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A year of healthy progress along Microsoft strategic ambitions

July 24, 2016 11:45 am / Leave a comment

Microsoft Stock Price for the last 5 years — July 22, 2016:Microsoft Stock Price for the last 5 years -- 22 July, 2016 My earlier posts related specifically to this 3 years overall transition history:
– Microsoft partners empowered with ‘cloud first’, high-value and next-gen experiences for big data, enterprise social, and mobility on wide variety of Windows devices and Windows Server + Windows Azure + Visual Studio as the platform as of July 10, 2013
– Microsoft reorg for delivering/supporting high-value experiences/activities as of July 11, 2013
– An ARM-focussed Microsoft spin-off could be the only solution to save Microsoft in the crucial next 3-years period as of August 24, 2013
– Opinion Leaders and Lead Opinions: Reflections on Steven Sinofsky’s “Era of Continuous Productivity” vision as of September 1, 2013
– The question mark over Wintel’s future will hang in the air for two more years as of September 15, 2013
– Microsoft could be acquired in years to come by Amazon? The joke of the day, or a certain possibility (among other ones)? as of September 16, 2013
– Sinofsky’s ‘continuous productivity’ idea to be realised first in Box Notes as of September 21, 2013
MS FY15 NEW STRATEGIC SETUP– Microsoft is transitioning to a world with more usage and more software driven value add (rather than the old device driven world) in mobility and the cloud, the latter also helping to grow the server business well above its peers as of April 25, 2014
– Satya Nadella on “Digital Work and Life Experiences” supported by “Cloud OS” and “Device OS and Hardware” platforms–all from Microsoft as of July 23, 2014
– Steve Ballmer on leaving Microsoft, relationship with Bill Gates: “We’ve dusted-up many times”, on His Biggest Regret: “doing hardware earlier [for being] more effective in phone business” AND on Amazon: “They Make No Money.” as October 25, 2014
– The Empire Reboots — Can C.E.O. Satya Nadella Save Microsoft? | Vanity Fair, Oct 27, 2014

WPC Day 1: The Digital Transformation Opportunity from Microsoft Partner Network UK Blog as of July 11, 2016:

“Empower every person and every
organisation on the planet to achieve more”
The Microsoft Mission

At the core of today’s opening Worldwide Partner Conference keynote was ‘Digital Transformation’ aka the desire of CEO’s to use technology to change business outcomes – whether it be how they:

  • Engage their customers,
  • Empower employees to make better decisions,
  • Optimise their operations,
  • Build up the predictive power within their organisations so that every operation is intelligent,
  • Transform their products and services.

Digital Transformation = An Unprecedented Partner Opportunity

Every customer of every size business (startup to Enterprise) is not only looking to use digital technology, but to build digital technology for their own.

Digital-transformatoin-all-partner-types1-1024x530[1]

Businesses are looking to drive greater efficiency – automating processes and enhancing productivity, particularly in those areas where there are operating expenses. This poses an unprecedented opportunity for you no matter what partner type you are.

Digital Transformation Opportunity by Microsoft and Partners -- July 11, 2016Microsoft Ambitions to Drive Digital Transformation

Microsoft has three core ambitions which play a fundamental part in digitally transforming businesses:

  • Re-inventing Productivity and Business process
  • Building the Intelligent Cloud
  • Create more Personal Computing

These will be covered in more detail over the next two days keynotes, however, Satya provided some great examples of what these 3 ambitions entail.

1) Re-inventing Productivity and Business Process

This is all about removing the barriers between productivity tools and business applications. Satya focused on two key areas:

  • ‘Conversations as a Platform’: Using human language understanding personal assistants and Bots (conversational interfaces) which augment our connection with technologies. (Watch the demo 48 minutes into Day 1 Keynote)

2) Building out the intelligent Cloud

To showcase how intelligent cloud is helping transformation, Satya invited General Electric CEO, Jeff Immelt, on stage to discuss how he has digitally transformed the GE business.

Considering GE is over 140 years old, it’s a company that has embraced transformation and digital transformation. You can read more about their story and find out about Microsoft’s new partnership with GE to bring Predix to Azure, accelerating digital transformation for industrial customers.

Satya then went on to talk about ‘The next phase of building the Intelligent cloud’ with ‘Cognitive services’.  We’re seeing the beginnings of a new platform for cognitive services. Microsoft has taken decades of research from Microsoft Research encapsulating speech, computer vision, natural language text understanding, and made these available as API’s. These API’s are being used to infuse perception into apps – the ability for Apps/Bots to understand speech and see i.e. computer vision. These cognitive capabilities are capable of transforming business by bringing productivity gains. A great example of this is how Macdonalds are creating efficiency in their Drive Thru’s with speech/order recognition (Watch the demo 1 hour 10 minutes into the Day 1 keynote).

3) Create More Personal Computing

Create more personal computing was the third and final ambition covered. Satya discussed Windows 10 – an OS system spanning multiple devices from Raspberry PI to Hololens and bringing centralised infrastructure benefits and cost savings to business.

It was on the topic of Hololens, he discussed how personal computing is shaped by category creation moments. Moments where input and output change. ‘Mixed Reality’ is that moment. With Hololens its created an interface changing moment – Mixing real with virtual, enabling us to be anywhere and everywhere – fully untethered and mobile.

What followed was a great demo showcasing how Japan Airlines are using Microsoft HoloLens to change how they train flight crews and mechanics (Watch the demo 1 hour 17 minutes into the Day 1 keynote)

Mixed reality offers huge opportunities for partners with so many applications across so many sectors.

Expect more details on Digital Transformation and Microsoft’s three ambitions in WPC Day 2 and 3 keynotes.

News From WPC2016 Day 1

The three ambitions announced a year ago and the proof-points of healthy progress along them in FY16:

  1. Office 365, Dynamics 365, AppSource, and LinkedIn as all being part of one overarching strategy in Productivity and Business Process:
    – core part of an overarching strategy
    – digital transformation both for us and our partnerships with customers
  2. Significant differentiation vs. Amazon AWS in Intelligent Cloud:
    – enterprise cloud leadership
    – every customer is also an ISV
    – hyperscale-plus-hybrid approach with annuity focus enabling cloud lead conversation with customers
    – meeting cloud needs of customers where they are
  3. Windows strategy to achieve progress in More Personal Computing:
    – deliver more value and innovation, particularly for enterprise customers
    – grow new monetization through services across our unified Windows platform
    – innovate in new device categories in partnership with our OEMs

The Q1FY16 progress was presented in my Microsoft is ready to become a dominant force in cloud computing with superior cloud offerings, a Windows ecosystem under complete renewal, first signs of Surface-Lumia-Xbox successes on the market, and strong interest in technology partnerships by other industry leaders as of October 24, 2015.

“Reinvent Productivity and Business Processes“, “Build the Intelligent Cloud” and “Create More Personal Computing” were the original 3 “interlocking ambitions” the Microsoft CEO talked about at Microsoft Iginite held on May 4-8, 2015 in Chicago. The proof-points of FY16 progress are shown along that list, and explained in detail by remarks from Microsoft (MSFT) Satya Nadella on Q4 2016 Results – Earnings Call Transcript as of July 18, 2016.

For more information see also:  Q4 2015 Earning Call Transcript, the 2015 Annual Report or—even better—my earlier posts indicated here under each ambition. For a deeper strategic intent underlying these ambilitions see my earlier post Julia Liuson: “Microsoft must transform from a company that throws a box with software into the market … into a company that offers pure services” published on October 25, 2015. These ambitions also became reporting segments in FY16. See Earnings Release FY16 Q1 as of October 22, 2015. The major corporate groups were also organised along these line: ASG = Application & Services Group for “Reinvent productivity and business processes” ambition, C&E = Cloud & Enterprise for “Build the intelligent cloud platform” ambition, and OSG= Operating Systems Group for “Create more personal computing” ambition.

Note that the overall strategic approach was developed 2 years ago and it was described in my post Satya Nadella on “Digital Work and Life Experiences” supported by “Cloud OS” and “Device OS and Hardware” platforms–all from Microsoft of July 23, 2014:

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Here are the remarks from Microsoft (MSFT) Satya Nadella on Q4 2016 Results – Earnings Call Transcript as of July 18, 2016. for details

1. Office 365, Dynamics 365, AppSource, and LinkedIn as all being part of one overarching strategy in Productivity and Business Process:

For initial and additional details available earlier see my earlier posts:
– The first “post-Ballmer” offering launched: with Power BI for Office 365 everyone can analyze, visualize and share data in the cloud as of February 10, 2014
– OneNote is available now on every platform (+free!!) and supported by cloud services API for application and device builders as of March 18, 2014
– An upcoming new era: personalised, pro-active search and discovery experiences for Office 365 (Oslo) as of April 2, 2014
– Microsoft Azure: Marketable machine learning components capability for “a new data science economy”, and real-time analytics for Azure HDInsight service as of October 22, 2014

In fact, this last quarter, some of the most strategic announcements were all around our application platform. At our partner conference, there was a significant amount of excitement with the tools that we announced like PowerApps and Power BI, Azure functions and Flow. These are tools that our developers and system integrators and solution partners will use in order to be able to customize applications around Azure. And so to me that’s another huge advantage and a competitive differentiation for us.

1.1 Core part of an overarching strategy

The move to the cloud for our customers and for us is not just about a new way of delivering the same value just as a SaaS service. It’s really the transformation from having applications that are silos to becoming more services in the cloud where you can reason about the activity and the data underneath these services to benefit the customers who are using these services. So that’s what this notion of a graph [by Microsoft Graph] represents.

So when somebody moves to Office 365, their graph [by Microsoft Graph], their people, their relationships with other people inside the organization, their work artifacts all move to the cloud. You can connect them with all the business process data that’s in Dynamics 365, but not just in Dynamics 365 but all the applications in AppSource because business process will always be a much more fragmented market as opposed to just one market share leader by industry, by vertical, by country. And so that’s our strategy there.

And now the professional cloud or the professional network helps usage across all of that professional usage. Whether it’s in Office 365 or whether you’re a salesperson using any application related to sales, you want your professional network there. Of course, it’s relevant in recruiting, it’s relevant in training, it’s relevant in marketing. So that’s really our strategy with LinkedIn as the professional network meeting the professional cloud. And these are all part of one overarching strategy, and ultimately it’s about adding value to customers.

1.2 Digital transformation both for us and our partnerships with customers

This past year was a pivotal one in both our transformation and in our partnerships with customers who are also driving their own digital transformation. Our progress is best captured in the results of our three ambitions, starting with Productivity and Business Process. In a world of infinite information but finite attention and time, we aim to change the nature of work with digital technology. In pursuit of this ambition, we continue to add value to our products, grow usage, and increase our addressable market. Along these lines, let me start with Office 365 and then move to Dynamics 365.

In the last quarter, we advanced our collaboration tools. We launched Microsoft Planner, which helps teams manage operations, as well as Skype Meetings, which is aimed at helping small businesses collaborate. In June, we further strengthened our security value proposition with the release of Advanced Security Management.

Lastly, we continue to add intelligence in machine learning to Office to help people automate their tasks and glean insights from data. These advancements helped to drive increased usage across enterprises, small and medium businesses, and consumers. In the enterprise, Office 365 Commercial seats grew 45% year over year, and revenue grew 59% in constant currency. Also 70% of our Office Enterprise agreement renewals are in the cloud. Innovative companies like Facebook, Hershey’s, Discovery Communications, Cushman Wakefield all adopted Office 365 and now see how transformative this service can be for their own business.

We are enthusiastic about the early feedback and growth opportunity from companies using our newly released Office 365 E5, which includes powerful security controls, advanced analytics, and cloud voice. These customers tell us that they love the simplification that comes with standardizing across all of our productivity workloads.

We will continue to grow our install base and drive premium mix through offers like Office 365 E5, but they’re very, very early days of E5. And E5 value proposition across all three of the areas, whether it’s cloud voice or analytics or security are all three massive areas for us. And I would say if anything, the initial data from our customers around security is gaining a lot of traction. But at the same time, one of the things that customers are looking for is making an enterprise-wide architectural decision across all of the workloads.

We see momentum in small and medium businesses, with a growing number of partners selling Office 365, now up to nearly 90,000, a 25% increase year over year. We continue to grab share and adding over 50,000 customers each month for 28 consecutive months.

We also see momentum amongst consumers, with now more than 23 million Office 365 subscribers. Across segments, customers increasingly experience the power of Office on their iOS and Android mobile devices. In fact, we now have more than 50 million iOS and Android monthly active devices, up more than four times over last year.

Now let’s talk about progress with the other pillar of this ambition, Dynamics 365. We are removing any impedance that exists between productivity, collaboration, and business process. This month we took a major step forward with the introduction of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource. Dynamics 365 provides business users with purpose-built SaaS applications. These applications have intelligence built in. They integrate deeply with communications and collaboration capabilities of Office 365.

Dynamics 365 along with AppSource and our rich application platform introduces a disruptive and customer-centric business model so customers can build what they want and use just the capabilities they need. The launch of Dynamics 365 builds on the momentum we’re already seeing in this business. Customers around the globe are harnessing the power of Dynamics in their own transformation, including 24 Hour Fitness and AccuWeather. Overall, Dynamics now has nearly 10 million monthly paid seats, up more than 20% year over year, and Q4 billings grew more than 20% year over year.

Overall, Business Processes represent an enormous addressable market, projected to be more than $100 billion by 2020. It’s a market we are increasingly focused on, and I believe we are poised with both Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource to grow and drive opportunity for our partners.

Across Office 365 and Dynamics 365, developers increasingly see the opportunity to build innovative apps and experiences with the Microsoft Graph, and we now have over 27,000 apps connected to it. Microsoft AppSource will be a new way for developers to offer their services and reach customers worldwide.

Lastly, with Office 365 and Dynamics 365, we have the opportunity to connect the world’s professional cloud and the world’s professional network with our pending LinkedIn deal. Overall, the Microsoft Cloud is winning significant customer support. With more than $12 billion in Commercial Cloud annualized revenue run rate, we are on track to achieve our goal of $20 billion in fiscal year 2018. Also, nearly 60% of the Fortune 500 companies have at least three of our cloud offerings. And we continue to grow our annuity mix of our business. In fact, commercial annuity mix increased year over year to 83%.

2. Significant differentiation vs. Amazon AWS in Intelligent Cloud 

For initial and additional details available earlier see my earlier posts:
– Windows Azure becoming an unbeatable offering on the cloud computing market as of June 28, 2013
– Microsoft partners empowered with ‘cloud first’, high-value and next-gen experiences for big data, enterprise social, and mobility on wide variety of Windows devices and Windows Server + Windows Azure + Visual Studio as the platform as of July 10, 2013

– 4. Microsoft products for the Cloud OS [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, as of Dec 18, 2013, but published only on Feb 14, 2014] (was separated from the next “half bakedness” post because of its length)
– 4.5. Microsoft talking about Cloud OS and private clouds: starting with Ray Ozzie in November, 2009[‘Experiencing the Cloud’, as of Dec 18, 2013, but published only on Feb 14, 2014] (was separated from the next “half bakedness” post because of its length)
– Microsoft’s half-baked cloud computing strategy (H1’FY14) as of February 17, 2014 Note that this “half bakedness” ended by the facts published in Microsoft is ready to become a dominant force in cloud computing with superior cloud offerings, a Windows ecosystem under complete renewal, first signs of Surface-Lumia-Xbox successes on the market, and strong interest in technology partnerships by other industry leaders as of October 24, 2014
– Microsoft is transitioning to a world with more usage and more software driven value add (rather than the old device driven world) in mobility and the cloud, the latter also helping to grow the server business well above its peers as of April 25, 2014
– Microsoft BUILD 2014 Day 2: “rebranding” to Microsoft Azure and moving toward a comprehensive set of fully-integrated backend services as of April 27, 2014
– Scott Guthrie about changes under Nadella, the competition with Amazon, and what differentiates Microsoft’s cloud products as of October 2, 2014
– Sam Guckenheimer on Microsoft Developer Division’s Journey to Cloud Cadence as of October 19, 2014
– Microsoft Azure: Marketable machine learning components capability for “a new data science economy”, and real-time analytics for Azure HDInsight service as of October 22, 2014
– Microsoft Cloud state-of-the-art: Hyper-scale Azure with host SDN — IaaS 2.0 — Hybrid flexibility and freedom as of July 11, 2015
– Microsoft’s first quarter proving its ability to become a dominant force in cloud computing with superior cloud offerings as of Januar 27, 2015
– DataStax: a fully distributed and highly secure transactional database platform that is “always on” as of February 3, 2016
– Microsoft chairman: The transition to a subscription-based cloud business isn’t fast enough. Revamp the sales force for cloud-based selling as of June 6, 2016

Cloud Growth Helps Microsoft Beat Street in Q4 from TheStreet as of July 19, 2016 

… [0:34] and Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility [Suite]
customers nearly doubled YoY to 33,000. [0:40] …

Note that the Q1FY16 report was that “Enterprise Mobility [Suite] customers more than doubled year-over-year to over 20,000, and the installed base grew nearly 6x year-over-year“. Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) is a service available in the CSP (Cloud Solution Partner program) along with Windows Intune, Office 365, Azure and CRM Online. The reason for that very impressive growth was given by Satya Nadella in the much earlier Q2FY15 report as:

Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite is one key of product innovation that I would like to highlight given the growth and uniqueness of our offering. Microsoft offers a comprehensive solution that brings together mobile device management, mobile application management, hybrid identity management and data protection into a unified offering via EMS.

Office 365 now includes new app experiences on all phones and tablets for mobile productivity.  Further, we have released completely new scenarios. This includes Office Sway for visualizing and sharing ideas; Delve, to help search and discover content; Office 365 Groups to make it easier to collaborate; andOffice 365 Video for secure media streaming for businesses.

Finally, we continue to invest in enterprise value by integrating MDM and the Enterprise Mobility Suite into Office 365; new encryption technologies and compliance certifications; and new eDiscovery capabilities in Exchange.

…

Overall at the highest level, our strategy here is to make sure that the Microsoft Services i.e. cloud services be it Azure, Office 365, CRM Online or Enterprise Mobility Suite are covering all the devices out there in the marketplace. So that, that way we maximize the opportunity we have for each of these subscription and capacity based services.

2.1 Enterprise cloud leadership

Now let’s get into the specifics of the Intelligent Cloud, an area of massive opportunity, as we are clearly one of the two enterprise cloud leaders. Companies looking to digitally transform need a trusted cloud partner and turn to Microsoft. As a result, Azure revenue and usage again grew by more than 100% this quarter. We see customers choose Microsoft for three reasons. They want a cloud provider that offers solutions that reflect the realities of today’s world and their enterprise-grade needs. They want higher level services to drive digital transformation, and they want a cloud open to developers of all types. Let me expand on each.

To start, a wide variety of customers turn to Azure because of their specific real-world needs. Multinationals choose us because we are the only hybrid and hyperscale cloud spanning multiple jurisdictions. We cover more countries and regions than any other cloud provider, from North America to Asia to Europe to Latin America. Our cloud respects data sovereignty and makes it possible for an enterprise application to work across these regions and jurisdictions. More than 80% of the world’s largest banks are Azure customers because of our leadership support for regulatory requirements, advanced security, and commitment to privacy. Large ISVs like SAP and Citrix as well as startups like Sprinklr also choose Azure because of our global reach and a broad set of platform services. Last week GE announced it will adopt our cloud for its IoT approach.

Next, Azure customers also value our unique higher-level services. Now at 33,000, we nearly doubled in one year the number of companies worldwide that have selected our Enterprise Mobility Solutions. The Dow Chemical Company leverages EMS along with Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics to give its thousands of employees secure real-time access to data and apps from anywhere.

Just yesterday, we announced Boeing will use Azure, our IoT suite, and Cortana Intelligence to drive digital transformation in commercial aviation, with connected airline systems optimization, predictive maintenance, and much more. This builds on great momentum in IoT, including our work with Rolls-Royce, Schneider Electric, and others.

This is great progress, but our ambitions are set even higher. Our Intelligent Cloud also enables cognitive services. Cortana Intelligence Suite offers machine learning capabilities and advanced predictive analytics. Customers like Jabil Circuit, Fruit of the Loom, Land O’Lakes, LIBER already realize the benefits of these new capabilities.

Lastly, central to our Intelligent Cloud ambition is providing developers with the tools and capabilities they need to build apps and services for the platforms and devices of their choice. We have the best support for what I would say is the most open platform for all developers. Not only is .NET first class but Linux is first class, Java is first class. The new Azure Container service cuts across both containers running on Windows, running across Linux. So again, it speaks to the enterprise reality. .NET Core 1.0 for open source and our ongoing work with companies such as Red Hat, Docker, and Mesosphere also reflects significant progress on this front. We continue to see traction from open source, with nearly a third of customer virtual machines on Azure running Linux.

So those would be the places where we are fairly differentiated, and that’s what you see us gaining both for enterprise customers and ISVs.

On the server side, premium server revenue grew double digits in constant currency year over year. New SQL Server 2016 helps us expand into new markets with built-in advanced analytics and unparalleled performance. More than 15,000 customers, including over 50% of the Fortune 500, have registered for the private preview of SQL Server for Linux. And we’re not slowing down. We will launch Windows Server 2016 and System Server 2016 later this year.

2.2 Every customer is also an ISV

One of the phenomena now is that pretty much anyone who is a customer of Azure is also in some form an ISV, and that’s no longer just limited to people who are “in the classic tech industry” or the software business. So every customer who starts off consuming Azure is also turning what is their IP in most cases into an ISV solution, which ultimately will even participate in AppSource. So at least the vision that we have is that every customer is a digital company that will have a digital IP component to it, and that we want to be able to partner with them in pretty unique ways.

That’s the same case with GE. It’s the same case with Boeing. It’s the same case with Schneider Electric or ABB or any one of the customers we are working with because they all are taking some of their assets and converting them into SaaS applications on Azure. And that’s something that we will in fact have distribution agreements with.

And AppSource is a pretty major announcement for us because we essentially created for SaaS applications and infrastructure applications a way to distribute their applications through us and our channel. And I think it makes in fact our cloud more attractive to many of them because of that. So we look – I think going forward, you’ll look to see – or you’ll see us do much more of this with many other customers of ours.

2.3 Hyperscale-plus-hybrid approach with annuity focus enabling cloud lead conversation with customers

The focus for us is in what I describe as this hyperscale-plus-hybrid approach when you think about the current approach, which is pretty unique to us. Overall, I believe this hyperscale plus hybrid architecturally helps us a lot with enterprise customers because we meet them where their realities are today and also the digital transformation needs going forward, so that’s one massive advantage we have.

And the way we track progress is to see how is our annuity growth of our server business, and how is our cloud growth. And if you look at this last quarter, our annuity grew double digits and our cloud grew triple digits. And that’s a pretty healthy growth rate, and that’s something that by design both in terms of the technical architecture as well as the traction we have in the marketplace and our sales efforts and so on are playing out well, and we are very bullish about that going forward.

The Transactional business is much more volatile because of the macro environment, IT budgets, and also the secular shift to the cloud. The question again that gets asked is about the cannibalization. But if you look at Boeing or you look at any of the other examples that I talk about when it comes to the cloud, our servers never did what these customers are now doing in our cloud. So at a fundamental long-term secular basis, we have new growth, new workloads, and that’s what we are focused on, and that’s a much bigger addressable market than anything our Transactional Server business had in the past.

[Amy E. Hood – Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President:]
The first thing really that I think Satya and I both focus on every quarter, every month, is how much of our business are we continuing to shift to annuity and specifically to the cloud. We structure all of our motions at this company, from how we engineer to how we do our go-to-markets to how we think about sales engagement to how we do our investments, fundamentally toward that long-term structural transition in the market.

In terms of server products and services, I tend to think of it as the all-up growth. It’s really about growing the cloud, growing the hybrid, and then whatever happens in the Transactional business happens.

And so to your question on Transactional performance, there were some deals that didn’t get done in Q3 that got done in Q4, and there were some deals done in Q4 on the Office side with large companies that I’m thrilled by. But at the same time, we still will focus on those deals moving to the cloud over time. And so this volatility that we are going to see because of macro and because of budget constraints, especially on Transactional, we will focus on because we expect excellent execution and have accountability to do that in the field. But our first priority, every time, is to make sure we are focused on annuity growth and digital transformation at our company, which is best done through that motion.

In terms of the sales motion they are absolutely incented more towards cloud versus Transactional going into this year.

I do believe that every conversation that we’re having with customers is cloud-led. That cloud-led conversation and making a plan for customers to best change and transform their own business certainly is a far more in-depth one than on occasion is required by long-time Transactional purchasers, especially in Office, as an example, because what we’re talking about now is really pivoting your business for the long term.

And so I’m sure there are examples where that has elongated the sales cycle, for good reason. But I would generally point back and say most of these are driven at the structural level, which is – structurally over time, on-premises Transactional business will move to the cloud or to a hybrid structure through an annuity revenue stream.
[END BY Amy E. Hood]

2.4 Meeting cloud needs of customers where they are

The position that we have taken is that we want to serve customers where they are and not assume very simplistically that the digital sovereignty needs of customers can be met out of a fewer data center approach. Because right now, given the secular trend to move to the cloud across all of the regulated industries across the globe, we think it’s wiser for us and our investors long term to be able to meet them where they are. And that’s what you see us. We are the only cloud that operates in China under Chinese law, the only cloud that operates in Germany under German law. And these are very critical competitive advantages to us.

And so we will track that, and we will be very demand driven. So in this case we’re not taking these positions of which regions to open and where to open them well in advance of our demand. If anything, I think our cycle times have significantly come down. So it will be demand-driven, but I don’t want to essentially put a cap because if the opportunity arises, and for us it’s a high ROI decision to open a new region, we will do so.

3. Windows strategy to achieve progress in More Personal Computing

For initial and additional details available earlier see my earlier posts:
– Windows Embedded is an enterprise business now, like the whole Windows business, with Handheld and Compact versions to lead in the overall Internet of Things market as well as of June 8, 2013
– How the device play will unfold in the new Microsoft organization? as of July 14, 2013
– With Android and forked Android smartphones as the industry standard Nokia relegated to a niche market status while Apple should radically alter its previous premium strategy for long term as of August 17, 2013
– Windows [inc. Phone] 8.x chances of becoming the alternative platform to iOS and Android: VERY SLIM as it is even more difficult for Microsoft now than any time before as of August 20, 2013
– Leading PC vendors of the past: Go enterprise or die! as of November 7, 2013
– Xamarin: C# developers of native “business” and “mobile workforce” applications now can easily work cross-platform, for Android and iOS clients as well as of November 15, 2013
– Microsoft is transitioning to a world with more usage and more software driven value add (rather than the old device driven world) in mobility and the cloud, the latter also helping to grow the server business well above its peers as of April 25, 2014
– Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is the ultimate tablet product from Microsoft. What the market response will be? as of May 21, 2014
– Windows 10 Technical Preview: Terry Myerson and Joe Belfiore on the future of Windows as of October 1, 2014
– The Era Of Sub-$90 Windows 8.1 Phones in U.S. as of October 3, 2014
– Windows 10 is here to help regain Microsoft’s leading position in ICT as of July 31, 2015
– Microsoft and partners to capitalize on Continuum for Phones instead of the exited Microsoft phone business as of June 5, 2016

We have increased Windows 10 monthly active devices and are now at more than 350 million. This is the fastest adoption rate of any prior Windows release. While we are proud of these results, given changes to our phone plan, we changed how we will assess progress. Going forward, we will track progress by regularly reporting the growth of Windows 10 monthly active devices in addition to progress on three aspects of our Windows strategy:

3.1 Deliver more value and innovation, particularly for enterprise customers

We continue to pursue our goal of moving people from needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows. In two weeks, we will launch Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which takes a significant step forward in security. We are also extending Windows Hello to support apps and websites and delivering a range of new features like Windows Ink and updates to Microsoft Edge. We expect these advances will drive increased adoption of Windows 10, particularly in the enterprise, in the coming year. We already have strong traction, with over 96% of our enterprise customers piloting Windows 10.

