The cloud and SaaS (software-as-a-service) are rising trends for many business and IT professionals—and it is something we saw play out last week at Microsoft Build, which took place May 21-23, 2024. I thought it might be worth looking at what came out of the event and the impact such technology is having on enterprises, especially considering this is happening alongside the rise of AI (artificial intelligence).
Let’s consider the rising trends of cloud and SaaS first. In the earliest days of computing, large mainframe systems acted as the central processor and networked terminals as the clients. Cloud computing is based on the notion that computing does not need to be on the customer’s premise, nor does it have to be in any particular location. There are three service models—SaaS, PaaS (platform-as-a-service), IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service)—and four deployment models: private cloud, community cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud.
Research from Canalys suggested the market for SaaS applications, excluding infrastructure software, will continue to grow from $215 billion in 2023 to $278 billion by the end of this year 2024. This represents a whopping 30% growth year-on-year. Now that we have a better understanding of the market, let’s look at the recent example from Microsoft Build.
The new Real-Time Intelligence within Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end SaaS solution that is developed to give businesses the ability to act on high volume, time-sensitive, and highly granular data. For those who may not know, Microsoft Fabric is a unified data platform for analytics.
The new Real-Time Intelligence will help make quick business decisions. Real-Time Intelligence is currently in preview and will empower user roles such as everyday analysts with simple low-code/no-code experiences, as well as pro developers with code-rich user interfaces.
A deeper dive shows additional benefits include providing a central location for managing all events. It will offer streaming connectors to cross cloud sources and context-based routing, which will help remove the complexity of ingesting streaming data from external sources. Third, it will improve data exploration as well as integrating with the Real-Time hub, event streams, realtime dashboards, and KQL query sets. Finally, it will allow users to respond to system events.
In addition, this will integrate with Microsoft Copilot to provide AI-powered insights. Perhaps looking even deeper, this is potentially one of the biggest advantages for businesses. In one-click, companies can achieve anomaly detection, which allows users to detect unknown conditions beyond human scale.
While this is one recent example, we know the rise of AI is here and there are going to be greater opportunities for businesses to do new and exciting things with technology.
Many industries are exploring the potential short- and long-term impact of artificial intelligence. Consider the example of education. I recently wrote about how Arizona State University sees AI as a monumental transformation moment. I have also explored how it can be used in utilities, engineering, travel, and insurance—just to name a few.
The bottomline is we continue to see a multitude of use cases as the technology continues to advance and the opportunities expand. The real question now is what industries will emerge the most successful, tapping into the new intelligence?
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