In his keynote address at this year’s Microsoft Inspire, Microsoft’s annual partner-focused event that wrapped up last week, company CEO Satya Nadella described digital transformation as a “deflationary force in an inflationary economy.” Nadella insisted that tech is the only way to navigate “the headwinds we’re facing today,” and he laid out five digital imperatives for every organization to do more with less—migrate to the cloud, empower fusion teams, unify data and apply AI (artificial intelligence) models, pursue collaborative business processes, and prioritize security. Here is a roundup of some announcements Microsoft made at its event.
The company announced it is offering new benefits for ISVs (independent software vendors) through its ISV Success Program. The program—currently in private preview mode—is designed to help ISVs innovate rapidly, build well-architected applications, publish them to Microsoft’s commercial marketplace, and grow sales. Microsoft says the program will become broadly available this fall. Microsoft also announced a new digital-transformation solution for the public sector called Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty. The solution will help governments and government organizations ensure they’re meeting compliance, security, and policy requirements as they build and digitally transform workloads in the Microsoft Cloud.
Another key announcement made at Microsoft Inspire 2022 involves leveraging the company’s technology to provide better customer service. The new Digital Contact Center Platform integrates Microsoft Teams with Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and the recently acquired conversational AI tech from Nuance Communications to build an “open, extensible, and collaborative platform” that helps create a seamless experience for users—essentially empowering ISVs to build the contact-center experience that works best for their customers.
Microsoft has been a big player enabling the transition to hybrid work throughout the past few years as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated adoption of hybrid and remote work solutions in every industry. At Inspire 2022, the company announced it’s now offering new capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams to continue to facilitate hybrid and remote work. For instance, Excel Live enables realtime interaction among remote workers, allowing them to work collaboratively on workbooks during meetings within Teams. Second, a new collaborative annotations feature lets meeting participants draw, type, or react to shared meeting content via Microsoft Whiteboard. Finally, a new feature in Teams chat called Video Clip allows users to record, send, and view short videos.
In other partner news at this year’s Inspire event, Microsoft announced its new Azure Space Partner Community, and it celebrated its partners of the year for 2022. Winning partners included Ernst & Young in the AI category (Ernst & Young also won 2022 Security Partner of the Year thanks to its use of the Zero Trust framework that leverages Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Azure Key Vault), ICONICS in the IoT (Internet of Things) category, and Schneider Electric in the energy and sustainability category for its EcoStruxure solutions powered by Microsoft Azure, which help customers achieve their energy and sustainability objectives. Overall, the event showcased the importance of collaboration and innovation to drive digital transformation in a rapidly changing world.
Want to tweet about this article? Use hashtags #IoT #sustainability #AI #5G #cloud #edge #digitaltransformation #machinelearning #futureofwork #cybersecurity #MSInspire #Microsoft #MicrosoftPartnerNetwork #Azure #Excel#Teams #MicrosoftCloud #ErnstYoung #ICONICS #SchneiderElectric