3.2 Grow new monetization through services across our unified Windows platform

As we grow our install base and engagement, we generate more opportunity for Microsoft and our ecosystem. Bing profitability continues to grow, with greater than 40% of the search revenue in June from Windows 10 devices. Bing PC query share in the United States approached 22% this quarter, not including volume from AOL and Yahoo!. The Cortana search box has over 100 million monthly active users, with 8 billion questions asked to date.

We continue to drive growth in gaming by connecting fans on Xbox Live across Windows 10, iOS, and Android. Just this quarter we launched our Minecraft Realm subscription on Android and iOS. Overall engagement on Xbox Live is at record levels, with more than 49 million monthly active users, up 33% year over year. At E3 we announced our biggest lineup of exclusive games ever for Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs. And we announced Xbox Play Anywhere titles, where gamers can buy a game once and play it on both their Windows 10 PC and Xbox One. We also announced two new members of the Xbox One console family, the Xbox One S and Project Scorpio.

The Windows Store continues to grow, with new universal Windows apps like Bank of America, Roku, SiriusXM, Instagram, Facebook, Wine, Hulu, and popular PC games like Quantum Break.

3.3 Innovate in new device categories in partnership with our OEMs

Our hardware partners are embracing the new personal computing vision, with over 1,500 new devices designed to take advantage of Windows 10 innovations like Touch, Pen, Hello, and better performance and power efficiency.

Microsoft’s family of Surface devices continues to drive category growth, and we are reaching more commercial customers of all sizes with the support of our channel partners. We recently announced new Surface enterprise initiatives with IBM and Booz Allen Hamilton to enable more customer segments. Also in the past year, we grew our commercial Surface partner channel from over 150 to over 10,000.

Lastly this quarter, more and more developers and enterprise customers got to experience two entirely new device categories from Microsoft Surface Hub and Microsoft HoloLens. While we are still in the early days of both of these devices, we are seeing great traction with both enterprise customers and developers, making us optimistic about future growth.

Microsoft chairman: The transition to a subscription-based cloud business isn’t fast enough. Revamp the sales force for cloud-based selling.

June 6, 2016 5:29 pm / Leave a comment

See also my earlier posts:
– John W. Thompson, Chairman of the Board of Microsoft: the least recognized person in the radical two-men shakeup of the uppermost leadership, ‘Experiencing the Cloud’, February 6, 2014
– Satya Nadella on “Digital Work and Life Experiences” supported by “Cloud OS” and “Device OS and Hardware” platforms–all from Microsoft, ‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 23, 2014

May 17, 2016: John Thompson: Microsoft Should Move Faster on Cloud Plan in an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang on “Bloomberg West”

The focus is very-very good right now. We’re focused on cloud, on the hydrid model of the cloud. We’re focused on the application services we can deliver not just in the cloud but on multiple devices. If ever I would like to see something change, it’s more about pace. From my days at IBM [Thompson spent 28 years at IBM before becoming chief executive at Symantec] I can remember we never seemed to be running or moving fast enough. That is always the case in the established enterprise. While you believe that you’re moving fast in fact you’re not moving as fast as a startup.

June 2, 2016: Microsoft Ramps Up Its Cloud Efforts Bloomberg Intelligence’s Mandeep Singh reports on “Bloomberg Markets”

If you look at their segment revenue 43% from Windows and hardware devices. That part is the one where it is hard to come up with a cloud strategy to really kind of migrate that segment to the cloud very quickly. The infrastructure side is 30%, that is taken care of, and the Office is the other 30% that they have a good mix. That is really the other 43% revenue they have to figure out how to accelerate that transition to the cloud.

Then Bloomberg’s June 2, 2016 article (written by Dina Bass) came out with the following verdict:

Microsoft Board Mulls Sales Force Revamp to Speed Shift to Cloud 

Board members at Microsoft Corp. are grappling with a growing concern: that the company’s traditional software business, which makes up the majority of its sales, could evaporate in a matter of years — and Chairman John Thompson is pushing for a more aggressive shift into newer cloud-based products.

Thompson said he and the board are pleased with a push by Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella to make more money from software and services delivered over the internet, but want it to move much faster. They’re considering ideas like increasing spending, overhauling the sales force and managing partnerships differently to step up the pace.

The cloud growth isn’t merely nice to have — it’s critical against the backdrop of declining demand for what’s known as on-premise software programs, the more traditional approach that involves installing software on a company’s own computers and networks. No one knows exactly how quickly sales of those legacy offerings will drop off, Thompson said, but it’s “inevitable that part of our business will be under continued pressure.”

The board members’ concern was born from experience. Thompson recounts how fellow director Chuck Noski, a former chief financial officer of AT&T, watched the telecom carrier’s traditional wireline business evaporate in just three years as the world shifted to mobile. Now, Noski and Thompson are asking whether something similar could happen to Microsoft.

“What’s the likelihood that could happen with on-prem versus cloud? That in three years, we look up and it’s gone?” Thompson said in an interview, snapping his fingers to make the point.

Small, but Growing

Nadella has said the company is on track to make its forecast for $20 billion in annualized sales from commercial cloud products in fiscal 2018. Still, Thompson said, the cloud business could be even further along, and the software maker should have started its push much earlier. Commercial cloud services revenue has posted impressive growth rates — with Azure product sales rising more than 100 percent quarterly — but the total business contributed just $5.8 billion of Microsoft’s $93.6 billion in sales in the latest fiscal year.

Thompson praised the technology behind smaller cloud products, such as Power BI tools for business analysis and data visualization and the enterprise mobile management service, which delivers apps and data to various corporate devices. But the latter, for example, brings in $300 million a year — just a sliver of overall annual revenue, which will soon top $100 billion, Thompson said.

The board is examining whether Microsoft has invested enough in its complete cloud lineup, Thompson said. It’s not just about developing better cloud technology — it’s a question of how the company sells those products and its strategy for recruiting partners to resell Microsoft’s services and build their own offerings on top of them. Persuading partners to develop compatible applications is a strong point for cloud market leader Amazon.com Inc., he said.

Thompson declined to be specific about what the company might change in sales and partnerships, but he said the company may need to “re-imagine” those organizations. “The question is, should it be more?” he said. “If you believe we need to run harder, run faster, be less risk-averse as a mantra, the question is how much more do you do.”

Cloud Partnerships

Analysts say Microsoft should seek to develop a deeper bench of partners making software for Azure and consultants to install and manage those services for customers who need the help. Microsoft is working on this, but is behind Amazon Web Services, said Lydia Leong, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

“They are nowhere near at the same level of sophistication, and the Microsoft partners are mostly new to the Azure ecosystem, so they don’t know it as well,” she said. “If you’re a customer and you want to migrate to AWS, you have this massive army that can help you.”

In the sales force, Microsoft’s representatives need more experience in cloud deals — which are generally subscription-based rather than one-time purchases — and how they differ from traditional software contracts, said Matt McIlwain, managing director at Seattle’s Madrona Venture Partners. “They haven’t made enough of a transition to a cloud-based selling motion,” he said. “It’s still a work in progress.”

Microsoft declined to comment on the company’s cloud strategy or any changes to sales and partnerships for this story, and director Noski couldn’t be reached for comment.

One-Time Purchases

The company’s dependence on demand for traditional software was painfully apparent in its most recent quarterly report, when revenue was weighed down by weakness in its transactional business, or one-time purchases of software that customers store and run on their own PCs and networks. Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood in April said that lackluster transactional sales were likely to continue.

Microsoft’s two biggest cloud businesses are the Azure web-based service, which trails top provider Amazon but leads Google and International Business Machines Corp., and the Office 365 cloud versions of e-mail, collaboration software, word-processing and spreadsheet software. Microsoft’s key on-premise products include Windows Server and traditional versions of Office and the SQL database server.

Slumps like last quarter’s hurt even more amid the company’s shift to the cloud, which has brought a lot of changes to its financial reporting. For cloud deals, revenue is recognized over the term of the deal rather than providing an up-front boost. They’re also lower-margin businesses, squeezed by the cost of building and maintaining data centers to deliver the services. Microsoft’s gross margin dropped from 80 percent in fiscal 2010 to 65 percent in the year that ended June 30, 2015.

“This business growing incredibly well, but the gross margin of that is substantially lower than their core products of the olden days,” said Anurag Rana, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “How low do they go?”

‘Different Model’ [of doing business for subscription-based software]

It’s jarring for some investors, but the other option is worse, said Thompson.

“That’s a very different model for Microsoft and one our investors are going to have to suck it up and embrace, because the alternative is don’t embrace the cloud and you wake up one day and you look just like — guess who?” Thompson doesn’t finish the sentence, but makes it clear he’s referring to IBM, the company where he spent more than 27 years, which he says is “not relevant anymore.” IBM declined to comment.

The pressure is good for Microsoft, Thompson said — pressure tends to result in change.

“You can re-imagine things when you’re stressed. It’s a lot easier to do it when you’re stressed because you feel compelled to do something,” Thompson said. “I see a lot of stress at Microsoft.”

Windows 10 is here to help regain Microsoft’s leading position in ICT

July 31, 2015 4:16 pm / Leave a comment

My verdict: The 3 phase launch strategy is almost flawless, as well as the functionality of the product. So the remaining question is whether the execution will be as flawless or not?

July 29, 2015, BBC News: Microsoft boss Nadella on Windows 10

From this interview 2 things are very important to remember:

  1. Cortana is the near term means to generate excitement for the Windows 10.
  2. Then the Hololens is to be launched within a year to drive that excitement even further into the augmented and virtual reality scenario which is expected to generate $150 billion in combined annual revenue by 2020, according to Digi-Capital, a research and advising firm.

Finally in the end of that interview Nadella is mentioning another important point:

It is a 5 year journey. It’s a beginning. Even the smart phone journey with touch was a 7 year – 8 year journey. So this is how you should think about these fundamental changes.

With all the client markets out of their real growth period such a way of thinking is the only possible one. See the specific posts on the client categories, with additional remarks highlighted here from them:

  • Aug 5, 2015: PC Market Trends is particularly drawing the attention to the fact that phones and tablets with detachable keyboards, i.e. 2-in-1 devices running either Windows or Android are remaining a competitive issue for the category.
  • Aug 4, 2015: Tablet and smartphone market trends on the other hand is emphasizing that the key going forward for the Windows will be if the coming wave of 2-in-1 detachable tablets (expected to be on the market in Q4) is a hit with consumers or if they go the way of the netbook-style laptops. This will determine how much the current Q2 2015 9% market share (which was just 5% in Q2 2014) of Windows-branded tablets could increase with the new Windows 10.
    Investors.com comments on tablet and smartphone market trends -- Q2'2015

Additional readings/information on Windows 10 Mobile:

  • July 29, 2015: Windows 10 coming soon to Lumia smartphones – Microsoft – Global which has indicated that “The following Lumia smartphones will receive a free upgrade when available: Lumia 430, Lumia 435, Lumia 532, Lumia 535, Lumia 540, Lumia 640, Lumia 640 XL, Lumia 735, Lumia 830, and Lumia 930. … In order to upgrade to Windows 10, your Lumia device will need to have the Lumia Denim software update [Jan 7, 2015] installed.“
  • Aug 4, 2015 8:03 tweet by Gabriel Aul, Vice President, WDG Engineering Systems team, Re: “No new builds today …  Sooo, maybe on Friday? And what build is currently in testing? 10240 or even newer?”: “It will be a few more days. We’re moving to a new branch for [Windows 10] Mobile and that takes a bit of prep. Newer than 10240.” Note that people on the Insider program currently using the 10166 version.
  • Aug 4, 2015 8:20 tweet by Gabriel Aul, Vice President, WDG Engineering Systems team: “10240 has a blocking bug for [Windows 10] Mobile, we need a newer build with the fix.“

Remark as of Aug 5, 2015: The Windows 10 launch caused below average rate of interest. One evidence is this same July 31 post. It had just 5 views so far and at least 3 of them were based on my Hungarian Facebook post. Even my “Embedded Android — a VIA Technologies …” post of July 28 had 12 views just in the first 3 days and none of them were generated from my Facebook page as I’ve not posted there about that.

July 29, 2015: Windows 10 UK Launch Party by Microsoft UK for a “launch atmosphere”

IMHO Microsoft’s irresistible message is:

The upgrade to Windows 10 is free within the first year, and once you’ve upgraded it remains free on your device for life!

So I did the upgrade for both my devices yesterday, and it went very smoothly. One 2GB “classic” Toshiba laptop with Win7 on it, and a 4GB Lenovo Flex 2 dual-mode laptop with Win8.1.  The upgrade took about 3 hours on each, and now I am absolutely satisfied with the new Windows on them in all respects. Recommending the upgrade for everyone ASAP.

July 21, 2015: CEO Satya Nadella on “some amount of delay due to Windows 10 on the OEM side” in the Windows business, from Q4 2015 Earning Call Transcript (the 2 video inserts are mine), in order to understand Microsoft’s business strategy with the Windows 10 launch:

The way the Windows ecosystem works is there are phases to it … in some sense we’ve taken a very different approach with this Windows-as-a-service even when it comes to OEM relations and how they’re able to co-create the products with us. … there are three distinct phases:

  1. The first phase is what I will describe as the upgrade phase. That’s what starts in a week’s time, and that is a more retail execution and upgrade.
    July 28, 2015: 10 Reasons to Upgrade to Windows 10: WINDOWS STORE (the other 9 you can find in the 10 Reasons to Upgrade to Windows 10 playlist of the Windows YouTube channel)

    July 28, 2015: How to customize the Start Menu after Upgrading to Windows 10 by Scott Hanselman from Microsoft
    for more information see Scott’s Getting Started with Windows 10 post containing other very useful videos as well
  2. Then come the fall, you will see the devices from all the OEMs going into the holiday quarter.
  3. And then the enterprise upgrades; in fact, we have a release of enterprise features, which I mentioned in my script, which will ship in that timeframe. And I expect piloting to start and deployments to start in the second half of the fiscal year.

So that’s how I would think about the OEM as well as enterprise adoption. So my bullishness [in business sense] for Windows 10 is more in the second half of the fiscal year, and of course it will build. It will build starting in a week’s time in retail and in the upgrades, but I see this in three phases.

July 28, 2015: Microsoft Windows 10 Official Demonstration by Ger Lynch from Microsoft Ireland for a mix of a salespitch (in good sense) and a walkthrough:

July 21, 2015: CEO Satya Nadella on “the new strategy around the phone business” and “how … that business trending over a longer period of time” from the Q4 2015 Earning Call Transcript (for the phone-specific Win10 information read the Windows 10 coming soon to Lumia smartphones page by Microsoft and note the “In order to upgrade to Windows 10, your Lumia device will need to have the Lumia Denim software update installed.” warning):

The big shift that we are making when it comes to phones is to not think about phones in isolation. That’s perhaps the biggest shift because I think about Windows 10 in its entirety, the Windows ecosystem in its entirety.

We clearly are going to have premium first-party portfolio, and you’ve seen some of the numbers, some of the progress we have made in Surface. I feel that we have a formula there that I would like to apply more broadly in terms of growing, just delivering innovation, growing our own economic return for it, stimulating demand, creating categories. All of that is what I want to do broadly. And it applies to phones, it applies to Surface hardware, it applies to Hololens, and that’s how I view it.

I believe our participation in the phone segment by itself with Windows phones and Lumia phones being there is important, and that’s why we picked the three areas where we have differentiation and we want to focus on it.

  1. We’re going to have great flagship phones for Windows 10. That’s actually a segment we don’t today have good devices, and we hope to change that with Windows 10.
  2. We have in fact good traction in the business segment. This is business customers who are actually buying phone devices, which is basically a radio with essentially a smartphone to be able to deploy their line-of-business applications. That’s where we have pretty unparalleled value, which is we have Visual Studio Online and some of the tools I talked about, so you can generate these apps at a low cost of ownership, manage them, secure them, and deploy them to our phone endpoints, and then of course, management and security. So that’s a place where we want to continue to focus.
  3. And in the value smartphones, that’s the place where I want us to be much more efficient. We clearly have some value to add there because of the uniqueness of Office and Skype and our services. But at the same time, I think we want to be smart about how many of these phones do we want to generate, how many, which price points we want to participate. That’s where you will see the most significant operational changes from how we operated last year to the coming year.

May 4, 2015: Satya Nadella’s Keynote from Ignite 2015 on the Windows Community YouTube channel (see also the Microsoft announces new solutions
to empower IT professionals press release for more information) in order to understand the place of Windows 10 in the overall strategic setup of the company 

Microsoft - The 3 interlocking ambitions the Microsoft CEO talked about at Microsoft Iginite held on May 4-8, 2015 in Chicago

The 3 “interlocking ambitions” the Microsoft CEO talked about at Microsoft Iginite held on May 4-8, 2015 in Chicago

July 21, 2015: CEO Satya Nadella on Microsoft’s “third bold ambition to create more personal computing experiences with Windows and our devices” as the company’s equally important strategic ambition (in addition to “reinventing productivity in business processes” and “building the intelligent cloud platform with Azure“) from the Q4 2015 Earning Call Transcript

I am thrilled we are just days away from the start of Windows 10. It’s the first step towards our goal of 1 billion Windows 10 active devices in the fiscal year 2018. Our aspiration with Windows 10 is to move people from meeting to choosing to loving Windows. Based on feedback from more than 5 million people who have been using Windows 10, we believe people will love the familiarity of Windows 10 and the innovation. It’s safe, secure, and always up to date. Windows 10 is more personal and more productive with Cortana, Office, universal apps, and Continuum. And Windows 10 will deliver innovative new experiences like Inking on Microsoft Edge and gaming across Xbox and PCs, and also opens up entirely new device categories such as Hololens.

Windows 10 will deliver significant value to enterprise customers as well. Windows 10 provides advanced security capabilities with additional features for hardware-based security, mobile work and data protection. It also provides a single device management platform across all devices, from phones to laptops to Internet of Things devices. And Windows 10 helps enterprises stay up to date with Windows Update for Business and Windows Store for Business.

While the PC ecosystem has been under pressure recently, I do believe that Windows 10 will broaden our economic opportunity and return Windows to growth.

  1. First, we have an OEM ecosystem that is creating exciting new hardware designs for Windows 10. In fact, our OEM partners have over 2,000 distinct devices or configurations already in testing for Windows 10 upgrades as well as hundreds of new hardware designs. We are delighted that the first of these exciting new devices will start to be available on Windows 10 launch day, and by this holiday we will be selling the widest range of Windows hardware ever available.
  2. Second, we will generate new growth through gross margin on our own differentiated first-party premium device portfolio. We will also significantly reduce our losses on the phone by operating more effectively and efficiently with a more focused portfolio.
  3. Third, we will grow monetization opportunities across the commercial and consumer space. In the enterprise, customers will continue to value our unparalleled management security, app dev, and servicing capability. And for consumers, Windows 10 creates monetization opportunities with store, search, and gaming. We are confident that these are the right levers to revitalize Windows and restore growth. The progress we made this quarter and the forward-looking guidance that Amy will share shows the opportunity for renewed growth is real.

In hardware, both Surface and Xbox had an incredible Q4.

  1. We more than doubled Surface revenue to nearly $900 million this quarter, capping off a year in which it delivered more than $3.6 billion in revenue. Both consumers and enterprise customers love this device. Surface is clearly a product where we have gotten the formula right, earned fans, and can apply this formula to other parts of the hardware portfolio.
  2. Gaming is an important scenario for Windows 10, and our success with Xbox this quarter gives us a strong starting position heading into launch. Xbox Live users grew 22% this quarter and logged nearly 3.5 billion hours of gameplay. Our growing fan base is excited for the best games lineup in our history. All of this comes together with Windows 10, when fans can connect with each other, stream all of their Xbox One games to Windows 10, and experience the best virtual reality platform given our partnership with Oculus Rift and Valve.
  3. In search, Bing will now power both differentiated experiences on Windows 10 such as Cortana as well as search and search advertising across the AOL portfolio sites in addition to the partnership we already have with Yahoo!, Amazon, and Apple. With advertising revenue growth of 21% year over year, Bing will transition to profitability in the coming fiscal year.

July 28, 2015: Windows 10 available in 190 countries as a free upgrade Microsoft news release for the summary of what has been launched worldwide overall

REDMOND, Wash. — July 28, 2015 — Microsoft Corp. announced that Windows 10 will become available Wednesday as a free upgrade1 or with new PCs and tablets. Windows 10 includes innovations such as Cortana,2 an Xbox app and Microsoft Edge for a familiar, yet more personal and productive, experience. The most secure Windows ever, Windows 10 is delivered as a service and kept automatically up-to-date with innovations and security updates. Windows 10 offers one experience that will become available on the broadest range of devices, including PCs, tablets, phones, Raspberry Pi, Xbox One, HoloLens and more — with more than 2,000 devices or configurations already in testing. The new Windows Store and Windows Software Development Kit also become available Wednesday, opening the door to new and innovative app experiences on Windows 10.

People around the world will celebrate the launch of Windows 10 Wednesday at fan celebrations in 13 countries and via a new yearlong initiative to celebrate people and organizations making a difference around the world. Microsoft encourages people to share how they plan to #UpgradeYourWorld and to vote for a global nonprofit to receive a cash donation by simply mentioning the nonprofit in a post on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter and using the hashtags #UpgradeYourWorld and #vote. More information on Upgrade Your World can be found at http://www.windows.com/upgradeyourworld.

“A new era of Windows starts today. From the beginning, Windows 10 has been unique — built with feedback from over 5 million fans, delivered as a service and offered as a free upgrade,” said Terry Myerson, executive vice president, Windows and Devices Group, at Microsoft. “Windows 10 delivers on our more personal computing vision, with a natural, mobile and trusted experience. Along with our partners, we’re excited to deliver the best Windows ever, which will empower people and organizations around the world to do great things.”

Windows 10: Best Windows ever

Windows 10 is fast and familiar — with the return of the Start menu and Live Tiles for instant, streaming updates of what matters most. Windows 10 is the most secure Windows Microsoft has ever released, with enhancements to Windows Defender and SmartScreen to help safeguard against viruses, malware and phishing and innovations such as Windows Hello, which offers a fast, secured, password-free way to log in.3 Keeping up-to-date is also simple, as free updates will help people stay current with the latest features and security updates for the supported lifetime of the device.

Windows 10 is more personal and productive, with voice, pen and gesture inputs for natural interaction with PCs. It’s designed to work with Office and Skype and allows you to switch between apps and stay organized with Snap and Task View. Windows 10 offers many innovative experiences and devices, including the following:

  • Cortana, the personal digital assistant, makes it easy to find the right information at the right time.
  • New Microsoft Edge browser lets people quickly browse, read, and mark up and share the Web.
  • The integrated Xbox app delivers the Xbox experience to Windows 10, bringing together friends, games and accomplishments across Xbox One and Windows 10 devices.
  • Continuum optimizes apps and experiences beautifully across touch and desktop modes.
  • Built-in apps including Photos; Maps; Microsoft’s new music app, Groove; and Movies & TV offer entertainment and productivity options. With OneDrive, files can be easily shared and kept up-to-date across all devices.
  • A Microsoft Phone Companion app enables iPhones, Android or Windows phones to work seamlessly with Windows 10 devices.
  • The all new Office Mobile apps for Windows 10 tablets are available today in the Windows Store.4 Built for work on-the-go, the Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps offer a consistent, touch-first experience for small tablets. For digital note-taking needs, the full-featured OneNote app comes pre-installed with Windows 10. The upcoming release of the Office desktop apps (Office 2016) will offer the richest feature set for professional content creation. Designed for the precision of a keyboard and mouse, these apps will be optimized for large-screen PCs, laptops and 2-in-1 devices such as the Surface Pro.

Windows 10: Best platform for businesses

Feedback from millions of IT pros has shaped Windows 10, the most extensively tested version of Windows ever. Ready for corporate deployments, Windows 10 will help companies protect against modern cyberattacks, deliver experiences their employees will love and enable continuous innovation with a platform that keeps companies up-to-date with the latest technology. Businesses will be able to control the frequency of their updates and select the features and functionality that are right for each group of their employees.

Windows 10 includes built-in, enterprise-grade security, so customers can replace passwords with more secure options, protect corporate data and corporate identities, and run only the software they trust. New management and deployment tools simplify device management, help lower costs, and enable companies to power their business with the enterprise strength of the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Top apps available on Windows 10

The new Windows Store will open Wednesday and begin accepting new apps for Windows 10. The Windows Store offers one-stop shopping for popular free and paid apps, games, movies, TV shows and the latest music, which can work across all Windows 10 devices. The new Windows Store is the only store where people can use Cortana to control apps with their voice5 and get real-time notifications on their app tiles. All Windows Store content is certified by Microsoft to help keep devices safer. In addition to existing Windows 8.1 apps such as Netflix, Flipboard, Mint.com, “Asphalt 8: Airborne” and The Weather Channel, the Windows Store provides a constant stream of new and updated Universal Windows Apps and games, including Twitter, “Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition beta,” Hulu, iHeartRadio, USA TODAY, “Candy Crush Saga” and others including WeChat and QQ, which will launch soon.6

Easy upgrade, devices now available

Upgrading to Windows 10 is easy for customers running a genuine Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 PC or tablet. Starting Wednesday, people who reserved their upgrade to Windows 10 will be notified in waves when their upgrade is ready to be installed. For business customers, Windows 10 is available to start deploying within their work environments, and starting Aug. 1, organizations that have volume licensing can upgrade to Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education.

Retail partners are ready to help people upgrade to Windows 10 with our largest tech bench program ever, including more than 100,000 trained retailers and tens of thousands of stores around the world. Free upgrade programs will be available Wednesday, with Windows 10 software becoming broadly available in retail stores around the world between mid-August and September. Devices running Windows 10 will be available in some retail stores on Wednesday, with many, many more devices to become available in the weeks and months ahead.

Microsoft has also worked closely with retailers to introduce programs to help people easily upgrade, including Best Buy, Bic Camera, Croma, Currys/PC World, Darty, Elkjøp, Fnac, Jarrir, Incredible Connection, Media Markt, Staples, Yamada Denki, Yodobashi and many more leading retailers from around the world.

Information on upgrading, new and compatible devices, and apps for Windows can be found at http://www.windows.com. Additional information and media assets are available at http://blogs.windows.com/launch.

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

1 Limited time free upgrade offer for qualified and genuine Windows 7 and 8/8.1 devices. Hardware and software requirements apply; see http://www.windows.com/windows10upgrade for details.

2 Cortana available in select markets at launch; experience may vary by region and device.

3 Windows Hello requires specialized hardware, including fingerprint reader, illuminated IR sensor or other biometric sensors.

4 An Office 365 subscription is required to edit Office apps on Windows 10 PCs or larger tablets.

5 Hardware dependent.

6 Some apps and content sold separately. App and content availability and experience may vary by region and device.

Scott Guthrie about changes under Nadella, the competition with Amazon, and what differentiates Microsoft’s cloud products

October 2, 2014 12:03 pm / Leave a comment

Scott Guthrie Microsoft

Scott Guthrie Executive Vice President Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group As executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group, Scott Guthrie is responsible for the company’s cloud infrastructure, server, database, management and development tools businesses. His engineering team builds Microsoft Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, Active Directory, System Center, Visual Studio and .NET. Prior to leading the Cloud and Enterprise group, Guthrie helped lead Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud platform. Since joining the company in 1997, he has made critical contributions to many of Microsoft’s key cloud, server and development technologies and was one of the original founders of the .NET project. Guthrie graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Duke University. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two children. Source: Microsoft

From The cloud, not Windows 10, is key to Microsoft’s growth [Fortune, Oct 1, 2014]

  • about changes under Nadella:

Well, I don’t know if I’d say there’s been a big change from that perspective. I mean, I think obviously we’ve been saying for a while this mobile-first, cloud-first…”devices and services” is maybe another way to put it. That’s been our focus as a company even before Satya became CEO. From a strategic perspective, I think we very much have been focused on cloud now for a couple of years. I wouldn’t say this now means, “Oh, now we’re serious about cloud.” I think we’ve been serious about cloud for quite a while.

