoe, is using Azure Bot Service to deploy a text message bot to answer users’ questions.

Uncovering latent insights from content with knowledge mining

Azure Cognitive Search, formerly known as Azure Search, is the only cloud search service with built-in AI capabilities that enables you to discover patterns and relationships in your content, understand the sentiment, extract key phrases and more. Updates to Azure Cognitive Search, including new data connectors, additional built-in AI skills, and expanded region availability, make it easier for enterprises to build knowledge mining applications that ingest, enrich, and search structured and unstructured information, influencing better business decisions. You can get started for free with Azure Cognitive Search.

The Atlantic is using Azure AI to catalog and preserve 160 years of published history. Leveraging Azure Cognitive Search, the publication is transitioning from hard copy to a digital system where its archives can be explored by the public as well as used as a resource for writers to build connections between stories and enrich their content.

Archive360, an intelligent information management solution provider, uses Azure Cognitive Search to enable their customers to ask complex questions of petabyte-sized archive datasets both quickly and cost-effectively.

"By using Azure Cognitive Search to provide customers with the search performance and simplicity they need, we can deliver deeper data insights than ever before."—Tibi Popp, Chief Technology Officer, Archive 360

autoTRADER.ca, which serves more than 5 million Canadians monthly in the market for a new or used car, has been using Azure Cognitive Search to launch new growth opportunities including a dealer-to-dealer auction site, as well as plans to replace their old search engine with a more cost-effective, scalable, improved search experience for their consumer marketplace.

“Azure Cognitive Search enabled us to launch the dealer auction site. We couldn’t have been able to do it otherwise, and we’re really excited about using Azure Cognitive Search for the marketplace. It gives us an opportunity to provide better and better services to our customers with instant, seamless experiences across all devices.”—Allen Wales: Vice President of Technology, autoTRADER.ca

While we’re pleased to see start-ups to enterprise companies adopting Azure AI, we remain focused on addressing barriers that hinder companies’ ability to take advantage of all the benefits of AI.

Stay tuned for more updates in the coming months, we’ll have some exciting things to share. In the meantime, we look forward to helping you and your company explore how you can tackle your hardest business problems with the power of Microsoft’s AI platform, Azure AI. Get started with a free trial of Azure AI today. 

Azure. Invent with purpose.
Quelle: Azure