More information: Satya Nadella on “Digital Work and Life Experiences” supported by “Cloud OS” and “Device OS and Hardware” platforms–all from Microsoft [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 23, 2014]

  • about the competition with Amazon:

… I think there’s certainly a first mover advantage that they’ve been able to benefit from. … In terms of where we’re at today, we’ve got about 57% of the Fortune 500 that are now deployed on Microsoft Azure. … Ultimately the way we think we do that [gain on the current leader] is by having a unique set of offerings and a unique point of view that is differentiated.

  • about uniqueness of Microsoft offering:

One is, we’re focused on and delivering a hyper-scale cloud platform with our Azure service that’s deployed around the world. …

… that geographic footprint, as well as the economies of scale that you get when you install and have that much capacity, puts you in a unique position from an economic and from a customer capability perspective …

Where I think we differentiate then, versus the other two, is around two characteristics. One is enterprise grade and the focus on delivering something that’s not only hyper-scale from an economic and from a geographic reach perspective but really enterprise-grade from a capability, support, and overall services perspective. …

The other thing that we have that’s fairly unique is a very large on-premises footprint with our existing server software and with our private cloud capabilities. …

Satya Nadella on “Digital Work and Life Experiences” supported by “Cloud OS” and “Device OS and Hardware” platforms–all from Microsoft

July 23, 2014 2:53 pm / 1 Comment on Satya Nadella on “Digital Work and Life Experiences” supported by “Cloud OS” and “Device OS and Hardware” platforms–all from Microsoft

Update: Gates Says He’s Very Happy With Microsoft’s Nadella [Bloomberg TV, Oct 2, 2014] + Bill Gates is trying to make Microsoft Office ‘dramatically better’ [The Verge, Oct 3, 2014]

This is the essence of Microsoft Fiscal Year 2014 Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call(see also the Press Release and Download Files) for me, as the new, extremely encouraging, overall setup of Microsoft in strategic terms (the below table is mine based on what Satya Nadella told on the conference call):

image

These are extremely encouraging strategic advancements vis–à–vis previously publicized ones here in the following, Microsoft related posts of mine:

I see, however, particularly challenging the continuation of the Lumia story with the above strategy, as with the previous, combined Ballmer/Elop(Nokia) strategy the results were extremely weak:

image

Worthwhile to include here the videos Bloomberg was publishing simultaneously with Microsoft Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call:

Inside Microsoft’s Secret Surface Labs [Bloomberg News, July 22, 2014]

July 22 (Bloomberg) — When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella defined the future of his company in a memo to his 127,100 employees, he singled out the struggling Surface tablet as key to a future built around the cloud and productivity. Microsoft assembled an elite team of designers, engineers, and programmers to spend years holed up in Redmond, Washington to come up with a tablet to take on Apple, Samsung, and Amazon. Bloomberg’s Cory Johnson got an inside look at the Surface labs.

Will Microsoft Kinect Be a Medical Game-Changer? [Bloomberg News, July 22, 2014]

July 23 (Bloomberg) — Microsoft’s motion detecting camera was thought to be a game changer for the video gaming world when it was launched in 2010. While appetite for it has since decreased, Microsoft sees the technology as vital in its broader offering as it explores other sectors like 3d mapping and live surgery. (Source: Bloomberg

Why Microsoft Puts GPS In Meat For Alligators [Bloomberg News, July 22, 2014]

July 23 (Bloomberg) — At the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, scientists track animals and map climate change all on the off chance they’ll stumble across the next big thing. (Source: Bloomberg)

To this it is important to add: How Pier 1 is using the Microsoft Cloud to build a better relationship with their customers [Microsoft Server and Cloud YouTube channel, July 21, 2014]

In this video, Pier 1 Imports discuss how they are using Microsoft Cloud technologies such as Azure Machine Learning to to predict which the product the customer might want to purchase next, helping to build a better relationship with their customers. Learn more: http://www.azure.com/ml

as well as:
Microsoft Surface Pro 3 vs. MacBook Air 13″ 2014 [CNET YouTube channel, July 21, 2014]

http://cnet.co/1nOygqh Microsoft made a direct comparison between the Surface Pro 3 and the MacBook Air 13″, so we’re throwing them into the Prizefight Ring to settle the score once and for all. Let’s get it on!

Surface Pro 3 vs. MacBook Air (2014) [CTNtechnologynews YouTube channel, July 1, 2014]

The Surface Pro 3 may not be the perfect laptop. But Apple’s MacBook Air is pretty boring. Let’s see which is the better device!

In addition here are some explanatory quotes (for the new overall setup of Microsoft) worth to include here from the Q&A part of Microsoft’s (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella on Q4 2014 Results – Earnings Call Transcript [Seeking Alpha, Jul. 22, 2014 10:59 PM ET]

…

Mark Moerdler – Sanford Bernstein

Thank you. And Amy one quick question, we saw a significant acceleration this quarter in cloud revenue, or I guess Amy or Satya. You saw acceleration in cloud revenue year-over-year what’s – is this Office for the iPad, is this Azure, what’s driving the acceleration and how long do you think we can keep this going?

Amy Hood

Mark, I will take it and if Satya wants to add, obviously, he should do that. In general, I wouldn’t point to one product area. It was across Office 365, Azure and even CRM online. I think some of the important dynamics that you could point to particularly in Office 365; I really think over the course of the year, we saw an acceleration in moving the product down the market into increasing what we would call the mid-market and even small business at a pace. That’s a particular place I would tie back to some of the things Satya mentioned in the answer to your first question.

Improvements to analytics, improvements to understanding the use scenarios, improving the product in real-time, understanding trial ease of use, ease of sign-up all of these things actually can afford us the ability to go to different categories, go to different geos into different segments. And in addition, I think what you will see more as we initially moved many of our customers to Office 365, it came on one workload. And I think what we’ve increasingly seen is our ability to add more workloads and sell the entirety of the suite through that process. I also mentioned in Azure, our increased ability to sell some of these higher value services. So while, I can speak broadly but all of them, I think I would generally think about the strength of being both completion of our product suite ability to enter new segments and ability to sell new workloads.

Satya Nadella

The only thing I would add is it’s the combination of our SaaS like Dynamics in Office 365, a public cloud offering in Azure. But also our private and hybrid cloud infrastructure which also benefits, because they run on our servers, cloud runs on our servers. So it’s that combination which makes us both unique and reinforcing. And the best example is what we are doing with Azure active directory, the fact that somebody gets on-boarded to Office 365 means that tenant information is in Azure AD that fact that the tenant information is in Azure AD is what makes EMS or our Enterprise Mobility Suite more attractive to a customer manager iOS, Android or Windows devices. That network effect is really now helping us a lot across all of our cloud efforts.

…

Keith Weiss – Morgan Stanley

Excellent, thank you for the question and a very nice quarter. First, I think to talk a little bit about the growth strategy of Nokia, you guys look to cut expenses pretty aggressively there, but this is – particularly smartphones is a very competitive marketplace, can you tell us a little bit about sort of the strategy to how you actually start to gain share with Lumia on a going forward basis? And may be give us an idea of what levels of share or what levels of kind unit volumes are you going to need to hit to get to that breakeven in FY16?

Satya Nadella

Let me start and Amy you can even add. So overall, we are very focused on I would say thinking about mobility share across the entire Windows family. I already talked about in my remarks about how mobility for us even goes beyond devices, but for this specific question I would even say that, we want to think about mobility not just one form factor of a mobile device because I think that’s where the ultimate price is.

But that said, we are even year-over-year basis seen increased volume for Lumia, it’s coming at the low end in the entry smartphone market and we are pleased with it. It’s come in many markets we now have over 10% that’s the first market I would sort of say that we need to track country-by-country. And the key places where we are going to differentiate is looking at productivity scenarios or the digital work and life scenario that we can light up on our phone in unique ways.

When I can take my Office Lens App use the camera on the phone take a picture of anything and have it automatically OCR recognized and into OneNote in searchable fashion that’s the unique scenario. What we have done with Surface and PPI shows us the way that there is a lot more we can do with phones by broadly thinking about productivity. So this is not about just a Word or Excel on your phone, it is about thinking about Cortana and Office Lens and those kinds of scenarios in compelling ways. And that’s what at the end of the day is going to drive our differentiation and higher end Lumia phones.

Amy Hood

And Keith to answer your specific question, regarding FY16, I think we’ve made the difficult choices to get the cost base to a place where we can deliver, on the exact scenario Satya as outlined, and we do assume that we continue to grow our units through the year and into 2016 in order to get to breakeven.

…

Rick Sherlund – Nomura

Thanks. I’m wondering if you could talk about the Office for a moment. I’m curious whether you think we’ve seen the worst for Office here with the consumer fall off. In Office 365 growth in margins expanding their – just sort of if you can look through the dynamics and give us a sense, do you think you are actually turned the corner there and we may be seeing the worse in terms of Office growth and margins?

Satya Nadella

Rick, let me just start qualitatively in terms of how I view Office, the category and how it relates to productivity broadly and then I’ll have Amy even specifically talk about margins and what we are seeing in terms of I’m assuming Office renewals is that probably the question. First of all, I believe the category that Office is in, which is productivity broadly for people, the group as well as organization is something that we are investing significantly and seeing significant growth in.

On one end you have new things that we are doing like Cortana. This is for individuals on new form factors like the phones where it’s not about anything that application, but an intelligent agent that knows everything about my calendar, everything about my life and tries to help me with my everyday task.

On the other end, it’s something like Delve which is a completely new tool that’s taking some – what is enterprise search and making it more like the Facebook news feed where it has a graph of all my artifacts, all my people, all my group and uses that graph to give me relevant information and discover. Same thing with Power Q&A and Power BI, it’s a part of Office 365. So we have a pretty expansive view of how we look at Office and what it can do. So that’s the growth strategy and now specifically on Office renewals.

Amy Hood

And I would say in general, let me make two comments. In terms of Office on the consumer side between what we sold on prem as well as the Home and Personal we feel quite good with attach continuing to grow and increasing the value prop. So I think that’s to address the consumer portion.

On the commercial portion, we actually saw Office grow as you said this quarter; I think the broader definition that Satya spoke to the Office value prop and we continued to see Office renewed in our enterprise agreement. So in general, I think I feel like we’re in a growth phase for that franchise.

…

Walter Pritchard – Citigroup

Hi, thanks. Satya, I wanted to ask you about two statements that you made, one around responsibly making the market for Windows Phone, just kind of following on Keith’s question here. And that’s a – it’s a really competitive market it feels like ultimately you need to be a very, very meaningful share player in that market to have value for developer to leverage the universal apps that you’re talking about in terms of presentations you’ve given and build in and so forth.

And I’m trying to understand how you can do both of those things once and in terms of responsibly making the market for Windows Phone, it feels difficult given your nearest competitors there are doing things that you might argue or irresponsible in terms of making their market given that they monetize it in different ways?

Satya Nadella

Yes. One of beauties of universal Windows app is, it aggregates for the first time for us all of our Windows volume. The fact that even what is an app that runs with a mouse and keyboard on the desktop can be in the store and you can have the same app run in the touch-first on a mobile-first way gives developers the entire volume of Windows which is 300 plus million units as opposed to just our 4% share of mobile in the U.S. or 10% in some country.

So that’s really the reason why we are actively making sure that universal Windows apps is available and developers are taking advantage of it, we have great tooling. Because that’s the way we are going to be able to create the broadest opportunity to your very point about developers getting an ROI for building to Windows. For that’s how I think we will do it in a responsible way.

Heather Bellini – Goldman Sachs

Great. Thank you so much for your time. I wanted to ask a question about – Satya your comments about combining the next version of Windows and to one for all devices and just wondering if you look out, I mean you’ve got kind of different SKU segmentations right now, you’ve got enterprise, you’ve got consumer less than 9 inches for free, the offering that you mentioned earlier that you recently announced. How do we think about when you come out with this one version for all devices, how do you see this changing kind of the go-to-market and also kind of a traditional SKU segmentation and pricing that we’ve seen in the past?

Satya Nadella

Yes. My statement Heather was more to do with just even the engineering approach. The reality is that we actually did not have one Windows; we had multiple Windows operating systems inside of Microsoft. We had one for phone, one for tablets and PCs, one for Xbox, one for even embedded. So we had many, many of these efforts. So now we have one team with the layered architecture that enables us to in fact one for developers bring that collective opportunity with one store, one commerce system, one discoverability mechanism. It also allows us to scale the UI across all screen sizes; it allows us to create this notion of universal Windows apps and being coherent there.

So that’s what more I was referencing and our SKU strategy will remain by segment, we will have multiple SKUs for enterprises, we will have for OEM, we will have for end-users. And so we will – be disclosing and talking about our SKUs as we get further along, but this my statement was more to do with how we are bringing teams together to approach Windows as one ecosystem very differently than we ourselves have done in the past.

Ed Maguire – CLSA

Hi, good afternoon. Satya you made some comments about harmonizing some of the different products across consumer and enterprise and I was curious what your approach is to viewing your different hardware offerings both in phone and with Surface, how you’re go-to-market may change around that and also since you decided to make the operating system for sub 9-inch devices free, how you see the value proposition and your ability to monetize that user base evolving over time?

Satya Nadella

Yes. The statement I made about bringing together our productivity applications across work and life is to really reflect the notion of dual use because when I think about productivity it doesn’t separate out what I use as a tool for communication with my family and what I use to collaborate at work. So that’s why having this one team that thinks about outlook.com as well as Exchange helps us think about those dual use. Same thing with files and OneDrive and OneDrive for business because we want to have the software have the smart about separating out the state carrying about IT control and data protection while me as an end user get to have the experiences that I want. That’s how we are thinking about harmonizing those digital life and work experiences.

On the hardware side, we would continue to build hardware that fits with these experiences if I understand your question right, which is how will be differentiate our first party hardware, we will build first party hardware that’s creating category, a good example is what we have done with Surface Pro 3. And in other places where we have really changed the Windows business model to encourage a plethora of OEMs to build great hardware and we are seeing that in fact in this holiday season, I think you will see a lot of value notebooks, you will see clamshells. So we will have the full price range of our hardware offering enabled by this new windows business model.

And I think the last part was how will we monetize? Of course, we will again have a combination, we will have our OEM monetization and some of these new business models are about monetizing on the backend with Bing integration as well as our services attached and that’s the reason fundamentally why we have these zero-priced Windows SKUs today.

…

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is the ultimate tablet product from Microsoft. What the market response will be?

May 21, 2014 2:31 pm / Leave a comment

imageWith the jury still out (as one can judge from the value of Microsoft shares – on the right) it remains to be seen whether Microsoft will be able to crack the high-end tablet market with this product.

The Microsoft product site is entitled New Surface Pro 3 Tablet – The Tablet That Can Replace Your Laptop clearly indicating the main positioning of this 3d generation product. See also the press release for additional details, as well as the remarks by Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, and Panos Panay, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Surface, at the press event held in New York City, May 20, 2014. The brief summary video of the event is below, while a full on-demand Webcast is here. There are also several “first impression” type media feedbacks given after the brief video report.

Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 event in under six minutes [The Verge YouTube channel, May 20, 2014]

“You’ve been told to buy a laptop, but you know you need a laptop.” Though freshly-minted Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave the opening remarks, today’s Surface event was all about Surface creator Panos Panay — dropping tablets, playing with scales, pushing hinges, and giving more than a few shout-outs to Wall Street Journal editor (and former Verge editor) Joanna Stern. Here’s everything you need to know from the event in under five minutes.

Microsoft Introduces a Larger-Screen Surface Tablet [By SHIRA OVIDE in The Wall Street Journal , May 20, 2014]

First Look: Microsoft Surface Pro 3
[WSJDigitalNetwork YouTube channel, May 20, 2014]

Microsoft tries again to combine the laptop and tablet. WSJ Personal Tech Columnist Joanna Stern has the first look. Photo/Video: Drew Evans for The Wall Street Journal

Microsoft Corp. MSFT -0.18% introduced a larger-screen version of one of its Surface tablet computers, offering a lighter and thinner device that the company cast as a potential successor for laptop PCs.

The software company introduced the new device, called the Surface Pro 3, at an eventTuesday in New York. The device, like prior Pro models in the Surface line, is powered byIntel Corp. INTC 0.00% computer chips. Microsoft said the new version’s display measures 12 inches diagonally, compared with the 10.6-inch screens of existing Surface devices.

Microsoft said the Surface Pro 3 will start at $799 without a keyboard. A keyboard that doubles as a device cover will cost $129.99. The top end of the product line, with the most powerful Intel chip, lists for $1,949 without a keyboard.

At the event Tuesday, Microsoft officials repeatedly compared the Surface Pro 3 with laptop personal computers like AppleInc.‘s MacBook Air, rather than discuss competitors in the tablet market, where Microsoft remains a bit player. The MacBook Air costs $899 and up.

Microsoft’s positioning underscores its troubles in becoming a major competitor in tablets, where price tags of less than $200 have become commonplace for consumer-oriented models. The company’s share of the market was less than 4% last year, according to research firm IDC.

Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella and other officials stressed what they said were limits of existing tablet computers for activities like writing documents or other work that isn’t Web surfing or reading digital books. They also stressed drawing and note-taking with an upgraded digital-pen accessory that comes with the Surface Pro 3.

“This is the tablet that can replace your laptop,” Panos Panay, a Microsoft executive working on Surface devices, said about the Surface Pro 3.

Microsoft said it would start taking orders Wednesday for the new device.

Steven Sinofsky, a former Microsoft executive who helped spearhead development of the Surface, said Tuesday the Surface Pro 3 “realizes the ‘no compromises’ vision of Surface.”

Dating back to the early 2000s, Microsoft officials have used the expression “no compromises” to describe their vision of a device that combines the best features of tablets and laptops.

Microsoft also has been developing for months a tablet similar to Apple’s 7.9-inch iPad Mini, and some media reports had indicated that device would be announced Tuesday. Smaller tablets accounted for more than half of all tablets sold last year.

In an interview Tuesday, Mr. Panay said Microsoft is “looking at an array of devices. It comes down to what customers need right now.”

He also addressed a different type of Windows software used on more iPad-like tablets, including one model of Surface devices. That operating software, Windows RT, isn’t compatible with many older PC applications or software. Windows RT “is a critical element as well,” Mr. Panay said. “It’s still pumping.”

Some analysts said Tuesday Microsoft was sensible for targeting businesses and workers, rather than consumer applications, with the Surface Pro.

“This is a smart move by Microsoft,” said Patrick Moorhead, president of research firm Moor Insights & Strategy. “Surface Pro 3 is more of a laptop replacement than a device that replaces your seven-to-eight-inch tablet.”

As Microsoft touts the abilities of Surface to replace laptops, it has the potential to anger companies like Dell Inc. that also make tablets and laptops powered by the Windows operating system. At the event, however, Mr. Nadella said Microsoft isn’t trying to compete with its computer-hardware partners.

Some Microsoft investors don’t want Microsoft to make its own computing devices at all. The company incurs a loss on each Surface it sells, and the company’s critics say Microsoft hasn’t made a compelling case for expanding its hardware ambitions.

Microsoft officials, including Mr. Nadella on Tuesday, say homegrown devices like the Surface are the best showcase for Microsoft software like Office, Skype and digital file-storage service OneDrive.

“We are not building hardware for hardware’s sake,” Mr. Nadella said during a brief appearance at the Surface event. “We want to build experiences that bring together all the capabilities of our company.”

Daniel Ives, a Microsoft analyst with FBR Capital Markets, said Surface Pro 3 “appears to be an impressive” device, but he said persuading consumers to buy the Surface “remains a Kilimanjaro-like challenge given intense competition.”

—Joanna Stern contributed to this article.

The most popular “Surface Pro 3” YouTube videos 19 hours after the launch:

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Surface Pro 3—The Tablet that Can Replace Your Laptop by surface 19 hours ago  440,030 views
Witness the next evolution of productivity. Introducing the Surface Pro 3, the tablet that can replace your laptop.
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Surface Pro 3 hands on at Surface NYC event 
by Windows Phone Central  16 hours ago   26,585 views
We go hands on with the Surface Pro 3 from the Surface NYC event. More details: …
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TLDR: My Surface Pro 3 Thoughts  by LockerGnome’s Geek Lifestyles 11 hours ago 3,005 views
Become a patron for bonuses ASAP: http://ChrisPirillo.com/ Patron video bonus today: …
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Microsoft Unveils 12-inch Surface Pro 3 Tablet – IGN News  by IGN  16 hours ago  19,373 views
Microsoft has just unveiled its latest Windows-powered tablet: the Surface Pro 3.
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CNET Update – Surface Pro 3 aims to replace laptops — and paper  by CNET   15 hours ago   8,526 views
With an improved kickstand, keyboard, and stylus pen, Microsoft says the new Surface solves the productivity problem of tablets.
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Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Hands On | Mashable
by Mashable   16 hours ago     9,936 views
Microsoft’s third-generation Surface Pro 3 aims to be “the tablet that can replace your laptop.” Here’s Mashable’s Pete Pachal and …
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This is the Surface Pro 3 (hands-on)
by The Verge    18 hours ago    48,815 views
Dan Seifert takes a hands-on look at Microsoft’s 12-inch Surface Pro 3, the “tablet that can replace the laptop.”
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Surface Pro 3 Hands-on    by Booredatwork.com
15 hours ago      5,288 views
Surface Pro 3 Pre-order link: http://bit.ly/1m07g9M Loot Crate:http://www.lootcrate.com/booredatwork 10% Code “booredatwork” …
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Hands-on with the Microsoft Surface Pro 3
by CNET   14 hours ago     16,412 views
The Surface Pro 3 is a new high-performance Windows 8.1 tablet designed to get rid of the “conflict” between owning a tablet and …
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Hands-on with Surface Pro 3    by expertzone
19 hours ago   19,040 views
Ben “The PC Guy” Rudolph goes hands-on with the all-new Surface Pro 3. Faster, thinner, lighter, and with a larger screen, this is …
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Surface Pro 3 Launch Reactions & Impressions
by lachlanlikesathing   8 hours ago    864 views
My thoughts on the Surface Pro 3 launch announcement! Surface Pro 2 long term review: http://youtu.be/hlsiNom5a3o Thanks …
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Surface Pro 3 — Finally a Tablet that can replace your Laptop?!?  by SourceFed   13 hours ago   61,977 views
The SurfacePro3 was announced today — larger, lighter, and able to stream 4k! Are all the bells and whistles in the SurfacePro3 …
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Surface Pro 3 Hands On    by Geek.com
16 hours ago     2,523 views
Microsoft has a made a splash today with an all new Surface Pro, which is a 12-inch device that manages to be thinner, lighter, …
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Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Hands-On   by laptopmag
13 hours ago    2,519 views
We go hands-on with Microsoft’s latest hybrid tablet and give you an overview of the design, specs, and price. For more coverage …
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Microsoft reveals thinner, faster Surface Pro 3 tablet
by CNET   17 hours ago   13,905 views
Microsoft’s Panos Panay shows off the company’s latest tablet at a press event in New York City. The new 12-inch tablet weighs …
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Surface Pro 3 Unboxing , Hands On , and First Impression Review  by Sean Ong   6 hours ago  326 views      In this video I do my very first product unboxing as I show off the shiny new Surface Pro 3! I give my first impressions of the device …

Microsoft is transitioning to a world with more usage and more software driven value add (rather than the old device driven world) in mobility and the cloud, the latter also helping to grow the server business well above its peers

April 25, 2014 2:45 pm / 1 Comment on Microsoft is transitioning to a world with more usage and more software driven value add (rather than the old device driven world) in mobility and the cloud, the latter also helping to grow the server business well above its peers

Quartely Highlights (from Earnings Call Slides):

Cloud momentum helps drive Q3 results

  • Outstanding momentum and results in our cloud services; total Commercial Cloud revenue more than doubled again this quarter
  • Office 365 Home currently has 4.4 million subscribers, adding nearly one million new users this quarter
  • Windows remained the platform of choice for business users, with double-digit increases in both Windows OEM Pro and Windows Volume Licensing revenue
  • With focus on spend prioritization, we grew our operating expenses only 2%, contributing to solid earnings growth

Microsoft CEO offer bright future [‘Saxo TV – TradingFloor.com’ YouTube channel, April 25, 2014]

Willing to change, that was the message new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was pushing as the firm released third quarter earnings.

Microsoft beat Wall Street analysts’ expectations, driving the company’s stock price up 3 percent on Thursday after earnings were released. Growth came from the company’s surface tablet sales and commercial business sector, according to Norman Young, Senior Equity Analyst at Morningstar. Results were also aided by a less severe decline in the PC industry.

Young believes the company has already demonstrated continued growth for the fourth quarter and remains optimistic about the company’s new direction.

Nadella is shifting the traditionally PC focused company towards more mobile and cloud based technology. On the quarterly call with Wall Street he said, “What you can expect of Microsoft is courage in the face of reality; we will approach our future with a challenger mindset; we will be bold in our innovation.” Analysts are excited about the company’s future trajectory as he continues to push Microsoft’s business into the mobile and cloud computing world.

The company’s stock has increased 8 percent since Nadella assumed the role of CEO in February.

From Earnings Release FY14 Q3 [April 24, 2014]

“This quarter’s results demonstrate the strength of our business, as well as the opportunities we see in a mobile-first, cloud-first world. We are making good progress in our consumer services like Bing and Office 365 Home, and our commercial customers continue to embrace our cloud solutions. Both position us well for long-term growth,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer at Microsoft. “We are focused on executing rapidly and delivering bold, innovative products that people love to use.”

…

Devices and Consumer revenue grew 12% to $8.30 billion.

  • Windows OEM revenue grew 4%, driven by strong 19% growth in Windows OEM Pro revenue.
  • Office 365 Home now has 4.4 million subscribers, adding nearly 1 million subscribers in just three months.
  • Microsoft sold in 2.0 million Xbox console units, including 1.2 million Xbox One consoles.
  • Surface revenue grew over 50% to approximately $500 million.
  • Bing U.S. search share grew to 18.6% and search advertising revenue grew 38%.

Commercial revenue grew 7% to $12.23 billion.

  • Office 365 revenue grew over 100%, and commercial seats nearly doubled, demonstrating strong enterprise momentum for Microsoft’s cloud productivity solutions.
  • Azure revenue grew over 150%, and the company has announced more than 40 new features that make the Azure platform more attractive to cloud application developers.
  • Windows volume licensing revenue grew 11%, as business customers continue to make Windows their platform of choice.
  • Lync, SharePoint, and Exchange, our productivity server offerings, collectively grew double-digits.

From Microsoft’s CEO Discusses F3Q 2014 Results – Earnings Call Transcript [Seeking Alpha, April 25, 2014]

From the prepared comments: “This quarter we continued our rapid cadence of innovation and announced a range of new services and features in three key areas – data, cloud, and mobility. SQL Server 2014 helps improve overall performance, and with Power BI, provides an end-to-end solution from data to analytics. Microsoft Azure preview portal provides a fully integrated cloud experience. The Enterprise Mobility Suite provides IT with a comprehensive cloud solution to support bring-your-own-device scenarios. These offerings help businesses convert big data into ambient intelligence, developers more efficiently build and run cloud solutions, and IT manage enterprise mobility with ease.”

Satya Nadella – Chief Executive Officer:

As I have told our employees, our industry does not respect tradition, it only respects innovation. This applies to us and everyone else. When I think about our industry over the next 5, 10 years, I see a world where computing is more ubiquitous and all experiences are powered by ambient intelligence. Silicon, hardware systems and software will co-evolve together and give birth to a variety of new form factors. Nearly everything we do will become more digitized, our interactions with other people, with machines and between machines. The ability to reason over and draw insights from everything that’s been digitized will improve the fidelity of our daily experiences and interactions. This is the mobile-first and cloud-first world. It’s a rich canvas for innovation and a great growth opportunity for Microsoft across all our customer segments.

To thrive we will continue to zero in on the things customers really value and Microsoft can uniquely deliver. We want to build products that people love to use. And as a result, you will see us increasingly focus on usage as the leading indicator of long-term success.

…

  • advancing Office, Windows and our data platform
  • continue to invest in our cloud capabilities including Office 365 and Azure in the fast growing SaaS and cloud platform markets
  • ensuring that our cloud services are available across all device platforms that people use
  • delivering a cloud for everyone on every device
  • have bold plans to move Windows forward:
    – investing and innovating in every dimension from form-factor to software experiences to price
    – Windows platform is unique in how it brings together consistent end user experiences across small to large screens, broadest platform opportunity for developers and control and assurance for IT
    – enhance our device capabilities with the addition of Nokia’s talented people and their depth in mobile technologies
  • our vision is about being going boldly into this mobile-first, cloud-first world

…

So this mobile-first cloud-first thing is a pretty deep thing for us. When we say mobile-first, in fact what we mean by that is mobility first. We think about users and their experiences spanning a variety of devices. So it’s not about any one form factor that may have some share position today, but as we look to the future, what are the set of experiences across devices, some ours and some not ours that we can power through experiences that we can create uniquely. …

… When you think about mobility first, that means you need to have really deep understanding of all the mobile scenarios for everything from how communications happen, how meetings occur. And those require us to build new capability. We will do some of this organically, some of it inorganically.

A good example of this is what we have done with Nokia. So we will – obviously we are looking forward to that team joining us building on the capability and then execution, even in the last three weeks or so we have announced a bunch of things where we talked about this one cloud for everyone and every device. We talked about how our data platform is going to enable this data culture, which is in fact fundamentally changing how Microsoft itself works.

We always talked about what it means to think about Windows, especially with the launch of this universal Windows application model. How different it is now to think about Windows as one family, which was not true before, but now we have a very different way to think about it.

…

[Re: Microsoft transition to more of a subscription business]

The way I look at it … we are well on our way to making that transition, in terms of moving from pure licenses to long-term contracts and as well as subscription business model. So when you talked about Platform-as-a-Service if you look at our commercial cloud it’s made up of the platform itself which is Azure. We also have a SaaS business in Office 365.

Now, one of the things that we want to make sure we look at is each of the constituent parts because the margin profile on each one of these things is going to different. The infrastructure elements right now in particular is going to have different economics versus some of the per-user applications in a SaaS mode have. It’s the blending of all of that that matters and the growth of that matters to us the most in this time where I think there is just a couple of us really playing in this market. I mean this is gold rush time in some sense of being able to capitalize on the opportunity.

And when it comes to that we have some of the best, the broadest SaaS solution and the broadest platform solution and that combination of those assets doesn’t come often. So what we are very focused on is how do we make sure we get our customer aggressively into this, having them use our service, be successful with it. And then there will be a blended set of margins across even just our cloud. And what matters to me in the long run is the magnitude of profit we generate given a lot of categories are going to be merged as this transition happens. And we have to be able to actively participate in it and drive profit growth.

…

From the prepared comments: “Office Commercial revenue was up 6%, driven by Office 365 as customers transitioned to our cloud productivity services. Office 365 revenue grew over 100%, and seats nearly doubled as well. Our productivity server offerings continue to perform well, with Lync, SharePoint, and Exchange, collectively growing double-digits.”

… to me the Office 365 growth is in fact driving our enterprise infrastructure growth which is driving Azure growth and that cycle to me is most exciting. So that’s one of the reasons why I want to have to keep indexing on the usage of all of this and the growth numbers you see is a reflection of that.

[Background from him in the call:] Office 365 I am really, really excited about what’s happening there, which is to me this is the core engine that’s driving a lot of our cloud adoption and you see it in the numbers and Amy will talk more about the numbers. But one of the fundamental things its also doing is it’s actually a SaaS application and it’s also an architecture for enterprises. And one of the most salient things we announced when we talked about the cloud for everyone and every device and we talked about Office 365 having now iPad apps, we also launched something called the enterprise mobility suite which is perhaps one of the most strategic things during that day that we announced which was that we now have a consistent and deep platform for identity management which by the way gets bootstrapped every time Office 365 users sign up, device management and data protection, which is really what every enterprise customer needs in a mobile-first world, in a world where you have SaaS application adoption and you have BYOD or bring your own devices happening.

…

[Re #1: about the new world in terms of more usage and more software driven rather than device driven, and the reengagement with the developer community in that world]

Developers are very, very important to us. If you’re in the platform business which we’re on both on the device side as well as on the cloud side, developers and their ability to create new value props and new applications on them is sort of likes itself. I would say couple of things.
…
… on the cloud side, in fact one of the most strategic APIs is the Office API. If you think about building an application for iOS, if you want single sign-on for any enterprise application, it’s the Azure AD single sign-on. That’s one of the things that we showed at Build, which is how to take advantage of list data in Sharepoint, contact information in Exchange, Azure active directory information for log-on. And those are the APIs that are very, very powerful APIs and unique to us. And they expand the opportunity for developers to reach into the enterprises. And then of course Azure is a full platform, which is very attractive to developers. So that gives you a flavor for how important developers are and what your opportunities are.

…

From the prepared comments: “Devices and Consumer Other revenue grew 18% to $1.95 billion, driven by search advertising and our Office 365 Home service. Search revenue grew 38%, offset by display [advertising] revenue which declined 24% this quarter. Gross margin grew 26% to $541 million. The combined revenue from Office 365 Home and Office Consumer, reported in the Devices & Consumer Licensing segment, grew 28%. … Office Consumer revenue increased 15% due to higher attach and strong sales in Japan, where we saw customers accelerate some purchases ahead of a national sales tax increase. Excluding that estimated impact, Office still outpaced the underlying consumer PC market.”

[Re: how you could potentially make what has been traditionally a unit model with Windows OEM revenue into something potentially more recurring in nature?]

… the thing I would add is this transition from one time let’s say licenses or device purchases to what is a recurring stream. You see that in a variety of different ways. You have back end subscriptions, in our case, there will be Office 365, there is advertising, there is the app store itself. So these are all things that attach to a device. And so we are definitely going to look to make sure that the value prop that we put together is going to be holistic in its nature and the monetization itself will be holistic and it will increase with the usage of the device across these services. And so that’s the approach we will take.

From the prepared comments: “Zero dollar licensing for sub 9-inch devices helps grow share and creates new opportunities to deliver our services, with minimal short term revenue impact”

[Re: the recent decision to offer Windows for free for sub 9-inch devices and its impact of Microsoft share in that arena, about Windows pricing in general, the kind of play in different market segmentations, and how Windows pricing is evolving]

Overall, the way I want us to look at Windows going forward is what does it mean to have the broadest device family and ecosystem? Because at the end of the day it’s about the users and developer opportunity we create for the entirety of the family. That’s going to define the health of the ecosystem. So, to me, it matters that we approach the various segments that we now participate with Windows, because that’s what has happened. Fundamentally, we participated in the PC market. Now we are in a market that’s much bigger than the PC market. We continue to have healthy share, healthy pricing and in fact growth as we mentioned in the enterprise adoption of Windows.

And that’s we plan to in fact add more value, more management, more security, especially as things are changing in those segments. Given BYOD and software security issues, we want to be able to reinforce that core value, but then when it comes to new opportunities from wearables to internet of things, we want to be able to participate on all of this with our Windows offering, with our tools around it. And we want to be able to price by category. And that’s effectively what we did. We looked at what it makes – made sense for us to do on tablets and phones below 9 inches and we felt that the price there needed to be changed. We have monetization vehicles on the back end for those. And that’s how we are going to approach each one of these opportunities, because in a world of ubiquitous computing, we want Windows to be ubiquitous. That doesn’t mean its one price, one business model for all of that. And it’s actually a market expansion opportunity and that’s the way we are going to go execute on it.

From the prepared comments: “Our universal app development platform is a big step towards enabling developers to engage users across PCs, tablets, and phones with a common set of APIs”

[Re #2: about the new world in terms of more usage and more software driven rather than device driven, and the reengagement with the developer community in that world]

Developers are very, very important to us. If you’re in the platform business which we’re on both on the device side as well as on the cloud side, developers and their ability to create new value props and new applications on them is sort of likes itself. I would say couple of things.

One is the announcements we made at Build on the device side is really our breakthrough worked for us which is we’re the only device platform today that has this notion of building universal apps with fantastic tooling around them. So that means you can target multiple of our devices and have common code across all of them. And this notion of having a Windows universal application help developers leverage them core asset, which is their core asset across this expanded opportunity is huge. There was this one user experience change that Terry Myerson talked about at Build, which expands the ability for anyone who puts up application in Windows Store to be now discovered across even the billion plus PC installed base. And so that’s I think a fantastic opportunity to developers and we are doing everything to make that opportunity clear and recruit developers to do more with Windows. And in that context, we will also support cross platforms. So this has been one of the things that we have done is the relationship with Unity. We have tooling that allows you to have this core library that’s portable. You can bring your code asset. In fact, we are the only client platform that has the abstractions available for the different languages and so on.

From the prepared comments: “Server product revenue grew 10%, driven by demand for our data platform, infrastructure and management offerings, and Azure.”

  • “SQL Server revenue grew more than 15%, and continued to outpace the data platform market; we continue to gain share in mission critical workloads”
  • “Windows Server Premium and System Center revenue showed continued strength from increased virtualization share and demand for hybrid infrastructure”

[Re: about the factors that have enabled Microsoft to continue growing server business well above its peers, and whether that kind of 10% ish growth is sustainable over fiscal 2015]

It’s a pretty exciting change that’s happening, obviously it’s that part of the business is performing very well for a while now, but quite frankly it’s fundamentally changing. One of the questions I often get asked is hey how did Windows server and the hypervisor underneath it becomes so good so soon. You’ve been at it for a long time but there seems to have something fundamentally changed I mean we’ve grown a lot of share recently, the product is more capable than it ever was, the rate of change is different and for one reason alone which is we use it to run Azure. So the fact that we use our servers to run our cloud makes our servers more competitive for other people to build their own cloud.

So it’s the same trend that’s accelerating us on both sides. The other thing that’s happening is when we sell our server products they for most part are just not isolated anymore. They come with automatic cloud tiering. SQL server is a great example. We just launched a new version of SQL which is by far the best release of SQL in terms of its features like it’s exploitation of in-memory. It’s the first product in the database world that has in-memory for all the three workloads of databases, OLTP, data warehousing and BI. But more importantly it automatically gives you high availability which means a lot to every CIO and every enterprise deployment by actually tiering to the cloud.

From the prepared comments: “Commercial Other revenue grew 31%, to $1.90 billion, driven by Commercial Cloud revenue which exceeded our guidance as customers transitioned to our cloud solutions faster than expected; Gross margin increased 80% as we realized margin expansion through engineering efficiencies and continued scale benefits; Enterprise services revenue grew 8%”

So those kinds of feature innovation which is pretty boundary less for us is breakthrough work. It’s not something that somebody who has been a traditional competitor of ours can do if you’re not even a first class producer of a public cloud service. So I think that we’re in a very unique place. Our ability to deliver this hybrid value proposition and be in a position, where we not only run a cloud service at scale, but we also provide the infrastructure underneath it as the server products to others. That’s what’s driving the growth. The shape of that growth and so on will change over time, but I feel very, very bullish about our ability to continue this innovation.

Microsoft BUILD 2014 Day 1: consistency and superiority accross the whole Windows family extended now to TVs and IoT devices as well—$0 royalty licensing program for OEM and ODM partners in sub 9” phone and tablet space

April 2, 2014 9:46 pm / 1 Comment on Microsoft BUILD 2014 Day 1: consistency and superiority accross the whole Windows family extended now to TVs and IoT devices as well—$0 royalty licensing program for OEM and ODM partners in sub 9” phone and tablet space

OR Microsoft is going against Android and Apple with a vastly updated Windows/Windows Phone 8.1 for $0 royalty fee on smartphones and tablets with screens under 9”, integrated Windows desktop experience (upcoming in the next update), capability of creating Universal Windows apps accross the whole Windows family (demonstrated with the Modern version of the Office upcoming later), an open-source cross-platform WinJS framework, the first true digital assistant for phones (Cortana), showing that for TVs, as well as planning for IoT devices.

Update: the expectation was somewhat higher: image
although was met when looking back to Nadella’s March 27 Office for iPad announcement:
image

Microsoft showcases latest updates to Windows, opportunities for developers April 02, 2014
Unveils converged developer platform, new software advances with Windows Phone 8.1, and Windows 8.1 Update and new licensing; Nokia announces new Lumia phones.

SAN FRANCISCO — April 2, 2014 — Wednesday at Build 2014, Microsoft Corp.’s developer conference, the company announced several advances to Windows including Windows Phone 8.1, the availability of Windows 8.1 Update, a converged developer platform, and a $0 royalty licensing program for OEM and ODM partners developing smartphones and tablets with screens under nine inches.
Microsoft detailed new developer opportunities on the Windows platform with a common platform across devices, a single toolset, a common infrastructure across the Windows and Windows Phone stores, and a clear commitment to interoperability. The announcements highlight Microsoft’s continued commitment to its partners and the developer community by maximizing opportunities across the broadest range of devices and services.
Also as a part of the conference, Nokia announced three new Lumia smartphones for Windows Phone 8.1, including the flagship Lumia 930, the affordable Lumia 635 and the first dual-SIM Lumia 630.
“The news today shines a light on continued Windows innovation in ways that benefit our customers, partners and developers alike. Our commitment is to make Windows more personal and accessible to individuals, and to ensure a vibrant ecosystem through closer collaboration with our industry partners,” said Terry Myerson, executive vice president, OS Group at Microsoft.

… <more is inserted in the below keynote report>

The essence of the Day 1 keynote:

Microsoft Build 2014 keynote in seven minutes [The Verge YouTube channel, April 2, 2014]

Couldn’t sit through Microsoft’s three-hour Microsoft Build conference? We’ve cut it down to just the highlights for your viewing convenience.

The Full Day 1 Keynote record on Channel 9: 2 hours, 59 minutes, 13 seconds or a YouTube copy of that from MicrosoftEurope:

Attention developers and tech-fanatics! Build 2014 has started with breaking news and updates! Catch-up with the key announcements made by Satya Nadella, Terry Myerson, Joe Belfiore, David Treadwell and Stephen Elop.

Terry Myerson: Executive Vice President, Operating Sy stems group

    • Making your creativity come to life
    • Using public translation APIs to translate everything said here

Joe Belfiore (~ 1 hour): Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems group
==> Full transcript

  • Running PC, tablet and phone within the Operating Systems group

Windows Phone is the world’s most personal phone

image

  • 2 additional partners: Micromax and Prestigio (working with Qualcomm and Longcheer)
  • Windows Phone 8.1: ==> Made more personal
    – new Action Center
    – new lock screen APIs
    – option to choose a high density tile layout with custom background as well … even on a small screen

    Microsoft Build 2014 8.1 Update Personalized Digital Assistant named CORTANA

    Cortana Microsoft Build 2014 8.1 Update Personalized Digital Assistant named Cortana Microsoft VP Joe Belfiore unveils 2 new phones with hardware partners Micromax and Prestigio using Windows Phone 8.1
    Windows Phone gets even more personal
    Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 8.1 and introduced Cortana, the world’s first truly personal digital assistant with a persona inspired by a much-loved “Halo” character. Powered by Bing, Cortana gets to know you and gets better over time by asking questions based on your behavior and checking in with you before she assumes you’re interested in something. She detects and monitors the stuff you care about, looks out for you throughout the day, and helps filter out the noise so you can focus on what matters to you.
    Other new features that make Windows Phone 8.1 smartphones even more personal include Action Center, which complements Live Tiles by showing new activities and notifications at a glance; and Senses, a suite of features that takes the work out of managing data use, storage space and battery life. Windows Phone 8.1 also makes it easier for IT professionals to manage devices and for professionals to connect to essential business apps and services with features such as simplified device enrollment, a built-in mobile device management client, S/MIME for encrypted mail and VPN support.
    Windows Phone 8.1 will start rolling out to current Windows Phone 8 users over the coming months. It will also come pre-installed on new phones starting this month. Cortana will launch shortly in the U.S. as a beta, in the U.K. and China in the second half of 2014, and in other countries in 2015. Registered developers can update their phones to Windows Phone 8.1 as part of the developer program later this month.

    – working long for one a half year on (video): Cortana (launching as a Beta, in order to learn with linguistic & search things) – a digital assistance for Windows Phone; powered by Bing (knows the whole Internet); learns about you …; also replaces the search function for you …; can be extended via 3d party apps; giving Cortana a notebook in order to put the user in contact with Cortana; about the people matter most to you; about the places you use to frequent; has permission to read all e-mail on the phone in order to prompt pro-actively the owner on …; good with the calendar too; … example queries via voice …; works with typing as well; reminders; only Cortana can do: people reminders …; new version of Skype; starting apps for you via Cortana (like Hulu, even yommunicating with like for Facebook);
    ==> The first true digital assistant for phones
    ==>     The Ultimate Assistant: Halo’s Cortana Coming to Windows Phone

    ==> Searching for something more personal
    ==>     Bing at Build 2014: More Helpful, Personal and Intelligent/
    ==> Introducing the New Skype for Windows Phone 8.1 and Improved Skype for Windows 8.1

  • Consumers can choose for their device:
    image
    – VPN, S/MIME support, MDM capabilities, … many, many more hosted capabilities
    ==> The right choice for business
    ==> Building the Mobile Workplace with Windows and Windows Phone
  • Apps from the Store: … store experience more engaged for you …, new version of Calendar … with other views
  • Improved basic performance: … WiFi Sense to connect to automatically when sensed … even securely share with friends automatically (no need to tell the WiFi password); … from ordinary phone call to a video call, even for RCS apps as well; Word Flow [Keyboard] typing … world’s fastest typing on the smartphone (the previous record was Samsung Galaxy …); focus on settings; IE11 with a bunch of new features
  • to consumers rolling out in next few months
  • on very new phones late April

==> Announcing an updated version of Internet Explorer 11 for Windows and introducing IE11 for Windows Phone 8.1

==> Windows & Windows Phone 8.1 – Better Together

See how we’ve reinvented the Windows experience across all your screens so you can shoot, share, work and play while on the go.

Windows 8.1 Update

  • boot straight to the desktop
  • going automatically to enterprise mode
  • mouse and keyboard experience of Windows, e.g. enhanced taskbar to work with Windows Store apps: no different swithching mode for Modern apps and desktop apps; PC settings tile on Start Screen; right click context menu …; power user … on Start Screen; pre-pinning the Windows Store to the taskbar to make it mouse and kleyboard friendly; new apps pin to the Start Screen or the taskbar …
  • starting April 8
  • [The update also enables Microsoft’s hardware partners to deliver low-cost machines that require only 1 GB of RAM and 16GB HDD. On Intel’s Bay Trail Cost Reduced options.]
Windows 8.1 Update: easier to use, runs great on more devices
Continuing its commitment to deliver improvements through regular updates, Microsoft also announced Windows 8.1 Update, which includes improvements that provide more of what people love about Windows across more devices: quicker access to what’s important, a more familiar and consistent experience across touch and non-touch devices, and more ways to discover great apps.
Key features of the update include user interface improvements for mouse and keyboard users, the ability to access the taskbar from any screen and pin Windows Store apps to the taskbar alongside desktop apps and favorite websites, and performance and compatibility enhancements to Internet Explorer 11. These improvements provide faster, more direct access to the things customers care most about, so activities such as powering down, searching the Web and switching between apps are easier than ever. Navigating with the mouse and keyboard will feel more familiar and intuitive because there’s more consistency with where controls are and how they work. Specific to the enterprise, Windows 8.1 Update offers improved Internet Explorer 8 compatibility on Internet Explorer 11, extends mobile device management functionality, and eases deployment with increased predictability for new operating systems and line-of-business apps by leveraging familiar management tools.
Current Windows 8.1 customers will receive the Windows 8.1 Update for free through Windows Update, while Windows 8 customers will receive the update free through the Windows Store, beginning April 8, 2014.*

David Treadwell: Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems group
==> Full transcript

  • about things for developers

Microsoft’s Universal Windows App Allows Devs To Create For Any Platform [Pureinfotech, published on April 3, 2014]

Microsoft announces universal Windows apps, which simply means that apps created for the Windows platform will now run on all platforms including PCs, tablets, phones, and Xbox One.

image

Universal Windows apps:
==> Windows Runtime comes to phones

image
…
image
…

Windows developer platform: easily build innovative apps, reach more people
Microsoft also announced enhancements in the way developers can build applications that target the full range of Windows devices using Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 Release Candidate. Among other new capabilities, with the introduction of universal projects, developers are able to create apps that can be easily optimized to take full advantage of Windows devices. Developers of all types can draw upon their existing skills to deliver shared experiences for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 Update. Universal projects allow developers to use approximately 90 percent of the same code, a single packaging system, and a common user interface to target apps for phones, tablets and PCs.
To improve the developer experience on Windows, Microsoft announced updates to Windows Store to improve app discoverability and monetization, as well as easier shopping for end users with improved search, more personal recommendations and better merchandising. In addition, later this week, Microsoft will release the next version of Windows App Studio, a Web-based tool for non-developers that enables the creation of universal Windows apps in a single project.
To help developers build innovative apps for Windows using a natural user interface, Microsoft detailed plans for Kinect for Windows v2, coming this summer, with a new sensor and SDK that will enable developers to create Windows Store apps, with the Kinect sensor, for the first time. The Kinect for Windows v2 sensor offers more precision, responsiveness and intuitive capabilities. Developers and partner companies, such as Reflexion Health and Freak’n Genius, are already doing great things through the Kinect for Windows v2 developer preview program.

image

image

image

  • DEMO of the above

Windows enabling cross-platform apps:

image
frameworks, libraries, tools and services for Universal Windows apps

image
– Web GL
– Cutting Edge video playback etc.

image

image

image
– announcing: making WinJS cross-platform
– open-source via GitHub
==> MS Open Tech Open Sources WinJS, Part of the Windows App Platform

  • DEMO My

==> Announcing New Microsoft Advertising SDKs, Tools to Help Devs Do More and Earn More with Apps

Terry Myerson:
==> Full transcript

    • Now about the TV … no better television than Xbox
    • going to enable Universal Windows apps running on Xbox
    • DEMO
My insert here: Satya Nadella email to employees on tuning our organization [Microsoft, March 31, 2014]

Today marks the start of another big week for Microsoft as we gear up for the Build conference in San Francisco. We continue to push on the momentum from last week’s news about how we will thrive and grow in a mobile-first, cloud-first world, as shown by the great Office apps for iOS, rich new APIs for developers and our new Enterprise Mobility Suite.
In advance of Build, I want to highlight three announcements about how we’re continuing to evolve and tune our organization for maximum focus and impact.…
Next, I have asked Phil Spencer to take on a new role leading Xbox, combining the Xbox and Xbox Live development teams with the Microsoft Studios team. Phil will report to Terry Myerson, allowing us to keep gaming close to the group developing operating systems across devices. In this new job, Phil will lead the Xbox, Xbox Live, Xbox Music and Xbox Video teams, and Microsoft Studios. Combining all our software, gaming and content assets across the Xbox team under a single leader and aligning with the OSG team will help ensure we continue to do great work across the Xbox business, and bring more of the magic of Xbox to all form factors, including tablets, PCs and phones. Phil will continue his close partnership with Yusuf Mehdi, who leads business strategy and marketing for Xbox, George Peckham, who heads up third-party partnerships and Mike Angiulo, who will continue leading Xbox hardware. Over the years, Phil’s team at Microsoft Studios has helped build a community of more than 80 million Xbox owners and 48 million Xbox Live members through blockbuster game franchises such as “Halo,” “Gears of War,” “Kinect Sports,” “Fable,” “Forza Motorsport” and many others. He’s helped drive the development of brand-new entertainment offerings like the partnership with the NFL and the formation of Xbox Entertainment Studios [Nancy Tellem]. I love the way the Xbox team is focused on great games and gaming experiences (go, “Titanfall”!), connects with its fans, pushes the boundary of entertainment and has embraced the power of the cloud in such interesting and impactful ways. Phil is the right person to lead Xbox forward.
…
    • bringing Kinect to PC ==> Kinect 2.0 for Windows with greatly improved SDK, not just for games
    • non-gaming Kinect apps: video
Developers are excited to bring their apps to the Windows Store for the first time this summer following the release of Kinect for Windows v2, with its improved precision, responsiveness, and intuitive capabilities.

image

  • DEMO

Internet of Things (IoT):

image

  • Windows ported to ARM
  • Now Intel Quark (i.e. x86 for IoT)
  • Windows for IoT will be available for $0

Windows desktop:

  • Universal Windows apps to run in a window
  • New Start Menu: live tiles combined
  • what is shown here is just for start to improve the Windows desktop
      • (upcoming in the next update of Windows)

Pricing:

image

Making Windows devices more affordable
Microsoft is evolving its Windows business model to enable partners to offer lower-cost devices in the highly competitive smartphone, tablet and PC categories. Microsoft will offer to hardware partners $0 Windows with services including a one-year subscription to Office 365.
With Windows 8.1 Update hardware partners can also more easily build lower-cost machines — such as devices with 1 GB of RAM and a 16GB hard disk drive — without sacrificing the experience customers expect. The combination of new efficiencies and innovations from Microsoft hardware partners means customers will be able to choose from a wider range of Windows devices, particularly budget-friendly notebooks and tablets.

Additional information from Terry Myerson’s Thoughts on Day 1 of Build 2014 [Blogging Windows, April 2, 2014] post:

I wanted to use this post to share some thoughts from what I said in the keynote:
1. We believe in our ecosystem of device manufacturers and devs (developers, developers, developers!), and that their creativity has incredible potential to change the world – and we want to help them do that.
2. We believe in the Internet of Things, and that as the devices get smaller, the cloud gets bigger.
3. We believe in natural user interfaces, and the power of things like voice and gesture to transform how users will interact with their devices and apps in the coming years.
…
Today we announced that the Windows 8.1 Update will support Intel’s Bay Trail Cost Reduced options, along with 1GB RAM and 16 GB storage configurations which are popular on entry level tablets and notebooks. We’re also working with Intel on enablement programs that make it easy for their partners to onboard new Windows devices quickly, much as we are with Qualcomm.
…
We showed Windows running on an Intel Quark chip. It’s a processor the size of a pencil eraser that is running a full version of Windows, enabling developers to use all their Windows knowledge and skills to create new and exciting devices and experiences. When we are ready to ship Windows for the Internet of Things, we will make that available for zero dollars to encourage creation of these new devices and experiences in this new and exciting category.
…
Finally, I previewed some work we are doing for the next iteration of Windows, which builds on the journey we began with Windows 8 just over a year ago as well as the releases we’ve done since then. In particular, I showed some early thinking on how the user experience in Windows will evolve in a way that will help developers’ apps make their way to users across devices and form factors.

image

We set out to do this is a thoughtful way – one where we could enable more productivity for customers working in desktop mode, while building smart bridges to the new modern user experience and ensuring customers can get access to all your great apps in the Windows Store no matter where they are in the experience, or which device type they’re on.
As I said today, these are glimpses of our roadmap, with a particular focus on the parts of our roadmap that are most relevant to our developer partners. We’ll continue to invest in these and many other areas to build a great platform and experiences for developers, customers and partners and you’ll hear more from us when this work is closer to being ready to ship out to the world.

Stephen Elop (still Nokia, but soon Microsoft):
==> Full transcript

    • Lumia 520 the best selling smartphone in the world: will have WP 8.1
    • WP 8.1 for all other existing Lumias
    • The next-generation of Lumia devices:
      – Lumia 930: flagship for WP 8.1, with unprecendented images and video, Creative Studio app grealy updated, new/updated Living Images app, fantastic cinema video experiences (4 microphones included), all MS services well integrated, 2.2 GHz Snapdragon 800 SoC, from June starting in Europe, with more more than 100 operators
      – Lumia 630: 4.5” ClearBlack display, 3G dual-SIM as well (different tiles for each SIM),  designed for hyper-social people, Cortana is also available, SensoreCore introduced for health and fitness apps … Lumia services (HERE maps, etc.), 1.5GHz Snapdragon 400 quadcore, from May starting in Asia, $159 single SIM
      – Lumia 635: 4.5” ClearBlack display, 4G LTE, …, 1.5GHz Snapdragon 400 quadcore, from May starting in Asia
    • Two new SDKs:
      – Imaging SDK 1.2
      – new SensoreCore SDK to create motion based apps

Satya Nadella: CEO
==> Full transcript

    • developer roots of Microsoft
    • Q&A via the DPE collection made before the conference
    • Why build for Windows if one develops for Android? –> innovating in every dimension … you will see a progress in a rapid pace … pretty unique pieces, e.g. bring end-users, IT profs and devs together … create a developer opportunity accross the Windows family expanding … we are betting on this platform ourselves
    • Plans for easy development accross platforms? –> David Treadwell part … the only platform with APIs on every platform amd native, managed and the web … working w/ PhoneGap, Unity e.t.c. …
    • What MS is doing to compete against Apple and Google in the tablet space? –> tablets accross all prices ranges … innovate with Surface to make the most productive table … what is the role of a tablet in the device family … consistency of user experience
    • Approach to UX design now and in 5 years with Microsoft? –> we have fantastic people for UX … see inspiration for other platforms … Cortana … modern apps to mouse and … Bill Buxton about natural UI … the broadest range of input modes today
    • How to design for the cloud, and how MS is supporting that? –> Scott Guthrie tomorrow … data-tier built for scale-out and other consideration long taken into account, Service Bus etc. … lot of focus on tools, samples that truely take advantage of the cloud
    • Different APIs released for different products? –> Windows Universal apps is the first step in the direction of bring great consistency for developers … consistency of semantics for these APIs
    • What’s the plan with latency as we are moving and more apps to the cloud? –> build robustness … data center build-up throughout the world … great effort to enable apps to run in a true distributed way
    • How MS can better support start-ups? –> BizSpark program with 70K start-ups … seed fundings and accellerators throughout the world
    • The vision for Microsoft going forward? –> Drive in this world of mobile first, cloud first … interactions of differnt kinds getting digitized … create platforms .. build the best experiences
    • Plans to becoma a Master CEO? –> … 2514 … watch Scott Guthrie keynote tomorrow

Cortana (yes!) and Many, Many Other Great Features coming in Windows Phone 8.1 [by  Joe Belfiore on Windows Phone Blog, April 2, 2014]

Whew, what a day! What a week! I’ve just gotten off the stage at Build in front of 5,000 of our beloved developers talking about the future of the Windows platform. And now I’m here to tell YOU about the stuff we’ve been working on to delight all our Windows Phone users and fans!

During my time on stage, I went over what’s next for Windows PCs, tablets, and phones with two major updates: Windows Phone 8.1 and the Windows 8.1 Update. Both releases bring a lot of new features for consumers and businesses alike, built from the feedback we’ve heard from customers along the way. We’ve also continued to invest in our partners, enabling lots of great new phones, tablets, laptops and PCs for you to choose from in the months ahead.

Windows 8.1 Update: Focused on Mouse/Keyboard

For PCs and tablets, we’ve made improvements in Windows 8.1 that will noticeably improve the experience when you’re using a PC without a touch-screen. We’ve made commands easier to find with mouse/keyboard, we’ve made switching between apps—especially Windows Store apps—much easier with mouse/keyboard… and we’ve made it easier to find new apps to install.

To learn more about the update to Windows 8.1 for your PC and tablets, head on over to the Windows Experience Blog and read Brandon’s post. What I really want to cover in detail here is…

Windows Phone 8.1: More Personal, Smarter, and even a “World Record Holder”!

If you’re a Windows Phone user, you already know that we set out to create an experience that puts you and the things you care about most front and center. As a result, we believe Windows Phone is the world’s most personal smartphone… and with Windows Phone 8.1, we’ve added a BUNCH of new features that make your smartphone even more a reflection of your personality and desires.

Want to experience it all in one giant demo? Then watch this marathon 15-minute video. Else… read on!

The world’s most personal smartphone just got more personal. Watch the innovations of Windows Phone 8.1 come alive.
Start screen: Make the Live Tiles Yours
We want your Windows Phone Start screen to genuinely reflect your personality and the people and things you care about—so we are making it even more customizable!

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In 2013, we added a third column on devices for 5-inch screen or larger devices, like the Lumia 1520, to enable more stuff to show up on the screen. People really liked this so we are enabling this on all screen sizes in Windows Phone 8.1. Pin away! We’ve also added the ability to customize your Start background with a favorite picture or one of the options we’ve provided, which will make many of the tiles on your Start screen become clear so you can see the background you selected as you scroll up and down.
Lock screen: Lots of new “themes” to choose from!

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The Lock screen is the very first thing you – or your friends—see when you grab your phone, and in Windows Phone 8.1 we’re providing a new app that lets you set a wide range of interesting “Lock Screen Themes” which show all kinds of different visuals and animations. Make it yours…
Cortana: Your PERSONAL Digital Assistant
Of everything we’re announcing today, I’m most excited to introduce you to the world’s first truly personal digital assistant, now on Windows Phone. We were inspired by the popular character from Halo who served as a brilliant AI and a deeply personal digital assistant to Master Chief… so we called her Cortana.
Powered by Bing, Cortana is the only digital assistant that gets to know you, builds a relationship that you can trust, and gets better over time by asking questions based on your behavior and checking in with you before she assumes you’re interested in something. She detects and monitors the stuff you care about, looks out for you throughout the day, and helps filter out the noise so you can focus on what matters to you. Cortana will launch shortly here in the U.S. first as a “beta,” and then will launch in the US, the U.K. and China in the second half of 2014 with other countries to follow afterwards into 2015.

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In Windows Phone 8.1, you get to Cortana by either a Live Tile on your Start screen or by pressing the search button on your device. This will take you to Cortana Home. To interact with Cortana, you can either speak or type—if you’re in a meeting, just type and Cortana won’t talk out loud. But if you ask her a spoken question, she’ll answer verbally and even carry on a natural conversation.
When you interact with Cortana for the VERY first time, she will start learning things about you… like your name, how to pronounce it, and ask for some personal interests.
Once she’s learned a bit about you, Cortana’s home populates with information that is curated just for you. You’ll see things like flight information she’s found from your email confirmations, weather, the latest news, and even traffic information once she learns your commute routine, such as from work and home.

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To develop Cortana, we talked to a number of real personal assistants. One technique these assistants spoke about was keeping track of the interests and preferences of their bosses in a notebook. We thought… what a great idea! So all the stuff Cortana curates for you is stored in Cortana’s Notebook. This information enables Cortana to be proactive and helpful throughout the day. For example, she’ll let me know if my upcoming flight back to Seattle is on time and, if I choose, will even pop-up to recommend what time I should leave for the airport based on traffic. Cortana can also manage your phone when you don’t want to be disturbed by setting quiet hours where she will silence any notifications, in-coming calls, and texts. Cortana understands the “inner circle” of people-closest-to-you, and she can let them break through at any time during quiet hours. And Cortana is the only digital assistant that lets you setup people reminders. You can have Cortana remind you that your buddy owes you $20 the next time you talk to him. And ALL of these interests and preferences are under YOUR CONTROL via Cortana’s notebook.
What’s more, because Cortana is powered by Bing, some of the interests in Cortana’s Notebook will light up on Bing.comwhen you sign in on the web. Bing.com will give you access to the things Cortana tracks for you, like your weather, stocks, news, and flights.
We’ve also designed Cortana to be able to interact with 3rd Party Appsinstalled on your phone. You can ask Cortana to help you make a video call in Skype, watch a TV show in Hulu Plus, look up a news feed on Facebook or send a tweet using the Twitter app – all of which we demoed during this morning’s keynote.
And finally, Cortana isn’t just a dry computer returning search results. Just as she has in the game Halo, Windows Phone’s Cortana has a bit of personality. But you’ll have to talk to her yourself to see what I mean by that. Or… I bet you’ll be able to find some videos on the web pretty soon to see what I mean.
We think you’re going to really love having Cortana as your personal assistant!
A Whole Slew of New Delighters

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Action Center: Live Tiles are a great way to “glance and go,” and now we’ve added Action Center to enable you to see notifications from ANY app – pinned or not—and to give you a customizable way to quickly access the settings you care about most, like Wi-Fi, Flight Mode, Bluetooth and Rotation Lock.

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Word Flow Keyboard: The keyboard in Windows Phone is smart enough to learn your writing style and even knows the names of people in your contacts for faster typing. Best of all, our new Word Flow Keyboard lets you glide your fingers over the keys to type INCREDIBLY quickly… a kid was able to BREAK THE OFFICIAL WORLD RECORD previously held by the Swype keyboard on a Samsung Galaxy S4 using Word Flow by 8 seconds!

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Skype:The new Skype app for Windows Phone 8.1 brings the best of Skype on a smartphone. It’s integrated with the Phone dialer, so if you’re on a call you can quickly and easily “upgrade” your ordinary phone call to a Skype video call at the tap of a button! And… the new Skype app is designed to work seamlessly with Cortana so you can use Cortana to setup your calls within Skype.

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Calendar:The new Calendar has been redesigned to add a new week view which lots of people have been asking for and it has many nice touches—like panning right to get to the next day or week or month! What’s more, it looks a lot like Outlook on your Windows PC… e.g., the weather is integrated at the top – just like in Outlook.

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Music, Video, Podcasts: We’ve made a ton of improvements to these experiences, which are now split out as separate apps and all of which can be updated via the Store. In Music, you can edit your playlists and manage your cloud collection really easily and effectively. Video makes it possible to buy or rent videos from Xbox Music, and Podcasts now lets you subscribe to any RSS feed AND provides a Bing-powered podcast search for every country where Windows Phone is available. Oh… and we’ve improved the phone volume control by including separate sliders for your ringer/notifications and for your apps and media. Just the way you asked for it!

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People Hub, Email and Accounts: The People Hub has higher-fidelity feeds for your social network content (large photos!) and it connects directly to 3rd-party social networking apps so that you can have easy access to all the full functionality of the 3rd party apps once they are installed. Email now supports S/MIME secure email, and we’ve broadened our support for different account types, now including iCloud.

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Photos & Camera: The Photos experience now jumps directly to your most recent photos and shows as collections automatically organized, in a view grouped by date and location. Online photo albums are now supported via app-extensibility, so 3rd parties can plug in their services. In the Camera, we’ve updated the UI and added “burst mode” photography that lets you capture exactly the perfect moment—just like on Windows 8.1.
Data Sense, Wi-Fi Sense, Storage Sense, and Battery Saver:We’ve added a number of features in Windows Phone 8.1 that are designed to help you get the most out of your data allowance, battery life and storage.

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Data Sense lets you track how much data usage you use in a given month and will give you a breakdown of usage by app so you can see which app is using the most of your data. As you near your data limit, Data Sense will more aggressively offload data to Wi-Fi and limit cellular usage… and in 8.1 there’s a new “high savings” mode that cranks up the compression of images as you browse the web so you can browse even farther using less data than WP8.
Wi-Fi Sense will automatically connect you to free public hotspots it finds to help you save cellular data. And, if you’d like, you can opt-in to automatically and securely enable your friends and contacts to auto-connect to your home Wi-Fi, so they can use the internet connection at your house without hassling you for the password and typing it in manually. If you turn off Wi-Fi in Wi-Fi Sense, you can have Cortana automatically turn it back on when you reach one of your favorite places as identified in Cortana.

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We’re introducing Storage Sense to help you get the most out of the memory and storage on your phone. It will help you manage content you have on an SD memory card if your device supports those. You can also move content – like apps, music, photos – between the storage built in to your device and an SD memory card.

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And Battery Saver gives you a clear breakdown of how apps are using your battery so you can make more informed usage decisions. With “automatic mode” enabled, it can dramatically extend your battery life.

Windows and Windows Phone Together

Your Microsoft Accountallows Windows and Windows Phone to work together in amazing ways. Windows Phone 8.1 furthers the integration between phone and PC. If you change your theme color, that change will sync across all your Windows devices. If you buy an in-app purchase in some of the newer apps written for Windows Phone and Windows 8.1, the purchase works on your phone AND your PC. And other settings like your home Wi-Fi password will also sync.

Ever wanted to project your phone screen onto a PC, TV set or projector? We’ve added support for that as well—connect your Windows Phone to a compatible PC using a USB cable and you can run an application on the PC to show the phone screen. Some of the forthcoming new phones will also support wireless Miracast display to compatible TVs and other devices.

And finally with Internet Explorer 11 for Windows Phone, you will be able to see all the open tabs you have on all your Windows devices and all your Favorites too. Plus the new Internet Explorer gives you InPrivate browsing, password caching, and a super-handy reading mode.

Great for Business Users and IT Managers

Windows has long been the choice for the enterprise and professionals. Windows Phone fits easily and seamlessly into a corporate ecosystem making it easier to work when you are on the go. Last year, PC Magazine’s readers selected Nokia Lumia/Windows Phones as the Business Choice Award for smartphonesby scoring them the highest in end-user satisfaction.

With Windows Phone 8.1, we’re making it even easier for IT professionals to manage devices and for professionals to connect to essential business apps and services with features such as customizable MDM enrollment, support for loads more MDM policies, LOB application & certificate management, S/MIME and VPN support. Stay tuned for a detailed blog post later today on the Windows for your Business Blog that covers all the key features for businesses.

Sounds Great! When Can I Get It? And on which phones?

Windows Phone 8.1 will start rolling out to existing Windows Phone 8 users and will come pre-installed on new phones, including the Lumia 630 and 635 and Lumia 930announced by Nokia today, in the coming months. If you want to try out Windows Phone 8.1 and you are a registered developer, you can update your phone as part of the Developer Preview Program in the first part of April.

We are very proud of the progress we are making with Windows Phone. Industry analyst IDC proclaimed Windows Phone the fastest growing smartphone platform in 2013, and we think the future is even brighter. At Mobile World Congress, we announced our commitment to growing the number of device partners making Windows Phones, and were proud to welcome nine new partners to the Windows Phone ecosystem. Today we announced two more partners – Prestigio in Europe and Micromax in India – to further ensure that individuals around the world will have access to the amazing experience that only Windows Phone delivers consistently across all price points.

We know we have lots more to do – for developers, for business customers, and for consumers. Today’s announcements at Build were all about taking the next steps – making it easier than ever to build great devices and write great apps for Windows, and enabling a new generation of cool experiences for customers that show the power of designing around people, delivering truly personal computing, and helping us all to get more out of the technology in our lives.

Tags: Windows phone, Build 2014, Word Flow Keyboard, Battery Saver, Start screen, Email, camera roll, Windows Phone 8.1, Xbox Video,Enterprise, Announcement, inprivate, Action Center, Photos, Windows 8.1, Business, Devices, VPN, Cortana, Platform, skype, Xbox Music,Lock Screen, Windows 8.1 Update, podcasts, People Hub, calendar, Microsoft Accounbt, Windows, Live Tiles, Internet Explorer 11, Nokia, Wi-Fi Sense, Data Sense, Storage Sense

Windows 8.1 Update – important refinements to the Windows experience [ by  Brandon LeBlanc on Windows Experience Blog, April 2, 2014]

As Joe mentioned here, today we’re announcing two important updates to the Windows platform: Windows Phone 8.1 andWindows 8.1 Update. With these updates, we continue to refine and improve Windows based on feedback from customers to deliver ongoing value to all their Windows devices. Joe’s post goes into detail on all the awesomeness that’s in Windows Phone 8.1(Cortana is rad – trust me!) but also gives some great context around our new engineering culture in the Operating Systems Group now that we’re in this mobile-first, cloud-first world. It also underscores how we are moving more quickly to improve the Windows experience for customers. In this post, I wanted to share a little bit more about the update for Windows 8.1 and Windows RT 8.1.
With the current generation of Windows, we made a pretty big bet on touch and mobility. Along with building on top of the strong foundation in Windows 7, we also introduced a brand new approach to the Windows user experience that brought touch to the forefront. Since the original introduction of Window 8 in 2012, we have been continuously refining the experience, and we are making steady progress. More than 40 percent of Windows PCs at big box retailers, like Windows Stores Only at Best Buy, this past holiday season were touch-enabled – up from only 4 percent a year ago. As Joe recently said at Mobile World Congress, customer satisfaction for a device running Windows 8 with touch is actually higher than it was for a PC running Windows 7 without touch. We believe deeply in the notion that delivering a compelling personal and modern experience across all the devices that matter in your life should not mean sacrificing familiarity. Windows 8 and 8.1 were first steps, and we continue to make refinements based on customer and partner feedback.
Last fall, less than a year after we shipped Windows 8, we released Windows 8.1– bringing a large set of customer-driven improvements including the return of the Start button, tutorials, more personalization options, the ability to boot to desktop, improvements to multi-tasking, and more. Today marks the next step as we release a new update for your Windows experience.
The Windows 8.1 Update delivers a collection of refinements designed to give people a more familiar and convenient experience across touch, keyboard and mouse inputs. It also brings improvements for business customers, really accelerates opportunity for developers, and enables device makers to offer lower cost devices.
See what’s new with Windows 8.1 in the latest update, including easier mouse and keyboard functions, a new taskbar, and Bing’s improved Smart Search!
Easier access to your favorite apps and key controls:
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On the Start screen, on select devices you will now find Power and Search buttons at the upper-right corner next to your account picture. You can now more quickly shut down your PC if you need to and do a search right from the Start screen.
If you like using the desktop, you will be happy to know that select devices will now boot to desktop as the default setting. And on your taskbar, you can now pin both desktop apps and apps from the Windows Store as well as your favorite websites. You can now pin any app you want to the taskbar so you can open or switch between apps right from the desktop. I’ve got some of my favorite apps like Xbox Music, Skype, Facebook, Flipboard, and Mint pinned to my taskbar. You can also access the taskbar from anywhere when you’re using a mouse; you can see the taskbar on any screen by moving your mouse to the bottom edge of your screen. Just click on any of the apps pinned to your taskbar to open or switch to them.
More familiar mouse and keyboard options:
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We’ve made it so your mouse works more consistently anywhere in Windows. If you move your mouse to the top of the screen when using a Windows Store app, you will see the familiar Close and Minimize buttons. And as I mentioned above, when you move your mouse to the bottom of the screen in a Windows Store app, the taskbar comes up.

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On the Start screen, if you right-click on an app tile, you will get a context menu next to the app tile that shows you what you can do with the tile, like unpin from Start, pin to the taskbar, change the tile size or even uninstall the app. Right-clicking on an app tile on the Start screen works just like right-clicking on something on the desktop.
Simpler way to find new apps:
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After installing the update, you’ll find the Windows Store is now pinned to the taskbar by default so you can easily discover new apps (yes, you can unpin it if you don’t want it there).
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And after installing new apps, you’ll notice a message at the lower-left corner of the Start screen that points you to the Apps view so you can see what you recently just installed.
Seamless browsing on all devices:
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With today’s update, Internet Explorer 11 adapts your browsing experience by detecting your Windows device and input type – whether an 8-inch touch tablet in portrait mode or a 24-inch desktop with mouse and keyboard. The web is still front-and-center but new design enhancements make your browsing experience feel like it was made just for your device – like the number of tabs on-screen, the size of the fonts and menus. You can also now control when the browser remains on-screen or hides away for full-screen browsing. Check out 22tracksto see these updates in action.
Improvements for business customers: We are introducing several key improvements for businesses such as Enterprise Mode Internet Explorer (EMIE) and extended Mobile Device Management (MDM). EMIE enables Internet Explorer 8 compatibility on Internet Explorer 11 so companies can run existing web-based apps seamlessly on Windows 8.1 devices. And with extended MDM, we are introducing additional policy settings that can be managed with whatever MDM solution an enterprise chooses including whitelisting or blacklisting Windows Store apps and websites. Look for a blog post later today on the Windows for your Business Blog that discusses these in greater detail and a post on the Springboard Series Blogon deployment guidance for the Windows 8.1 Update.
New low cost devices:With the Windows 8.1 Update, we have enabled our hardware partners to build lower cost devices for Windows such as devices with only 1GB RAM and 16GB of storage that provide customers with the experience they expect from a Windows device without sacrificing performance.
We have made the Windows 8.1 Update available today for MSDN subscribers, and will begin to roll it out for free to Windows 8.1 and Windows RT 8.1 customers via Windows Update next Tuesday April 8th. For the majority of folks, they will receive the update automatically. If you are still on Windows 8, you can get the Windows 8.1 Update via the Windows Store on April 8th as well.
NOTE: The Windows 8.1 Update will be KB2919355 for those of you interested.
We’re really excited to get this update out to everyone! Moving forward, we’ll continue to deliver improvements through regular updates like this one to Windows, allowing us to respond more quickly to customer feedback as your needs change.
Tags: Windows 8, Keyboard, Start screen, Windows Store, Windows 8.1, search, Apps, Windows 8.1 Update, Windows, Update, Pinning,Taskbar, Mouse

Extending platform commonality through universal Windows apps [by  Kevin Gallo on Building Apps for Windows, April 2, 2014]

Today during our BUILD conference in San Francisco we unveiled the latest Windows software for phones, tablets, and PCs. Windows Phone 8.1 further establishes Windows Phone as the world’s most personal smartphone, with an even more engaging Start screen, the fastest keyboard on the market, thanks to Word Flow, and of course Cortana – the only personal digital assistant built around you. We also shared Windows 8.1 Update features such as UI improvements for mouse and keyboard users, the ability to pin Windows Store apps to the taskbar, and Internet Explorer compatibility enhancements. These OS features, and a new wave of devices that consumers will love, open up new opportunities for developers.
With this release of the Windows developer platform we set out to accomplish three major goals: 1) Reach customers across phones, tablets, and PCs; 2) Deliver innovation that supports developer investments; 3) Make cross-platform technology easier and more capable.
Reaching customers across phones, tablets, and PCs
Windows Phone 8 brought the same core set of operating system components used by Windows 8 to the modern UI of Windows Phone. Today we’re taking an even bigger step with Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 Update by empowering developers to create universal Windows apps for a common Windows runtime.
Since universal Windows apps run on the same Windows runtime, developers have a common way of building and architecting apps for phones, tablets and PCs; from how they handle suspend and resume and do background processing, to the way they manage in-app security.
To help developers create universal Windows apps for Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1, we’ve announced the release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC. In addition to enhanced productivity and collaboration features, Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC includes Shared Projects that allow developers to create an app that is easily tailored to render a contextually appropriate experience across Windows phones, tablets and PCs. Get the tools now!
Innovation that supports developer investments
We’ve designed Windows for the long term, to address developers’ needs today, while respecting prior investments. We do this with one familiar toolset based on Visual Studio 2013, with support for C#, C++, JavaScript, XAML, DirectX, and HTML. The tools and technology stacks already used by hundreds of thousands of developers extend app development across Windows devices. Developers who have built apps for Windows 8.1 will find it fairly easy to reuse their work and bring tailored experiences to Windows Phone 8.1. Windows Phone 8 developers can use the same code, and also access new features, when they develop for Windows Phone 8.1.
Windows now also offers an expansive set of common APIs for everything from displaying notification toasts to accessing the file system and device capabilities. With Windows Phone 8.1, we are adding a wide array of new features including support for Bluetooth LE to connect to devices, Action Center extensibility to more effectively connect with users, triggers to ensure battery-friendly multitasking, VPN so end users can connect to their workplace, and many more.
Even Cortana delivers developer extensibility. Cortana brings a significant evolution of the speech technology developed by Windows and Bing, which first appeared in Windows Phone 8. In Windows Phone 8.1 we expose new enhancements to the Speech API that developers can use to integrate their apps with the Cortana family of services. Developers can now leverage speech recognition and voice commands to denote a series of actions triggered by heuristically derived scenarios that are surfaced through the Cortana speech recognition service. Fewer steps and more types of natural verbal exchanges open more apps. All of this is delivered through a simple API so developers who use Windows Phone 8 speech features today can plug into Cortana with little additional effort.
Developers are interacting with tablets and Windows computers in new ways as well. Kinect for Windows v2 will be released this summer. Soon developers can start building Kinect apps for Windows Store and publish or commercially deploy Kinect apps and solutions.
We’re also improving the way people find and use apps, as well as increasing monetization options and providing a more consistent Store experience across devices and markets. Developers can choose to link apps among phones, tablets and PCs so when a user downloads an app on one device they can install it on all of their Windows devices, increasing usage and engagement. Windows 8.1 Update brings the Store icon and pinned apps to the taskbar on the desktop. Developers are also getting more ways to market and monetize apps, such as common price tiers that bring the popular $0.99 and $1.29 price point to PCs, and updated advertising SDKs that support more rich media standards for better fill rates.
Also, by popular demand, we’ll soon be piloting a program through which developers can directly respond to app reviews to address potential confusion or other issues that may be hurting their ratings. These are just a few of the new Windows Store features being detailed this week during BUILD. Todd Brix will share much more detail about what’s new in Windows Store later today.
Make cross-platform technology easier and more capable
We’ve also been working for developers who may not already be on the Windows platform by supporting a mix of languages, runtimes, frameworks, and protocols that run across devices. Middleware partners like Unity have helped developers bring thousands of titles to the Windows Store. In a newly released beta version, Unity is delivering support for Windows Phone 8.1, including universal Windows apps.
Microsoft Open Technologies also works with various open source communities to contribute code to popular C++ frameworks and optimize them for Windows devices. For example, Windows Store supports Cocos2D-X, openFrameworks, OpenCV, Cinder, and Ogre3D apps. Box2D and Bullet also have joined the Windows Store. jQuery now fully supports Windows Runtime, so web developers can build Windows 8 apps reusing their existing code and skills. Developers who use HTML5 to build cross-platform apps for iOS and Android with tools like Apache Cordova will find it easy to port their apps to Windows.
In fact, we’re taking a much more pragmatic approach to the web in general. We know that HTML is a critical cross-platform technology. Windows Phone 8.1 brings the same powerful hardware-accelerated IE11 HTML engine in Windows 8.1 to the phone. We’ve made great strides in extending IE to developers by focusing on open standards. Now we want to focus even more on interoperability. We already support WebGL and other technologies, such as media streaming extensions for adaptive streaming scenarios.
Today we’re also announcing that Microsoft Open Technologies has brought the Windows Library for JavaScript (WinJS) cross-platform apps and is open sourcing it under the Apache 2.0 license. Find the source code on GitHub. Use this powerful Windows development framework to build high-quality web apps across a variety of browsers and devices beyond Windows, including Chrome, Firefox, Android, and iOS.
Where we go from here
We’re enabling universal Windows apps for a common Windows runtime today, and we know we have more work to do, including expanding the range of devices running universal Windows apps so developers can reach more customers in more places, from Xbox One and the Internet of Things scenarios, to millions more desktop Windows users. We also continue to strive to make the app development, submission, and management process faster and easier. In the coming weeks and months, you’ll see additional updates to the Windows platform – including tools and Store – all designed to deliver even better experiences and enable greater opportunity for our developer community.
Tags: phone, PC, Tablet

Satya Nadella’s (?the next Microsoft CEO?) next ten years’ vision of “digitizing everything”, Microsoft opportunities and challenges seen by him with that, and the case of Big Data

December 13, 2013 7:29 pm / Leave a comment

… as one of the crucial issues for that (in addition to the cloud, mobility and Internet-of-Things), via the current tipping point as per Microsoft, and the upcoming revolution in that as per Intel

Satya Nadella, Cloud & Enterprise Group, Microsoft and Om Malik, Founder & Senior Writer, GigaOM [LeWeb YouTube channel, Dec 10, 2013]

Satya is responsible for building and running Microsoft’s computing platforms, developer tools and cloud services. He and his team deliver the “Cloud OS.” Rumored to be on the short list for CEO, he shares his views on the future. [Interviewed during the “Plenary I” devoted to “The Next 10 years” at Day 1 on Dec 10, 2013.]

And why I will present Big Data after that? For very simple reason: IMHO exactly in Big Data Microsoft’s innovations came to a point at which its technology has the best chances to become dominant and subsequently define the standard for the IT industry—resulting in “winner-take-all” economies of scale and scope. Whatever Intel is going to add to that in terms of “technologies for the next Big Data revolution” is going only to help Microsoft with its currently achieved innovative position even more. But for this reason I will include here the upcoming Intel innovations for Big Data as well.

In this next-gen regard it is highly recommended to read also: Disaggregation in the next-generation datacenter and HP’s Moonshot approach for the upcoming HP CloudSystem “private cloud in-a-box” with the promised HP Cloud OS based on the 4 years old OpenStack effort with others [‘Experiencing the Cloud’. Dec 12, 2013] !

Now the detailed discussion of Big Data:

Microsoft® makes Big Data work for you! [HP Discover YouTube channel, recorded on Dec 11; published on Dec 12, 2013]

[Doug Smith, Director, Emerging Technologies, Microsoft] Come and join our Innovation Theatre session to hear how customers are solving Big Data challenges in big ways jointly with HP!

The Garage Series: Unleashing Power BI for Office 365 [Office 365 technology blog, Nov 20, 2013]

In this week’s show, host Jeremy Chapman is joined by Michael Tejedor from the SQL Server team to discuss Power BI and show it in action. Power BI for Office 365 is a cloud based solution that reduces the barriers to deploying a self-service Business Intelligence environment for sharing live Excel based reports and data queries as well as new features and services that enable ease of data discover and information access from anywhere. Michael draws up the self-service approach to Power BI as well as how public data can be queried and combined in a unified view within Excel. Then they walk through an end-to-end demo of Excel and Power BI components—Power Query [formerly known as “Data Explorer“], Power Pivot, Power View, Power Map [formerly known as product codename “Geoflow“] and Q&A–as they optimize profitability of a bar and rein in bartenders with data.

Last week Mark Kashman and I went through the administrative controls of managing user access and mobile devices, but this week I’m joined by Michael Tejedor and we shift gears completely to talk data, databases and business intelligence. Back in July we announced Power BI for Office 365 and how this new service along with the  using the familiar tools within Excel, enables you can to discover, analyze, visualize and share data in powerful ways. Power BIThe solution includes Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, Power Map and as well as a host of Power BI features including Q&A.  and how using the familiar tools within Excel, you can discover, analyze, visualize and share data in powerful ways. Power BI includes Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, Power Map and Q&A.  

  • Power Query [formerly known as “Data Explorer“] is a data search engine allowing you to query data from within your company and from external data sources on the Internet, all within Excel.
  • Power Pivot lets you create flexible models within Excel that can process large data sets quickly using SQL Server’s in-memory database.
  • Power View allows you to manipulate data and compile it into charts, graphs and other visualizations. It’s great for presentations and reports
  • Power Map [formerly known as product codename “Geoflow“] is a 3D data visualization tool for mapping, exploring and interacting with geographic and temporal data.
  • Q&A is a natural language query engine that lets users easily query data using common terms and phrases.

In many cases, the process to get custom reports and dashboards from the people running your databases, sales or operations systems is something like submitting a request to your database administrator and a few phone calls or meetings to get what you want. I came from an logistics and operations management background, it could easily take 2 or 3 weeks to even make minor tweaks to an operational dashboard. Now you can use something familiar–Excel—in a self-service way to hook into your local databases, Excel flat files, modern data sources like Hadoop or public data sources via Power Query and the data catalogue. All of these data sources can be combined create powerful insights and data visualizations, all can be easily and securely shared with the people you work with through the Power BI for Office 365 service.

Of course all of this sounds great, but you can’t really get a feel for it until you see it. Michael and team built out a great demo themed after a bar and using data to track alcohol profitability, pour precision per bartender and Q&A to query all of this using normal query terms. You’ll want to watch the show to see how everything turns out and of course to see all of these power tools in action. Of course if you want to kick the tires and try Power BI for Office 365, you can register for the preview now.

Intel: technologies for the next Big Data revolution [HP Discover YouTube channel, recorded on Dec 11; published on Dec 12, 2013]

[Patrick Buddenbaum, Director, Enterprise Segment, Intel Corporation at HP Discover Barcelona 2013 on Dec 11, 11:40 AM – 12:00 PM] HP and Intel share the belief that every organization and individual should be able to unlock intelligence from the world’s ever increasing set of data sources—the Internet of Things.

 

Related “current tipping point” announcements from Microsoft:

From: Organizations Speed Business Results With New Appliances From HP and Microsoft [joint press release, Jan 18, 2011]

New solutions for business intelligence, data warehouse, messaging and database consolidation help increase employee productivity and reduce IT complexity.

… The HP Business Decision Appliance is available now to run business intelligence services ….

Delivering on the companies’ extended partnership announced a year ago, the new converged application appliances from HP and Microsoft are the industry’s first systems designed for IT, as well as end users. They deliver application services such as business intelligence, data warehousing, online transaction processing and messaging. The jointly engineered appliances, and related consulting and support services, enable IT to deliver critical business applications in as little as one hour, compared with potentially months needed for traditional systems.3 One of the solutions already offered by HP and Microsoft — the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance — delivers up to 200 times faster queries and 10 times the scalability of traditional Microsoft SQL Server deployments.4

…

With the HP Business Decision Appliance, HP and Microsoft have greatly reduced the time and effort it takes for IT to configure, deploy and manage a comprehensive business intelligence solution, compared with a traditional business intelligence solution where applications, infrastructure and productivity tools are not pre-integrated. This appliance is optimized for Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint and can be installed and configured by IT in less than one hour.

The solution enables end users to share data analyses built with Microsoft’s award-winning5 PowerPivot for Excel 2010 and collaborate with others in SharePoint 2010. It allows IT to centrally audit, monitor and manage solutions created by end users from a single dashboard.

…

Availability and Pricing6

  • The HP Business Decision Appliance with three years of HP 24×7 hardware and software support services is available today from HP and HP/Microsoft Frontline channel partners for less than $28,000 (ERP). Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 are licensed separately.

  • The HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance with services for site assessment, installation and startup, as well as three years of HP 24×7 hardware and software support services, is available today from HP and HP/Microsoft Frontline channel partners starting at less than $2 million. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse is licensed separately.

…

3 Based on HP’s experience with customers using HP Business Decision Appliance.
4 SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) has been evaluated by 16 early adopter customers in six different industries. Customers compared PDW with their existing environments and saw typically 40x and up to 200x improvement in query times.
5 Messaging and Online Collaboration Reviews, Nov. 30, 2010, eWEEK.com.
6 Estimated retail U.S. prices. Actual prices may vary.

From: HP Delivers Enterprise Agility with New Converged Infrastructure Solutions [press release, June 6, 2011]

HP today announced several industry-first Converged Infrastructure solutions that improve enterprise agility by simplifying deployment and speeding IT delivery.

…

Converged Systems accelerate time to application value

HP Converged Systems speed solution deployment by providing a common architecture, management and security model across virtualization, cloud and dedicated application environments. They include:

…

  • HP AppSystem maximizes performance while simplifying deployment and application management. These systems offer best practice operations with a standard architecture that lowers total cost of ownership. Among the new systems are HP Vertica Analytics System, as well as HP Database Consolidation Solution and HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance, which are both optimized for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2.

…

From: Microsoft Expands Data Platform With SQL Server 2012, New Investments for Managing Any Data, Any Size, Anywhere [press release, Oct 12, 2011]

New technologies will give businesses a universal platform for data management, access and collaboration.

… Kummert described how SQL Server 2012, formerly code-named “Denali,” addresses the growing challenges of data and device proliferation by enabling customers to rapidly unlock and extend business insights, both in traditional datacenters and through public and private clouds. Extending on this foundation, Kummert also announced new investments to help customers manage “big data,” including an Apache Hadoop-based distribution for Windows Server and Windows Azure and a strategic partnership with Hortonworks Inc. …

…

The company also made available final versions of the Hadoop Connectors for SQL Server and Parallel Data Warehouse. Customers can use these connectors to integrate Hadoop with their existing SQL Server environments to better manage data across all types and forms.

…

SQL Server 2012 delivers a powerful new set of capabilities for mission-critical workloads, business intelligence and hybrid IT across traditional datacenters and private and public clouds. Features such as Power View (formerly Project “Crescent,”) and SQL Server Data Tools (formerly “Juneau”) expand the self-service BI capabilities delivered with PowerPivot, and provide an integrated development environment for SQL Server developers.

From: Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2012 to Help Customers Manage “Any Data, Any Size, Anywhere” [press release, March 6, 2012]

Microsoft’s next-generation data platform releases to manufacturing today.

REDMOND, Wash. — March 6, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that the latest version of the world’s most widely deployed data platform, Microsoft SQL Server 2012, has released to manufacturing. SQL Server 2012 helps address the challenges of increasing data volumes by rapidly turning data into actionable business insights. Expanding on Microsoft’s commitment to help customers manage any data, regardless of size, both on-premises and in the cloud, the company today also disclosed additional details regarding its plans to release an Apache Hadoop-based service for Windows Azure.

…

Tackling Big Data

IT research firm Gartner estimates that the volume of global data is growing at a rate of 59 percent per year, with 70 to 85 percent in unstructured form.* Furthering its commitment to connect SQL Server and rich business intelligence tools, such as Microsoft Excel, PowerPivot for Excel 2010 and Power View, with unstructured data, Microsoft announced plans to release an additional limited preview of an Apache Hadoop-based service for Windows Azure in the first half of 2012.

…

To help customers more cost-effectively manage their enterprise-scale workloads, Microsoft will release several new data warehousing solutions in conjunction with the general availability of SQL Server 2012, slated to begin April 1. This includes a major software update and new half-rack form factors for Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse appliances, as well as availability of SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse reference architectures for SQL Server 2012.

Microsoft Simplifies Big Data for the Enterprise [press release, Oct 24, 2012]

New Apache Hadoop-compatible solutions for Windows Azure and Windows Server enable customers to easily extract insights from big data.

NEW YORK — Oct. 24, 2012 — Today at the O’Reilly Strata Conference + Hadoop World, Microsoft Corp. announced new previews of Windows Azure HDInsight Service and Microsoft HDInsight Server for Windows, the company’s Apache Hadoop-based solutions for Windows Azure and Windows Server. The new previews, available today athttp://www.microsoft.com/bigdata, deliver Apache Hadoop compatibility for the enterprise and simplify deployment of Hadoop-based solutions. In addition, delivering these capabilities on the Windows Server and Azure platforms enables customers to use the familiar tools of Excel, PowerPivot for Excel and Power View to easily extract actionable insights from the data.

“Big data should provide answers for business, not complexity for IT,” said David Campbell, technical fellow, Microsoft. “Providing Hadoop compatibility on Windows Server and Azure dramatically lowers the barriers to setup and deployment and enables customers to pull insights from any data, any size, on-premises or in the cloud.”

The company also announced today an expanded partnership with Hortonworks, a commercial vendor of Hadoop, to give customers access to an enterprise-ready distribution of Hadoop with the newly released solutions.

“Hortonworks is the only provider of Apache Hadoop that ensures a 100 percent open source platform,” said Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks. “Our expanded partnership with Microsoft empowers customers to build and deploy on platforms that are fully compatible with Apache Hadoop.”

More information about today’s news and working with big data can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/bigdata.

Choose the Right Strategy to Reap Big Value From Big Data [feature article for the press, Nov 13, 2012]

From devices to storage to analytics, technologies that work together will be key for business’ next information age.

REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 13, 2012 — It seems the gigabyte is going the way of the megabyte — another humble unit of computational measurement that is becoming less and less relevant. Long live the terabyte, impossibly large, increasingly common.
Consider this: Of all the data that’s been collected in the world, more than 90 percent has been gathered in the last two years alone. According to a June 2011 report from the McKinsey Global Institute, 15 out of 17 industry sectors of the U.S. have more data stored — per company — than the U.S. Library of Congress.
The explosion in data has been catalyzed by several factors. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are creating huge streams of unstructured data in the form of opinions, comments, trends and demographics arising from a vast and growing worldwide conversation.
And then there’s the emerging world of machine-generated information. The rise of intelligent systems and the Internet of Things means that more and more specialized devices are connected to information technology — think of a national retail chain that is connected to every one of its point-of-sale terminals across thousands of locations or an automotive plant that can centrally monitor hundreds of robots on the shop floor.
Combine it all and some industry observers are predicting that the amount of data stored by organizations across industries will increase ten-fold every five years, much of it coming from new streams that haven’t yet been tapped.
It truly is a new information age, and the opportunity is huge. The McKinsey Global Instituteestimates that the U.S. health care system, for example, could save as much as $300 billion from more effective use of data. In Europe, public sector organizations alone stand to save 250 billion euros.
In the ever-competitive world of business, data strategy is becoming the next big competitive advantage. According to analyst firm Gartner Group,* “By tapping a continual stream of information from internal and external sources, businesses today have an endless array of new opportunities for: transforming decision-making; discovering new insights; optimizing the business; and innovating their industries.”
According to Microsoft’s Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Business Platforms Division, companies addressing this challenge today may wonder where to start. How do you know which data to store without knowing what you want to measure? But then again, how do you know what insights the data holds without having it in the first place?
“There is latent value in the data itself,” Kummert says. “The good news is storage costs are making it economical to store the data. But that still leaves the question of how to manage it and gain value from it to move your business forward.”
With new data services in the cloud such as Windows Azure HDInsight Service and Microsoft HDInsight Server for Windows and Microsoft’s Apache Hadoop-based solutions for Windows Azure and Windows Server, organizations can afford to capture valuable data streams now while they develop their strategy — without making a huge financial bet on a six-month, multimillion-dollar datacenter project.
Just having access to the data, says Kummert, can allow companies to start asking much more complicated questions, combining information sources such as geolocation or weather information with internal operational trends such as transaction volume.
“In the end, big data is not just about holding lots of information,” he says. “It’s about how you harness it. It’s about insight, allowing end users to get the answers they need and doing so with the tools they use every day, whether that’s desktop applications, devices at the network edge or something else.”
His point is often overlooked with all the abstract talk of big data. In the end, it’s still about people, so making it easier for information workers to shift to a new world in which data is paramount is just as important as the information itself. Information technology is great at providing answers, but it still doesn’t know how to ask the right questions, and that’s where having the right analytics tools and applications can help companies make the leap from simply storing mountains of data to actually working with it.
That’s why in the Windows 8 world, Kummert says, the platform is designed to extend from devices and phones to servers and services, allowing companies to build a cohesive data strategy from end to end with the ultimate goal of empowering workers.
“When we talk about the Microsoft big data platform, we have all of the components to achieve exactly that,” Kummert says. “From the Windows Embedded platform to the Microsoft SQL Server stack through to the Microsoft Office stack. We have all the components to collect the data, store it securely and make it easier for information workers to find it — and, more importantly, understand what it means.”
For more information on building intelligent systems to get the most out of business data, please visit the Windows Embedded home page.
* Gartner, “Gartner Says Big Data Creates Big Jobs: 4.4 Million IT Jobs Globally to Support Big Data By 2015,” October 2012

Which data management solution delivers against today’s top six requirements? [The HP Blog Hub, March 25, 2013]

By Manoj Suvarna – Director, Product Management, HP AppSystems

In my last post I talked about the six key requirements I believe a data management

solution should deliver against today, namely:

1.      High performance

2.      Fast time to value

3.      Built with Big Data as a priority

4.      Low cost

5.      Simplified management

6.      Proven expertise

Today, 25th March 2013, HP has announced the HP AppSystem for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse, a comprehensive data warerehouse solution jointly engineered with Microsoft, with a wide array of complementary tools, to effectively manage, store, and unlock valuable business insights.

Let’s take a look at how the solution delivers against each of the key requirements in turn:

1  High performance

With its MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) engine, and ‘shared nothing’ architecture, to effectively manage, store, and unlock valuable business insights, the HP AppSystem for Parallel Data Warehouse can deliver linear scale starting from a configuration to support small terabyte requirements all the way up to configurations supporting six Petabytes of data. 

The solution features the latest HP ProLiant Gen8 servers, with InfiniBand FDR networking, and uses the xVelocity in-memory analytics engine and the xVelocity memory-optimized columnstore index feature in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 to greatly enhance query performance. 

The combination of Microsoft software with HP Converged Infrastructure means HP AppSystem for Parallel Data Warehouse offers leading performance for complex workloads, with up to 100x faster query performance and a 30% faster scan rate than previous generations.

2  Fast time to value

HP AppSystem for Parallel Data Warehouse is a factory built, turn-key system, delivered complete from HP’s factory as an integrated set of hardware and software including servers, storage, networking, tools, software, services, and support.   Not only is the solution pre-integrated, but it’s backed by unique, collaborative HP and Microsoft support with onsite installation and deployment services to smooth implementation.  

3  Built with Big Data as a priority

Designed to integrate with Hadoop, HP AppSystem for Parallel Data Warehouse is ideally suited for “Big Data” environments. This integration allows customers to perform comprehensive analytics on unstructured, semi-structured and structured data, to effectively gain business insights and make better, faster decisions.

4  Simplified management

Providing the optimal management environment has been a critical element of the design, and is delivered through HP Support Pack Utility Suite.  This set of tools simplifies updates and several other maintenance tasks across the system to ensure that it is continually running at optimal performance.  Unique in the industry, HP Support Pack Utility Suite can deliver up to 2000 firmware updates with the click of a button.  In addition, the HP AppSystem for Parallel Data Warehouse is manageable via the Microsoft System Center console, leveraging deep integration with HP Insight Control.

5  Low cost

The HP AppSystem for Parallel Data Warehouse has been designed as part of an end to end stack for data management, integrating data warehousing seamlessly with BI solutions to minimize the cost of ownership.

It has also been re-designed with a new form factor to minimize space and maximize ease of expansion, which means the entry point for a quarter rack system is approximately 35% less expensive than the previous generation solution.    It is expandable in modular increments up to 64 nodes, which means no need for the type of fork-lift upgrade that might be needed with a proprietary solution, and is targeted to be approximately half the cost per TB of comparable offerings in the market from Oracle, IBM, and EMC*.

6 Proven expertise

Together HP and Microsoft have over 30 years experience delivering integrated solutions from desktop to datacenter.  HP AppSystem for Parallel Data Warehouse completes the portfolio for HP Data Management solutions, which give customers the ability to deliver insights on any data, of any size, combining best in class Microsoft software with HP Converged Infrastructure.

For customers, our ability to deliver on the requirements above ultimately provides agility for faster, lower risk deployment of data management in the enterprise, helping them make key business decisions more quickly and drive more value to the organization.

If you’d like to find out more, please go to www.hp.com/solutions/microsoft/pdw.

*  http://www.valueprism.com/resources/resources/Resources/PDW%20Compete%20Pricing%20FINAL.pdf

HP AppSystem for SQL 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse [HP product page, March 25, 2013]

Overview

Rapid time-to-value data warehouse solution

The HP AppSystem for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse, jointly engineered, built and supported with Microsoft, is for customers who realize limitations and inefficiencies of their legacy data warehouse infrastructure. This converged system solution delivers significant advances over the previous generation solution including:

Enhanced performance and massive scalability

  • Up to 100x faster query performance and a 30% faster scan rate
  • Ability to start from small terabyte requirements that can  linearly scale out to 6 Petabytes for mission critical needs

Minimize costs and management complexity

  • Redesigned form factor minimizes space  and allows ease of expansion with significant up-front acquisition savings as well as reduce OPEX heating, cooling and real estate cost requirements
  • Appliance  solution is pre-built and tested as a complete, end-to-end stack — easy to deploy and minimal technical resources required
  • Extensive integration of Microsoft and 3rd party tools  allow users to work with familiar tools like Excel as well as within heterogeneous BI environments
  • Unique HP Support Pack Utility Suite set of tools significantly simplifies updates and  other maintenance tasks to ensure system is running at optimal performance

Reduce risks and manage change

  • Services delivered jointly under a unique collaborative support agreement, integrated across hardware and software, to help avoid IT disruptions and deliver faster resolution to issues
  • Backed by more than 48,000 Microsoft professionals—with more than 12,000 Microsoft Certified—one of the largest, most specialized forces of consultants and support professionals for Microsoft environments in the world

Solution Components

HP Products

    HP Services

    HP Software

      Partner’s Software

        HP Support

        [also available with Dell Parallel Data Warehouse Appliance]
        Appliance: Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) [Microsoft PDW Software product page, Feb 27, 2013]

        PDW is a massively parallel processing data warehousing appliance built for any volume of relational data (with up to 100x performance gains) and provides the simplest integration to Hadoop.

        Unlike other vendors who opt to provide their high-end appliances for a high price or provide a relational data warehouse appliance that is disconnected from their “Big Data” and/or BI offerings, Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse provides both a high-end massively parallel processing appliance that can improve your query response times up to 100x over legacy solutions as well as seamless integration to both Hadoop and with familiar business intelligence solutions. What’s more, it was engineered to lower ongoing costs resulting in a solution that has the lowest price/terabyte in the market.

        What’s New in SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse

        Key Capabilities

        • Built For Big Data with PolyBase

          SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse introduces PolyBase, a fundamental breakthrough in data processing used to enable seamless integration between traditional data warehouses and “Big Data” deployments.

          • Use standard SQL queries (instead of MapReduce) to access and join Hadoop data with relational data.
          • Query Hadoop data without IT having to pre-load data first into the warehouse.
          • Native Microsoft BI Integration allowing analysis of relational and non-relational data with familiar tools like Excel.

        • Next-Generation Performance at Scale

          Scale and perform beyond your traditional SQL Server deployment with PDW’s massively parallel processing (MPP) appliance that can handle the extremes of your largest mission critical requirements of performance and scale.

          • Up to 100x faster than legacy warehouses with xVelocity updateable columnstore.
          • Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture that parallelizes and distributes computing for high query concurrency and complexity.
          • Rest assured with built-in hardware redundancies for fault tolerance.
          • Rely on Microsoft as your single point of contact for hardware and software support.

        • Engineered For Optimal Value

          Unlike other vendors in the data warehousing space who deliver a high-end appliance at a high price, Microsoft engineered PDW for optimal value by lowering the cost of the appliance.

          • Resilient, scalable, and high performance storage features built into software lowering hardware costs.
          • Compress data up to 15x with the xVelocity updateable columnstore saving up to 70% of storage requirements.
          • Start small with a quarter rack allowing you to right-size the appliance rather than over-acquiring capacity.
          • Use the same tools and knowledge as SQL Server without retaining new tools or knowledge for scale-out DW or Big Data.
          • Co-engineered with hardware partners offering highest level of product integration and shipped to your door offering fastest time to value.
          • The lowest price/terabyte than overall appliance market (and 2.5x lower than SQL 2008 R2 PDW).

          PolyBase [Microsoft page, Feb 26, 2013]

          PolyBase is a fundamental breakthrough in data processing used in SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse to enable truly integrated query across Hadoop and relational data.

          Complementing Microsoft’s overall Big Data strategy, PolyBase is a breakthrough new technology on the data processing engine in SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse designed as the simplest way to combine non-relational data and traditional relational data in your analysis. While customers would normally burden IT to pre-populate the warehouse with Hadoop data or undergo an extensive training on MapReduce in order to query non-relational data, PolyBase does this all seamlessly giving you the benefits of “Big Data” without the complexities.

          Key Capabilities

          • Unifies Relational and Non-relational Data

            PolyBase is one of the most exciting technologies to emerge in recent times because it unifies the relational and non-relational worlds at the query level. Instead of learning a new query like MapReduce, customers can leverage what they already know (T-SQL)

            • Integrated Query: Accepts a standard T-SQL query that joins tables containing a relational source with tables in a Hadoop cluster without needing to learn MapReduce.
            • Advanced query options: Apart from simple SELECT queries, users can perform JOINs and GROUP BYs on data in the Hadoop cluster.

          • Enables In-place Queries with Familiar BI Tools

            Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) integration enables users to connect to PDW with familiar tools such as Microsoft Excel, to create compelling visualizations and make key business decisions from structured or unstructured data quickly.

            • Integrated BI tools: End users can connect to both relational or Hadoop data with Excel abstracting the complexities of both.
            • Interactive visualizations: Explore data residing in HDFS using Power View for immersive interactivity and visualizations.
            • Query in-place: IT doesn’t have to pre-load or pre-move data from Hadoop into the data warehouse and pre-join the data before end users do the analysis.

          • Part of an Overall Microsoft Big Data Story

            PolyBase is part of an overall Microsoft “Big Data” solution that already includes HDInsight (a 100% Apache Hadoop compatible distribution for Windows Server and Windows Azure), Microsoft Business Intelligence, and SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse.

            • Integrated with HDInsight: PolyBase can source the non-relational analysis from Microsoft’s 100% Apache compatible Hadoop distribution, HD Insights.
            • Built into PDW: PolyBase is built into SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse to bring “Big Data” benefits within the power of a traditional data warehouse.
            • Integrated BI tools: PolyBase has native integration with familiar BI tools like Excel (through Power View and PowerPivot).

          Announcing Power BI for Office 365 [Office News, July 8, 2013]

          Today, at the Worldwide Partner Conference, we announced a new offering–Power BI for Office 365. Power BI for Office 365 is a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) solution that enables our customers to easily gain insights from their data, working within Excel to analyze and visualize the data in…

          Exciting new BI features in Excel [Excel Blog, July 9, 2013]

          Yesterday during the Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference we announced some exciting new Business Intelligence (BI) features available for Excel. Specifically, we announced the expansion of the BI offerings available as part of Power BI—a cloud-based BI solution that enables our customers to easily gain insights from their data, working within Excel to analyze and visualize the data in a self-service way.

          Power BI for Office 365 now includes:

          • Power Query, enabling customers to easily search and access public data and their organization’s data, all within Excel (formerly known as “Data Explorer“).  Download details here. 
          • Power Map, a 3D data visualization tool for mapping, exploring and interacting with geographic and temporal data (formerly known as product codename “Geoflow“).  Download details here.
          • Power Pivot for creating and customizing flexible data models within Excel. 
          • Power View for creating interactive charts, graphs and other visual representations of data.

          Head on over to the Office 365 Technology Blog, Office News Blog, and Power BI site to learn more.

          Clearing up some confusion around the Power BI “Release” [A.J. Mee’s Business Intelligence and Big Data Blog, Aug 13, 2013]

          Hey folks.  Thanks again for checking out my blog.
          Yesterday (8/12/2013), Power BI received some attention from the press.  Here’s one of the articles that I had seen talking about the “release” of Power BI:
          http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-releases-power-bi-office-365-for-windows-8rt

          Some of us inside Microsoft had to address all sorts of questions around this one.  For the most part, the questions revolved around the *scope* of what was actually released.  You have to remember that Power BI is a broad brand name that takes into account:

          * Power Pivot/View/Query/Map (which is available now, for the most part)

          * The Office 365 hosting of Power BI applications with cloud-to-on-premise data refresh, Natural Language query, data stewardship, etc..

          * The Mobile BI app for Windows and iOS devices

          Net-net: we announced the availability of the Mobile app (in preview form).  At present, it is only available on Windows 8 devices (x86 or ARM) – no iOS just yet.  The rest of the O365 / Power BI offering is yet to come.  Check out this article to find out how to sign up.
          http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ajmee/archive/2013/07/17/how-can-i-check-out-power-bi.aspx
          So, the headline story is really all around the Mobile app.  You can grab it today from the Store – just search on “Power BI” and it should be the first app that shows up.

          From: Power Map for Excel earns new name with significant updates to 3D visualizations and storytelling [Excel Blog, Sept 25, 2013]

          We are announcing a significant update to Power Map Preview for Excel (formerly Project codename “GeoFlow” Preview for Excel) on the Microsoft Download Center. Just over five months ago, we launched the preview of Project codename “GeoFlow” amidst a passionately announced “tour” of global song artists through the years by Amir Netz (see 1:17:00 in the keynote) at the first ever PASS Business Analytics conference in April. The 3D visualization add-in has now become a centerpiece visualization (along with Power View) within the business intelligence capabilities of Microsoft Power BI in Excel, earning the new name Power Map to align with other Excel features (Power Query, Power Pivot, and Power View).

          Information workers with their data in Excel have realized the potential of Power Map to identify insights in their geospatial and time-based data that traditional 2D charts cannot. Digital marketers can better target and time their campaigns while environmentally-conscious companies can fine-tune energy-saving programs across peak usage times. These are just a few of the examples of how location-based data is coming alive for customers using Power Map and distancing them from their competitors who are still staring blankly at a flat table, chart, or map. Feedback from customers like this lead us to introduce Power Map with some new features across experience of mapping data, discovering insights, and sharing stories.

          From: Microsoft unleashes fall wave of enterprise cloud solutions [press release, Oct 7, 2013]

          New Windows Server, System Center, Visual Studio, Windows Azure, Windows Intune, SQL Server, and Dynamics solutions will accelerate cloud benefits for customers.

          REDMOND, Wash. — Oct. 7, 2013 — Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced a wave of new enterprise products and services to help companies seize the opportunities of cloud computing and overcome today’s top IT challenges. Complementing Office 365 and other services, these new offerings deliver on Microsoft’s enterprise cloud strategy.

          …

          Data platform and insights

          As part of its vision to help more people unlock actionable insights from big data, Microsoft next week will release a second preview of SQL Server 2014. The new version offers industry-leading in-memory technologies at no additional cost, giving customers 10 times to 30 times performance improvements without application rewrites or new hardware. SQL Server 2014 also works with Windows Azure to give customers built-in cloud backup and disaster recovery.

          For big data analytics, later this month Microsoft will release Windows Azure HDInsight Service, an Apache Hadoop-based service that works with SQL Server and widely used business intelligence tools, such as Microsoft Excel and Power BI for Office 365. With Power BI, people can combine private and public data in the cloud for rich visualizations and fast insights.

          …

          How to take full advantage of Power BI in Excel 2013 [News from Microsoft Business UK, Oct 14, 2013]

          The launch of Power BI features in Excel 2013 gives users an added range of options for data analysis and gaining business intelligence (BI). Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Map work seamlessly together, making it much simpler to discover and visualise data. And for small businesses looking to take advantage of self-service intelligence solutions, this is a major stride forwards.

          Power Query

          With Power Query, users can search the entire cloud for data – both public and private. With access to multiple data sources, users can filter, shape, merge, and append the information, without the need to physically bring it in to Excel.

          Once your query is shaped and filtered how you want it, you can download it into a worksheet in Excel, into the Data Model, or both. When you have the dataset you need, shaped and formed and properly merged, you can save the query that created it, and share it with other users.

          Power Pivot

          Power Pivot enables users to create their own data models from various sources, structured to meet individual needs. You can customise, extend with calculations and hierarchies, and manage the powerful Data Model that is part of Excel.

          The solution works seamlessly and automatically with Power Query, and with other features of Power BI, allowing you to manage and extend your own custom database in the familiar environment of Excel. The entire Data Model in Power Pivot – including tables, columns, calculations and hierarchies – exist as report-ready elements in Power View.

          Power View

          Power View allows users to create engaging, interactive, and insightful visualisations with just a few clicks of their mouse. The tool brings the Data Model alive, turning queries into visual analysis and answers. Data can be presented in a variety of different forms, with the reports easily shareable and open for interactive analysis.

          Power Map

          A relatively new addition to Excel – Power Map is a geocentric and temporal mapping feature of Power BI. It brings location data into powerful, engaging 3D map visualisations. This allows users to create location-based reports, visualised over a time continuum, that tour the available data.

          Using the features together

          Power BI offers a collection of services which are designed to make self-service BI intuitive and collaborative. The solution combines the power and familiarity of Excel with collaboration and cloud-based functionality. This vastly increases users’ capacity to gather, manage and draw insights from data, ensuring they can make the most of business intelligence.

          The various feature of BI can add value independently, but the real value is in integration. When used in conjunction with one another – rather than in silo – the services become more than the sum of their parts. They are designed to work seamlessly together in Excel 2013, supporting users as they look to find data, process it and create visualisations which add value to the decision making process.

          Posted by Alex Boardman

          Related upcoming technology announcements from Intel:

          GraphBuilder: Revealing hidden structure within Big Data [Intel Labs blog, Dec 6, 2012]

          By Ted Willke, Principal Engineer with Intel and the General Manager of the Graph Analytics Operation in Intel Labs.

          Big Data.  Big.  Data.  We hear the term frequently used to describe data of unusual size or generated at spectacular velocity, like the amount of social data that Facebook has amassed on us (30 PB in one cluster) or the rate at which sensors at the Large Hadron Collider collect information on subatomic particles (15 PB/year).  And it’s often deemed “unstructured or semi-structured” to describe its lack of apparent, well, structure.  What’s meant is that this data isn’t organized in a way that can directly answer questions, like a database can if you ask it how many widgets you sold last week.

          But Big Data does have structure; it just needs to be discovered from within the raw text, images, video, sensor data, etc., that comprise it.  And, companies, led by pioneers like Google, have been doing this for the better part of a decade, using applications that churn through the information using data-parallel processing and convenient frameworks for it, like Hadoop MapReduce.  Their systems chop the incoming data into slices, farm it out to masses of machines, which subsequently filter it, order it, sum it, transform it, and do just about anything you’d want to do with it, within the practical limits of the readily available frameworks.

          But until recently, only the wizards of Big Data were able to rapidly extract knowledge from a different type of structure within the data, a type that is best modeled by tree or graph structures.  Imagine the pattern of hyperlinks connecting Wikipedia pages or the connections between Tweeters and Followers on Twitter.  In these models, a line is drawn between two bits of information if they are related to each other in some way.  The nature of the connection can be less obvious than in these examples and made specifically to serve a particular algorithm.  For example, a popular form of machine learning called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (a mouthful, I know) can create “word clouds” of topics in a set of documents without being told the topics in advance. All it needs is a graph that connects word occurrences to the filenames.  Another algorithm can accurately guess the type of noun (i.e., person, place, or thing) if given a graph that connects noun phrases to surrounding context phrases.

          Many of these graphs are very large, with tens of billions of vertices (i.e., things being related) and hundreds of billions of edges (i.e., the relationships).  And, many that model natural phenomena possess power-law degree distributions, meaning that many vertices connect to a handful of others, but a few may have edges to a substantial portion of the vertices.  For instance, a graph of Twitter relationships would show that many people only have a few dozen followers while only a handful of celebrities have millions. This is all very problematic for parallel computation in general and MapReduce in particular.  As a result, Carlos Guestrin and his crack team at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed a new framework, called GraphLab, that is specifically designed for graph-based parallel machine learning.  In many cases, GraphLab can process such graphs 20-50X faster than Hadoop MapReduce.  Learn more about their exciting work here.

          Carlos is a member of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Cloud Computing, and we started working with him on graph-based machine learning and data mining challenges in 2011.  Quickly it became clear that no one had a good story about how to construct large-scale graphs that frameworks like GraphLab could digest.  His team was constantly writing scripts to construct different graphs from various unstructured data sources.  These scripts ran on a single machine and would take a very long time to execute.  Essentially, they were using a labor-intensive, low-performance method to feed information to their elegant high-performance GraphLab framework.  This simply would not do.

          Scanning the environment, we identified a more general hole in the open source ecosystem: A number of systems were out there to process, store, visualize, and mine graphs but, surprisingly, not to construct them from unstructured sources.  So, we set out to develop a demo of a scalable graph construction library for Hadoop.  Yes, for Hadoop.  Hadoop is not good for graph-based machine learning but graph construction is another story.  This work became GraphBuilder, which was demonstrated in July at the First GraphLab Workshop on Large-Scale Machine Learning and open sourced this week at 01.org (under Apache 2.0 licensing).

          GraphBuilder not only constructs large-scale graphs fast but also offloads many of the complexities of graph construction, including graph formation, cleaning, compression, partitioning, and serialization.  This makes it easy for just about anyone to build graphs for interesting research and commercial applications.  In fact, GraphBuilder makes it possible for a Java programmer to build an internet-scale graph for PageRank in about 100 lines of code and a Wikipedia-sized graph for LDA in about 130.

          This is only the beginning for GraphBuilder but it has already made a lot of connections.  We will continually update it with new capabilities, so please try it out and let us know if you’d value something in particular.  And, let us know if you’ve got an interesting graph problem for us to grind through.  We are always looking for new revelations.

          Intel, Facebook Collaborate on Future Data Center Rack Technologies  [press release, Jan 16, 2013]

          New Photonic Architecture Promises to Dramatically Change Next Decade of Disaggregated, Rack-Scale Server Designs

          NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

          • Intel and Facebook* are collaborating to define the next generation of rack technologies that enables the disaggregation of compute, network and storage resources.
          • Quanta Computer* unveiled a mechanical prototype of the rack architecture to show the total cost, design and reliability improvement potential of disaggregation.
          • The mechanical prototype includes Intel Silicon Photonics Technology, distributed input/output using Intel Ethernet switch silicon, and supports the Intel® Xeon® processor and the next-generation system-on-chip Intel® Atom™ processor code named “Avoton.”
          • Intel has moved its silicon photonics efforts beyond research and development, and the company has produced engineering samples that run at speeds of up to 100 gigabits per second (Gbps).

          OPEN COMPUTE SUMMIT, Santa Clara, Calif., Jan. 16, 2013 – Intel Corporation announced a collaboration with Facebook* to define the next generation of rack technologies used to power the world’s largest data centers. As part of the collaboration, the companies also unveiled a mechanical prototype built by Quanta Computer* that includes Intel’s new, innovative photonic rack architecture to show the total cost, design and reliability improvement potential of a disaggregated rack environment.

          “Intel and Facebook are collaborating on a new disaggregated, rack-scale server architecture that enables independent upgrading of compute, network and storage subsystems that will define the future of mega-datacenter designs for the next decade,” said Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer during his keynote address at Open Computer Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. “The disaggregated rack architecture [since renamed RSA (Rack Scale Architecture)] includes Intel’s new photonic architecture, based on high-bandwidth, 100Gbps Intel® Silicon Photonics Technology, that enables fewer cables, increased bandwidth, farther reach and extreme power efficiency compared to today’s copper based interconnects.”

          Rattner explained that the new architecture is based on more than a decade’s worth of research to invent a family of silicon-based photonic devices, including lasers, modulators and detectors using low-cost silicon to fully integrate photonic devices of unprecedented speed and energy efficiency. Silicon photonics is a new approach to using light (photons) to move huge amounts of data at very high speeds with extremely low power over a thin optical fiber rather than using electrical signals over a copper cable. Intel has spent the past two years proving its silicon photonics technology was production-worthy, and has now produced engineering samples.

          Silicon photonics made with inexpensive silicon rather than expensive and exotic optical materials provides a distinct cost advantage over older optical technologies in addition to providing greater speed, reliability and scalability benefits. Businesses with server farms or massive data centers could eliminate performance bottlenecks and ensure long-term upgradability while saving significant operational costs in space and energy.

          Silicon Photonics and Disaggregation Efficiencies

          Businesses with large data centers can significantly reduce capital expenditure by disaggregating or separating compute and storage resources in a server rack. Rack disaggregation refers to the separation of those resources that currently exist in a rack, including compute, storage, networking and power distribution into discrete modules. Traditionally, a server within a rack would each have its own group of resources. When disaggregated, resource types can be grouped together and distributed throughout the rack, improving upgradability, flexibility and reliability while lowering costs.

          “We’re excited about the flexibility that these technologies can bring to hardware and how silicon photonics will enable us to interconnect these resources with less concern about their physical placement,” said Frank Frankovsky, chairman of the Open Compute Foundation and vice president of hardware design at supply chain at Facebook. “We’re confident that developing these technologies in the open and contributing them back to the Open Compute Project will yield an unprecedented pace of innovation, ultimately enabling the entire industry to close the utilization gap that exists with today’s systems designs.”

          By separating critical components from one another, each computer resource can be upgraded on its own cadence without being coupled to the others. This provides increased lifespan for each resource and enables IT managers to replace just that resource instead of the entire system. This increased serviceability and flexibility drives improved total-cost for infrastructure investments as well as higher levels of resiliency. There are also thermal efficiency opportunities by allowing more optimal component placement within a rack.

          The mechanical prototype is a demonstration of Intel’s photonic rack architecture for interconnecting the various resources, showing one of the ways compute, network and storage resources can be disaggregated within a rack. Intel will contribute a design for enabling a photonic receptacle to the Open Compute Project (OCP) and will work with Facebook*, Corning*, and others over time to standardize the design. The mechanical prototype includes distributed input/output (I/O) using Intel Ethernet switch silicon, and will support the Intel® Xeon® processor and the next generation, 22 nanometer system-on-chip (SoC) Intel® Atom™ processor, code named “Avoton” available this year.

          The mechanical prototype shown today is the next evolution of rack disaggregation with separate distributed switching functions.

          Intel and Facebook: A History of Collaboration and Contributions

          Intel and Facebook have long been technology collaboration partners on hardware and software optimizations to drive more efficiency and scale for Facebook data centers. Intel is also a founding board member of the OCP, along with Facebook. Intel has several OCP engagements in flight including working with the industry to design OCP boards for Intel Xeon and Intel Atom based processors, support for cold storage with the Intel Atom processor, and common hardware management as well as future rack definitions including enabling today’s photonics receptacle.

          Disruptive technologies to unlock the power of Big Data [Intel Labs blog, Feb 26, 2013]

          By Ted Willke, Principal Engineer with Intel and the General Manager of the Graph Analytics Operation in Intel Labs.

          This week’s announcement by Intel that it’s expanding the availability of the Intel® Distribution for Apache Hadoop* software to the US market is seriously exciting for the employees of this semiconductor giant, especially researchers like me.  Why?  Why would I say this given the amount of overexposure that Hadoop has received?  I mean, isn’t this technology nearly 10 years old already??!!  Well, because the only thing I hear more than people touting Hadoop’s promise are people venting frustration in implementing it.  Rest assured that Intel is listening.  We get that users don’t want to make a career out of configuring Hadoop… debugging it…  managing it… and trying to figure out why the “insight” it’s supposed to be delivering often looks like meaningless noise.

          Which brings me back to why this is a seriously exciting event for me.  With our product teams doing the heavy lifting of making the Hadoop framework less rigid and easier to use while keeping it inexpensive, Intel Labs gets a landing zone for some cool disruptive technologies. In December, I blogged about the launch of our open source scalable graph construction library for Hadoop, called Intel® Graph Builder for Apache Hadoop software (f.k.a. GraphBuilder), and explained how it makes it easy to construct large scale graphs for machine learning and data mining. These structures can yield insights from relationships hidden within a wide range of big data sources, from social media and business analytics to medicine and e-science. Today I’ll delve a bit more into Graph Builder technology and introduce the Intel® Active Tuner for Apache Hadoop software, an auto-tuner that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to configure Hadoop for optimal performance.  Both technologies will be available in the Intel Distribution.

          So, Intel® Graph Builder leverages Hadoop MapReduce to turn large unstructured (or semi-structured) datasets into structured output in graph form.  This kind of graph may be mined using graph search of the sort that Facebook recently announced.  Many companies would like construct such graphs out of unstructured datasets and Graph Builder makes it possible.  Beyond search, analysis may be applied to an entire graph to answer questions of the type shown in the figure below.  The analysis may be performed using distributed algorithms implemented in frameworks like GraphLab, which I also discussed in my previous post.

          image

          Intel® Graph Builder performs extract, transform, and load operations, terms borrowed from databases and data warehousing.  And, it does so at Hadoop MapReduce scale.  Text is parsed and tokenized to extract interesting features.  These operations are described in a short map-reduce program written by the data scientist.  This program also defines when two vertices (i.e., features) in the graph are related by an edge.  The rule is applied repeatedly to form the graph’s topology (i.e., the pattern of edge relationships between vertices), which is stored via the library.  In addition, most applications require that additional tabulated information, or “network information,” be associated with each vertex/edge and the library provides a number of distributed algorithms for these tabulations.

          At this point, we have a large-scale graph ready for HDFS, HBase, or another distributed store.  But we need to do a few more things to ensure that queries and computations on the graph will scale up nicely, like:

          • Cleaning the graph’s structure and checking that it is reasonable
          • Compressing the graph and network information to conserve cluster resources
          • Partitioning the graph in a way that will minimize cluster communications while load balancing computational effort

          The Intel Graph Builder library provides efficient distributed algorithms for all of the above, and more, so that data scientists can spend more of their time analyzing data and less of their time preparing it.  Enough said. The library will be included in the Intel Distribution shortly and we look forward to your feedback.  We are constantly on the hunt for new features as we look to the future of big data.

          Whereas Intel® Graph Builder was developed to simplify the programming of emerging applications, Intel® Active Tuner was developed to simplify the deployment of today’s applications by automating the selection of configuration settings that will result in optimal cluster performance. In fact, we initially codenamed this technology “Gunther,” after a well-known circus elephant trainer, because of its ability to train Hadoop to run faster :-) .  It’s cruelty-free to boot, I promise.  Anyway, many Hadoop configuration parameters need to be tuned for the characteristics of each particular application, such as web search, medical image analysis, audio feature analysis, fraud detection, semantic analysis, etc.  This tuning significantly reduces both job execution and query time but is time consuming and requires domain expertise. If you use Hadoop you know that the common practice is to tune it up using rule-of-thumb settings published by industry leaders.  But these recommendations are too general and fail to capture the specific requirements of a given application and cluster resource constraints.  Enter the Active Tuner.

          Intel® Active Tuner implements a search engine that uses a small number of representative jobs to identify the best configuration from among millions or billions of possible Hadoop configurations.  It uses a form of AI known as a genetic algorithm to search out the best settings for the number of maps, buffer sizes, compression settings, etc., constantly striving to derive better settings by combining those from pairs of trials that show the most promise (this is where the genetic part comes in) and deriving future trials from these new combinations.  And, the Active Tuner can do this faster and more effectively than a human can using the rules-of-thumb.  It can be controlled from a slick GUI in the new Intel Manager for Apache Hadoop, so take it for a test run when you pick up a copy of the Intel Distribution.  You may see your cluster performance improve by up to 30% without any hassle.

          To wrap, these are one-of-a-kind technologies that I think you’ll have fun playing with.  And, despite offering quite a lot, Intel® Graph Builder and Intel® Active Tuner are just the beginning.  I am very excited by what’s coming next.  Intel is moving to unlock the power of Big Data and Intel Labs is preparing to blow it wide open.

          *Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others

          Intel Unveils New Technologies for Efficient Cloud Datacenters [press release, Sept 4, 2013]

          From New SoCs to Optical Fiber, Intel Delivers Cloud-Optimized Innovations Across Network, Storage, Microservers, and Rack Designs

          NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

          • The Intel® Atom™ C2000 processor family is the first based on Silvermont micro-architecture, has 13 customized configurations and is aimed at microservers, entry-level networking and cold storage.
          • New 64-bit, system-on-chip family for the datacenter delivers up to six times1 the energy efficiency and up to seven times2 the performance compared to previous generation.
          • The first live demonstration of a Rack Scale Architecture-based system with high-speed Intel® Silicon Photonics components including a new MXC connector and ClearCurve* optical fiber developed in collaboration with Corning*, enabling data transfers speeds up to 1.6 terabits4 per second at distances up to 300 meters5 for greater rack density.

          SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., September 4, 2013 – Intel Corporation today introduced a portfolio of datacenter products and technologies for cloud service providers looking to drive greater efficiency and flexibility into their infrastructure to support a growing demand for new services and future innovation.

          Server, network and storage infrastructure is evolving to better suit an increasingly diverse set of lightweight workloads, creating the emergence of microserver, cold storage and entry networking segments. By optimizing technologies for specific workloads, Intel will help cloud providers significantly increase utilization, drive down costs and provide compelling and consistent experiences to consumers and businesses.

          The portfolio includes the second generation 64-bit Intel® Atom™ C2000 product family of system-on-chip (SoC) designs for microservers and cold storage platforms (code named “Avoton”) and for entry networking platforms (code named “Rangeley”). These new SoCs are the company’s first products based on the Silvermont micro-architecture, the new design in its leading 22nm Tri-Gate SoC process delivering significant increases in performance and energy efficiency, and arrives only nine months after the previous generation.

          “As the world becomes more and more mobile, the pressure to support billions of devices and users is changing the very composition of datacenters,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group at Intel. “From leadership in silicon and SoC design to rack architecture and software enabling, Intel is providing the key innovations that original equipment manufacturers, telecommunications equipment makers and cloud service providers require to build the datacenters of the future.”

          Intel also introduced the Intel® Ethernet Switch FM5224 silicon which, when combined with the WindRiver Open Network Software suite, brings Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions to servers for improved density and lower power.

          Intel also demonstrated the first operational Intel Rack Scale Architecture (RSA)-based rack with Intel® Silicon PhotonicsTechnology in combination with the disclosure of a new MXC connector and ClearCurve* optical fiber developed by Corning* with requirements from Intel. This demonstration highlights the speed with which Intel and the industry are moving from concept to functionality.

          Customized, Optimized Intel® Atom™ SoCs for New and Existing Market Segments
          Manufactured using Intel’s leading 22nm process technology, the new Intel Atom C2000 product family features up to eight cores, a range of 6 to 20Watts TDP, integrated Ethernet and support for up to 64 gigabytes (GB) of memory, eight times the previous generation. OVH* and 1&1, leading global web-hosting services companies, have tested Intel Atom C2000 SoCs and plan to deploy them in its entry-level dedicated hosting services next quarter. The 22 nanometer process technology delivers superior performance and performance per watt.

          Intel is delivering 13 specific models with customized features and accelerators that are optimized for particular lightweight workloads such as entry dedicated hosting, distributed memory caching, static web serving and content delivery to ensure greater efficiency. The designs allow Intel to expand into new markets like cold storage and entry-level networking.

          For example, the new Intel Atom configurations for entry networking address the specialized needs for securing and routing Internet traffic more efficiently. The product features a set of hardware accelerators called Intel® QuickAssist Technology that improves cryptographic performance. They are ideally suited for routers and security appliances.

          By consolidating three communications workloads – application, control and packet processing – on a common platform, providers now have tremendous flexibility. They will be able to meet the changing network demands while adding performance, reducing costs and improving time-to-market.

          Ericsson, a world-leading provider of communications technology and services announced that its blade-based switches used in the Ericsson Cloud System, a solution which enables service providers to add cloud capabilities to their existing networks, will sooninclude the Intel Atom C2000 SoC product family.

          Microserver-Optimized Switch for Software Defined Networking
          Network solutions that manage data traffic across microservers can significantly impact the performance and density of the system. The unique combination of the Intel Ethernet Switch FM5224 silicon and the WindRiver Open Network Software suite will enable the industry’s first 2.5GbE, high-density, low latency, SDN Ethernet switch solutions specifically developed for microservers. The solution enhances system level innovation, and complements the integrated Intel Ethernet controller within the Intel Atom C2000 processor. Together, they can be used to create SDN solutions for the datacenter.

          Switches using the new Intel Ethernet Switch FM5224 silicon can connect up to 64 microservers, providing up to 30 percent3 higher node density. They are based on Intel Open Network Platform reference design announced earlier this year.

          First Demonstration of Silicon Photonics-Powered Rack
          Maximum datacenter efficiency requires innovation at the silicon, system and rack level. Intel’s RSA design helps industry partners to re-architect datacenters for modularity of components (storage, CPU, memory, network) at the rack level. It provides the ability to provision or logically compose resources based on application specific workload requirements. Intel RSA also will allow for the easier replacement and configuration of components when deploying cloud computing, storage and networking resources.

          Intel today demonstrated the first operational RSA-based rack equipped with the newly announced Intel Atom C2000 processors, Intel® Xeon® processors, a top-of-rack Intel SDN-enabled switch and Intel Silicon Photonics Technology. As part of the demonstration, Intel also disclosed the new MXC connector and ClearCurve* fiber technology developed by Corning* with requirements from Intel. The fiber connections are specifically designed to work with Intel Silicon Photonics components.

          The collaboration underscores the tremendous need for high-speed bandwidth within datacenters. By sending photons over a thin optical fiber instead of electrical signals over a copper cable, the new technologies are capable of transferring massive amounts of data at unprecedented speeds over greater distances. The transfers can be as fast as 1.6 terabits per second4 at lengths up to 300 meters5 throughout the datacenter.

          To highlight the growing range of Intel RSA implementations, Microsoft and Intel announced a collaboration to innovate on Microsoft’s next-generation RSA rack design. The goal is to bring even better utilization, economics and flexibility to Microsoft’s datacenters.

          The Intel Atom C2000 product family is shipping to customers now with more than 50 designs for microservers, cold storage and networking. The products are expected to be available in the coming months from vendors including Advantech*, Dell*, Ericsson*, HP*, NEC*, Newisys*, Penguin Computing*, Portwell*, Quanta*, Supermicro*, WiWynn*, ZNYX Networks*.

          Intel Brings Supercomputing Horsepower to Big Data Analytics [press release, Nov 19, 2013]

          NEWS HIGHLIGHTS.

          • Intel discloses form factors and memory configuration details of the CPU version of the next generation Intel® Xeon Phi™ processor (code named “Knights Landing“), to ease programmability for developers while improving performance.
          • Intel® Xeon® processor-based systems power more than 82 percent of all supercomputers on the recently announced 42nd edition of the Top500 list.
          • New Intel® HPC Distribution for Apache Hadoop* and Intel® Cloud Edition for Lustre* software tools bring the benefits of Big Data analytics and HPC together.
          • Collaboration with HPC community designed to deliver customized products to meet the diverse needs of customers.

          SUPERCOMPUTING CONFERENCE, Denver, Nov. 19, 2013 –Intel Corporation unveiled innovations in HPC and announced new software tools that will help propel businesses and researchers to generate greater insights from their data and solve their most vital business and scientific challenges.

          “In the last decade, the high-performance computing community has created a vision of a parallel universe where the most vexing problems of society, industry, government and research are solved through modernized applications,” said Raj Hazra, Intel vice president and general manager of the Technical Computing Group. “Intel technology has helped HPC evolve from a technology reserved for an elite few to an essential and broadly available tool for discovery. The solutions we enable for ecosystem partners for the second half of this decade will drive the next level of insight from HPC. Innovations will include scale through standards, performance through application modernization, efficiency through integration and innovation through customized solutions.”

          Accelerating Adoption and Innovation
          From Intel® Parallel Computing Centers to Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor developer kits, Intel provides a range of technologies and expertise to foster innovation and adoption in the HPC ecosystem. The company is collaborating with partners to take full advantage of technologies available today, as well as create the next generation of highly integrated solutions that are easier to program for and are more energy-efficient. As a part of this collaboration Intel also plans to deliver customized HPC products to meet the diverse needs of customers. This initiative is aimed to extend Intel’s continued value of standards-based scalable platforms to include optimizations that will accelerate the next wave of scientific, industrial, and academic breakthroughs.

          During the Supercomputing Conference (SC’13), Intel unveiled how the next generation Intel Xeon Phi product (codenamed “Knights Landing”), available as a host processor, will fit into standard rack architectures and run applications entirely natively instead of requiring data to be offloaded to the coprocessor. This will significantly reduce programming complexity and eliminate “offloading” of the data, thus improving performance and decreasing latencies caused by memory, PCIe and networking.

          Knights Landing will also offer developers three memory options to optimize performance. Unlike other Exascale concepts requiring programmers to develop code specific to one machine, new Intel Xeon Phi processors will provide the simplicity and elegance of standard memory programming models.

          In addition, Intel and Fujitsu recently announced an initiative that could potentially replace a computer’s electrical wiring with fiber optic links to carry Ethernet or PCI Express traffic over an Intel® Silicon Photonics link. This enables Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors to be installed in an expansion box, separated from host Intel Xeon processors, but function as if they were still located on the motherboard. This allows for much higher density of installed coprocessors and scaling the computer capacity without affecting host server operations.

          Several companies are already adopting Intel’s technology. For example, Fovia Medical*, a world leader in volume rendering technology, created high-definition, 3D models to help medical professionals better visualize a patient’s body without invasive surgery. A demonstration from the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS) showed a 2D simulation of an F4 tornado, and addressed how a forecaster will be able to experience an immersive 3D simulation and “walk around a storm” to better pinpoint its path. Both applications use Intel® Xeon® technology.

          High Performance Computing for Data-Driven Discovery
          Data intensive applications including weather forecasting and seismic analysis have been part of the HPC industry from its earliest days, and the performance of today’s systems and parallel software tools have made it possible to create larger and more complex simulations. However, with unstructured data accounting for 80 percent of all data, and growing 15 times faster than other data1, the industry is looking to tap into all of this information to uncover valuable insight.

          Intel is addressing this need with the announcement of the Intel® HPC Distribution for Apache Hadoop* software (Intel® HPC Distribution) that combines the Intel® Distribution for Apache Hadoop software with Intel® Enterprise Edition of Lustre* software to deliver an enterprise-grade solution for storing and processing large data sets. This powerful combination allows users to run their MapReduce applications, without change, directly on shared, fast Lustre-powered storage, making it fast, scalable and easy to manage.

          The Intel® Cloud Edition for Lustre* software is a scalable, parallel file system that is available through the Amazon Web Services Marketplace* and allows users to pay-as-you go to maximize storage performance and cost effectiveness. The software is ideally suited for dynamic applications, including rapid simulation and prototyping. In the case of urgent or unplanned work that exceeds a user’s on-premise compute or storage performance, the software can be used for cloud bursting HPC workloads to quickly provision the infrastructure needed before moving the work into the cloud.

          With numerous vendors announcing pre-configured and validated hardware and software solutions featuring the Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre, at SC’13, Intel and its ecosystem partners are bringing turnkey solutions to market to make big data processing and storage more broadly available, cost effective and easier to deploy. Partners announcing these appliances include Advanced HPC*, Aeon Computing*, ATIPA*, Boston Ltd.*, Colfax International*, E4 Computer Engineering*, NOVATTE* and System Fabric Works*.

          Intel Tops Supercomputing Top 500 List
          Intel’s HPC technologies are once again featured throughout the 42nd edition of the Top500 list, demonstrating how the company’s parallel architecture continues to be the standard building block for the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Intel-based systems account for more than 82 percent of all supercomputers on the list and 92 percent of all new additions. Within a year after the introduction of Intel’s first Many Core Architecture product, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor-based systems already make up 18 percent of the aggregated performance of all Top500 supercomputers. The complete Top500 list is available at www.top500.org.

          1 From IDC Digital Universe 2020 (2013)

          Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark and MobileMark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products.
          Optimization Notice
          Intel’s compilers may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimizations include SSE2, SSE3, and SSE3 instruction sets and other optimizations. Intel does not guarantee the availability, functionality, or effectiveness of any optimization on microprocessors not manufactured by Intel. Microprocessor-dependent optimizations in this product are intended for use with Intel microprocessors. Certain optimizations not specific to Intel microarchitecture are reserved for Intel microprocessors. Please refer to the applicable product User and Reference Guides for more information regarding the specific instruction sets covered by this notice.
          Intel does not control or audit the design or implementation of third party benchmark data or Web sites referenced in this document. Intel encourages all of its customers to visit the referenced Web sites or others where similar performance benchmark data are reported and confirm whether the referenced benchmark data are accurate and reflect performance of systems available for purchase.

          Fujitsu Lights up PCI Express with Intel Silicon Photonics [The Data Stack blog of Intel, Nov 5, 2013]

          Victor Krutul is the Director of Marketing for the Silicon Photonics Operation at Intel.  He shares the vision and passion of Mario Paniccia that Silicon Photonics will one day revolutionize the way we build computers and the way computers talk to each other.  His other passions are tennis and motorcycles (but not at the same time)!

          I am happy to report that Fujitsu announced at its annual Fujitsu Forum on November 5th 2013, that it has worked with Intel to build and demonstrate the world’s first Intel® Optical PCIe Express (OPCIe) based server.  This OPCIe server was enabled by Intel® Silicon Photonics technology.  I think Fujitsu has done some good work when they realized that OPCIe powered servers offer several advantages over non OPCIe based servers.  Rack based servers, especially 1u and 2u servers are space and power constrained.  Sometimes OEMs and end users want to add additional capabilities such as more storage and CPUs to these servers but are limited  because there is simply not enough space for these components or because packing too many components too close to each other increases the heat density and prevents the system from being able to cool the components.

          Fujitsu found a way to fix these limitations!

          The solution to the power and space density problems is to locate the storage and compute components on a remote blade or tray in a way that they appear to the CPU to be on the main motherboard.  The other way to do this is to have a pool of hard drives managed by a second server – but this approach requires messages be sent between the two servers and this adds latency – which is bad.  It is possible to do this with copper cables; however the distance the copper cables can span is limited due to electro-magnetic interference (EMI).  One could use amplifiers and signal conditioners but these obviously add power and cost.  Additionally PCI Express cables can be heavy and bulky.  I have one of these PCI Express Gen 3 16 lanes cables and it feels like it weighs 20 lbs.  Compare this to a MXC cable that carries 10x the bandwidth and weighs one to two pounds depending on length.

          Fujitsu took two standard Primergy RX200 servers and added an Intel® Silicon Photonics module into each along with an Intel designed FPGA.  The FPGA did the necessary signal conditioning to make PCI Express “optical friendly”.  Using Intel® Silicon Photonics they were able to send PCI Express protocol optically through an MXC connector to an expansion box (see picture below).  In this expansion box was several solid state disks (SSD) and Xeon Phi co-processors and of course there was a Silicon Photonics module along with the FPGA to make PCI Express optical friendly.  The beauty of this approach was that the SSD’s and Xeon Phi’s appeared to the RX200 server as if they were on the mother board.  With photons traveling at 186,000 miles per second the extra latency of travelling down a few meters of cable cannot reliably be measured (it can be calculated to be ~5ns/meter or 5 billionths of a second).So what are the benefits of this approach?  Basically there are four.  First, Fujitsu was able to increase the storage capacity of the server because they now were able to utilize the additional disk drives in the expansion box.  The number of drives is determined by the physical size of the box.  The 2nd benefit is they were able to increase the effective CPU capacity of the Xeon E5’s in the RX200 server because the Xeon E5’s could now utilize the CPU capacity of the Xeon Phi co-processors. In a standard 1u rack it would be hard if not impossible to incorporate Xeon Phi’s.  The third benefit is the cooling.  First putting the SSD’s in a expansion box allows one to burn more power because the cooling is divided between the fans in the 1U rack and those in the expansion box,  The fourth benefit is what is called cooling density or, how much heat needs to be cooled per cubic centimeter.  Let me make up an example. For simplicity sake let’s say the volume of a 1u rack is 1 cubic meter and let’s say there are 3 fans cooling that rack and each fan can cool 333 watts for a total capacity of 1000 watts of cooling.  If I evenly space components in the rack each fan does its share and I can cool 1000 watts.  Now assume I put all the components so that just one fan is cooling them because there is no room in front of the other two fans.  If those components expend more than 330 watts they can’t be cooled.  That’s cooling density.  The Fujitsu approach solves the SSD expansion problem, the CPU expansion problem and the total cooling and cooling density problems.

          image

          Go to:https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/images/research/pci-express-and-mxc-2.jpg  if you want to see the PCI Express copper cable vs the MXC optical cable (you will also see we had a little fun with the whole optical vs copper thing.)

          Besides Intel® Silicon Photonics the Fujitsu demo also included Xeon E5 microprocessors and Xeon Phi co-processors.

          Why does Intel want to put lasers in and around computers?

          Photonic signaling (aka fiber optics) has 2 fundamental advantages over copper signaling.  First, when electric signals go down a wire or PCB trace they emit electromagnetic radiation (EMI) and when this EMI from one wire or trace couples into an adjacent wire it causes noise, which limits the bandwidth distance product.  For example, 10G Ethernet copper cables have a practical limit of 10 meters.  Yes, you can put amplifies or signal conditioners on the cables and make an “active copper cable” but these add power and cost.  Active copper cables are made for 10G Ethernet and they have a practical limit of 20 meters.

          Photons don’t emit EMI like electrons do thus fiber based cables can go much longer.  For example with the lower cost lasers used in data centers today at 10G you can build 500 meter cables.  You can go as far as 80km if you used a more expensive laser, but these are only needed a fraction of the time in the data center (usually when you are connecting the data center to the outside world.)

          The other benefit of optical communication is lighter cables.  Optical fibers are thin, typically 120 microns and light.  I have heard of situations where large data centers had to reinforce the raised floors because with all the copper cable, the floor loading limits would be exceeded.

          So how come optical communications is not used more in the data center today? The answer is cost!

          Optical devices made for data centers are expensive.  They are made out of expensive and exotic materials like Lithium-Niobate or Gallium-Arsenide.  Difficult to pronounce, even more difficult to manufacture.  The state of the art for these exotic materials is 3 inch wafers with very low yields.  Manufacturing these optical devices is expensive.  They are designed inside of gold lined cans and sometimes manual assembly is required as technicians “light up” the lasers and align them to the thin fibers.  A special index matching epoxy is used that sometimes can cost as much as gold per ounce.  Bottom line is that while optical communications can go further and uses light fiber cables it costs a lot more.

          Enter Silicon Photonics!  Silicon Photonics is the science of making Photonic devices out of Silicon in a CMOS fab.  Also known as optical but we use the word photonics because the word “optical” is also used when describing eye glasses or telescopes.  Silicon is the most common element in the Earth’s crust, so it’s not expensive.  Intel has 40+ years of CMOS manufacturing experience and has worked over the 40 years to drive costs down and manufacturing speed up.  In fact, Intel currently has over $65 Billion of capital investment in CMOS fabs around the world.  In short, the vision of Intel® Silicon Photonics is to combine the natural advantages of optical communications with the low cost advantages of making devices out of Silicon in a CMOS fab.

          Intel has been working on Intel® Silicon Photonics (SiPh) for over ten years and has begun the process of productizing SiPh.  Earlier this year, at the OCP summit Intel announced that we have begun the long process of building up our manufacturing abilities for Silicon Photonics.  We also announced we had sampled customers with early parts.

          People will often ask me when we will ship our products and how much they will cost?   They also ask me for all sort of technical details about out SiPh modules.  I tell them that Intel is focusing on a full line of solutions – not a single component technology. What our customers want are complete Silicon Photonic based solutions that will make computing easier, faster or less costly.  Let me cite our record of delivering end-to-end solutions:

          Summary of Intel Solution Announcements

          January 2013:  We did a joint announcement with Facebook at the Open Compute Project (OCP) meeting that we worked together to design disaggregated rack architecture (since renamed RSA [Rack Scale Architecture]).  This architecture used Intel® Silicon Photonics and allowed for the storage and networking to be disaggregated or moved away from the CPU mother board.  The benefit is that users can now choose which components they want to upgrade and are not forced to upgrade everything at the same time.

          April 2013: At the Intel Developer Forum we demonstrated the first ever public demonstration of Intel® Silicon Photonics at 100G.

          September 2013: We demonstrated a live working Rack Scale Architecture solution using Intel® Silicon Photonics links carrying Ethernet protocol.

          September 2013: Joint announcement with Corning for new MXC and ClearCurve fiber solution capable of transmission of 300m with Intel® Silicon Photonics at 25G.  This reinforced our strategy of delivering a complete solution including cables and connectors that are optimized for Intel® Silicon Photonics.

          September 2013:  Updated Demonstration of a solution using Silicon Photonics to send data at 25G for more than 800 meters over multimode fibers – A new world record.

          Today: Intel has extended its Silicon Photonics solution leadership with a joint announcement with Fujitsu demonstrating the world’s first Intel® Silicon Photonics link carrying PCI Express protocol.

          I hope you will agree with me that Intel is focusing on more than just CPUs or optical modules and will deliver a complete Silicon Photonics solution!

          Microsoft partners empowered with ‘cloud first’, high-value and next-gen experiences for big data, enterprise social, and mobility on wide variety of Windows devices and Windows Server + Windows Azure + Visual Studio as the platform

          July 10, 2013 12:15 pm / 5 Comments on Microsoft partners empowered with ‘cloud first’, high-value and next-gen experiences for big data, enterprise social, and mobility on wide variety of Windows devices and Windows Server + Windows Azure + Visual Studio as the platform

          … even non-Microsoft devices are supported as Android and Apple phones are embraced as well 

          Preliminary information from this same ‘Experiencing the Cloud’ blog:
          – Windows Embedded is an enterprise business now, like the whole Windows business, with Handheld and Compact versions to lead in the overall Internet of Things market as well [June 8, 2013]
          – Proper Oracle Java, Database and WebLogic support in Windows Azure including pay-per-use licensing via Microsoft + the same Oracle software supported on Microsoft Hyper-V as well [June 25, 2013]
          – Windows 8.1: Mind boggling opportunities, finally some appreciation by the media [June 27, 2013]
          – Windows Azure becoming an unbeatable offering on the cloud computing market [June 28, 2013] Important note: Samsung was complete missing from device OEM roundup of Day 1 keynote despite of its leadership ATIV Q, ATIV Tab 3 and ATIV One 5 Style devices.  It is not by accident as according to Intel’s tablet challenge: How Israel helped lay the foundations of its Samsung-led fightback [ZDNet, July 9, 2013]:
          Intel, along with Samsung and other companies, are betting that the public is going to go for a new breed of device — two in one devices, which be switched between tablet and laptop mode, running both Android (when separated from the keyboard/base) and Windows 8 Pro (when attached).

          Brief subject summary:

          • industry megatrends:
            – [MS leading the enterprise cloud era] cloud,
            – [MS has unmatched offerings, unmatched insight] big data,
            – [MS solution is woved in, not forced] enterprise social, and
            – [MS has best devices for doers, best tools to manage] mobility
          • Partners going ‘cloud first’ with Windows Azure
          • Microsoft unique point of view: delivering high-value experiences through our software value-added devices and experiences
          • support non-Microsoft devices: embrace Android and Apple phones
          • new user experience design [partner] competency [to be launched in January]
          • Windows 8.1:
            – one modern and complete experience across the devices that matter today
            – the best of the modern UI and the best of the desktop UI brought together in a harmonized way
            – multitasking on one or any number of screens to increase productivity in a workstation like way
          • Windows 8/8.1 devices:
            – Windows Embedded 8
            – large-format touch, or the all-in-one (also as a desktop replacement)
            – ultimately thin and light ultrabook
            – tablet with touch, and convertible form factors
            – docking tablet (also as a desktop replacement)
            – waterproof tablet
            – tablet with ink/stylus
            – ruggedized tablet
            – “one-handed Windows”
            – thinnest and lightest tablet with ARM
            – phones
            – innovation: in hinge, in screen quality, in combined desktop replacement/home device/flat tablet mode
          • Self-service BI with Power BI for Office 365 Preview: next giant leap via building into Excel and SharePoint data discovery, data navigation, visualization, collaboration, and enterprise features around auditability
          • Application development: sea change with Windows Server + Windows Azure + Visual Studio as the development platform
            – “A platform that is capable of both infrastructure as a service and platform as a services (IaaS + PaaS)”
            – “That means any mission-critical Web application you want to build, any mobile front-end you want to build, where you’re automating a business process with a mobile front-end; any cloud service you want to build, you want to have this rich capability of both infrastructure as a service and a platform as a service”
            – “And you want to be able to deliver that, by the way, in both Windows Azure, as well as on Windows Server. So that symmetry of development runtime is also very important, and that’s what we’re building out.”
            – Visual Studio 2013 Preview availability announcement
            – SQL Services, or SQL Database Premium Services for Windows Azure announcement: “unique already with the fact that we have a PaaS-based SQL Service”
          • Cloud infrastructure: “No one else in the industry, neither Amazon nor VMware can promise or deliver this level of consistency, this level of mission-critical readiness because of the battle testing of all the diverse set of first-party workloads.”

          image

          From: Jon Roskill: Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 Introduction [Speech transcript, July 8, 2013]

          JON ROSKILL: Now let’s turn our attention and look forward, because while WPC is about celebrating, it’s also about us coming together to build our business plans together for the next year and kick off the fiscal year. That’s what WPC is all about.
          And we’ve made a few changes in WPC, some of which you’ve already noticed as you look at things we’ve done in MPN today, but changes based on your feedback.
          One of the key ones we’ve made is in the keynotes. You guys told us that you needed to have all of the product strategy upfront in order to be able to go and build your business plans over the remaining days. And so we’ve taken the day two keynote and the day one keynotes, and we’ve combined them together into a WPC day one supersession. So that’s what we’re going to do this morning.
          Then you have day two fully open to go and do networking, go to sessions, and build out those business plans.
          And then on day three we’ll come back together here with me, Kevin Turner. And then Wednesday night we will celebrate. And boy, are we going to have an amazing celebration. And by Wednesday night I’m going to be so excited to go crowd surfing with you guys.
          We’ve also made this year ‘s WPC, we’ve built it around a customer-centric notion, customers at the center of WPC. And we’ve done that by basing WPC around these four industry megatrends: mobility, enterprise social, cloud, and big data. These are trends that are relevant every day to customers, and they’re driving demand for all of our solutions. So you’re going to see these four trends reflected not just in the keynotes and the sessions, but also in the expo across the commons, in the BG areas, et cetera.
          Windows 8 takes center stage at Worldwide Partner Conference [Blogging Windows blog, July 8, 2013]
          At Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Houston, Texas, executives discussed the company’s approach to services and devices. Tami Reller, Windows chief marketing officer and chief financial officer, announced that Windows 8.1 release to manufacturing (RTM) will be available for original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners in late August, so they can prepare Windows 8.1 devices just in time for the holidays.

          New Power BI solution for Office 365 delivers self-service business intelligence on nearly any device [The Fire Hose blog from Microsoft]

          Today, at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced a new offering: Power BI for Office 365 – a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) solution that enables customers to easily gain insights from their data, working within Excel to analyze and visualize the data in a self-service way.

          Developments from Worldwide Partner Conference: Partners can go ‘cloud first’ with Windows Azure [Windows Azure blog, July 8, 2013]
          At Day 1 of the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft made several announcements that highlight new ways for our partners and customers to embrace cloud computing using the Windows Azure platform.
          Partners in the cloud for modern business [The Official Microsoft Blog, July 8, 2013]
          From the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Houston, Texas, Microsoft President of Server and Tools Business Satya Nadella announced new programs and services that are designed to help Microsoft partners and customers embrace the challenges and opportunities associated with cloud computing and big data. One such program, Cloud OS Accelerate, brings together Microsoft and key partners – Cisco, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, HP and Dell – who will invest more than $100 million to help put thousands of new private and hybrid cloud solutions into the hands of customers.
          Partners: Want higher profits and faster growth? Sell cloud solutions, new IDC study says [Microsoft press release, July 8, 2013]
          Today from the Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, Microsoft released a new study from IDC that shows partners selling cloud-based solutions benefit from higher gross profit, more new customers, higher revenue per employee and faster overall business growth. The study also revealed customer buying preferences that highlight the importance of the role of partners in the overall industry cloud transition.
          Microsoft survey reveals SMB and enterprise opportunities for partners [Microsoft press release, July 9, 2013]
          IPSOS study released at Worldwide Partner Conference highlights utilization of social tools and showcases opportunities for partners.

          Windows Embedded partners to join Microsoft Partner Network [Microsoft feature story, July 9, 2013]

          Resources will strengthen opportunities in rapidly growing intelligent systems market.

          Details

          Steve Ballmer at the Day 1 Keynote [msPartner YouTube channel, July 8, 2013]

          Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer provided opening remarks at the WPC 2013 Day 1 keynote.

          From: Steve Ballmer: Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 Keynote [Speech transcript, July 8, 2013]

          … There’s 15,000 of you here in the room today, and to all of you I want to start with a simple message of thanks. Thanks for your support, thanks for your good work, and thank you every day for taking care of our customers. (Applause.) We have a total of 750,000 partners around the world, but about 90 percent of the revenue that we do is actually represented in some way, shape or form with the partners who are here today: systems integration partners, resale partners, hardware partners, development partners, software partners, cloud partners, framing partners, distribution partners. The range in breadth of the activities in which you engage are amazing. This year, our partners in aggregate had really quite a good year. Growth in the businesses from our partners was about 6.5 percent year over year, but on a base of $650 billion. That’s the total revenue of our partner network, $650 billion, and you still manage to grow at 6.5 percent. Congratulations everybody. (Applause.) …
          …
          image
          We spend a lot of time as a leadership team thinking about the remaking of Microsoft. About a year ago in our annual report, we talked about the move from being a “software company” to a “devices and services company.” What that really means? It means that the world, and I’ve been saying this at our partner conferences here for a while, the world we grew up in was a world of software. When I dropped out of school and joined Microsoft, I had to explain to my mother and father what software was and why I was joining a software company. That was a long time ago.

          And software development, I believe, is still the most valuable skill that anybody on the planet can possibly have. And yet the way in which software innovation gets really packaged and presented now is through a set of devices that include the software, and through a set of cloud services that deliver that software.

          Just about six or seven years ago, I started talking about the cloud here at WPC. And it was highly unpopular the first time I talked about it, because it looked like an end around. And yet I think today everybody understands that this is the future of innovation. Even Windows, if you think about it, has really always been much more of a device than a piece of software.
          Windows defined a class of devices called the PC. And we are certainly incredibly determined to have Windows define new classes of devices, tablets, phones, two-in-ones, living room devices, defined by Windows as a piece of software, but purchased and implemented by our partners as tested software. So we’re in the transformation from delivering our software value one way to delivering it in a new form, and we need our partners to come with us on that journey, whether you design and build computers, whether you deliver systems integration services, whether you provide custom development, there’s a place in this journey for all of us.

          At Microsoft we say, what’s our unique point of view. Our unique point of view is on delivering high-value experiences through our software value-added devices and experiences. We think we understand the tools, the technologies that it takes to help people get work done better than anybody else on the planet, whether you are an employee, whether you are a customer or a trading partner, whether you are an IT person or a developer, we build experience that help people get stuff done. You need to do a piece of analysis, we’re going to have the best tools, the best devices and services for helping people do analysis. You want to participate in a virtual meeting, nobody is going to give you a better experience to participate in a virtual meeting than Microsoft does. You want to ensure information integrity in your customer, because no matter what happens with consumerization, it’s still the IT department that has to protect the integrity and value of corporate information. We together understand these things, and we together, Microsoft and our partners, will deliver the devices and services that really bring these things alive when people want to be productive.

          Now, we have another side of ourselves at Microsoft, too. That’s the fun side. I refer to it as serious fun, because unless you’re hardcore about fun, the Xbox probably hasn’t been the product for you. But when it’s serious fun, or serious business, we’re going to make sure that we provide the core experiences through our devices and services, and through the value add of people in this room to really bring that alive. That’s not easy. It takes a lot of core technology investment in operating systems, in user interface, and particularly now natural user interface, in machine learning, in cloud infrastructure.
          …

          So what is on our customer’s mind? These are the four big trends that I think in particular our IT customers, but businesses in general, want to speak with us about every day. They come to us and they say, what about the cloud? They say it to you. They say it to us. They say, hey, I hear about big data, or I understand big data, or I’m afraid I’m missing out on big data, how are you going to help me get there, they’ll say to the two of us.

          Social, part of the consumerization theme of the day is how do we apply techniques and software services that people get to know in their personal lives, how do we apply those to enable business productivity? And we’re going to show you a lot today of what we’re doing with social so that people can come together in what I would call human ways to do superhuman tasks at their work.

          And last, but certainly not least, is mobility. I get to do something that the rest of you don’t do, because I sit on the stage, I get to count the number of mobile devices that go up for pictures and various other things during my speech. We’re at about 25 percent would be my gauge this year. I’m sure everybody has got a mobile device with them, but what it says is that the range of applications of mobility just continues to increase. And I want you to really understand just how rich our mobile offering has become, both in terms of the Windows devices that you can use as part of your solution, and the work that we are doing to support some non-Windows devices. So let me dive into each of these in turn.

          image

          First is the cloud, the cloud remains a little bit of an amorphous thing. But, at the end of the day, the task of the cloud probably means, and it might be 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, it is really a path that leads for almost all companies to the public cloud. And that puts a lot of pressure on providers, whether it’s Microsoft, folks we compete with, our service provider partners, it puts a lot of pressure on us to make sure that we have world-class scaled, low-cost, low latency, high-bandwidth cloud infrastructure across the world. How do we, from a public cloud application, deliver with incredibly low-latency and with exactly the right data security and privacy and protection? How do we deliver information, whether it’s in the U.S., or Australia, or China, or Malaysia, or any place else in the world? And we are investing in that infrastructure.
          We actually started the investment process in that infrastructure in order to support our own applications, to support Bing, to support Office 365. And what we would tell you is that our cloud infrastructure, Azure, is being proven out, is being battle tested, and is being advanced on the backbone of our own first-party applications, but then that infrastructure, that Azure infrastructure, is there for all of you to use, to deliver solutions to your customers.
          I claim there really are almost no companies in the world, just a handful, that are really investing in scaled public cloud infrastructure. We have something over a million servers in our datacenter infrastructure. Google is bigger than we are. Amazon is a little bit smaller. You get Yahoo! and Facebook, and then everybody else is 100,000 units probably or less. So the number of companies that really understand the network topology, the datacenter construction, the server requirements to build this public cloud infrastructure is very, very small, very small. And the number of companies that are at the same time seriously investing in the private cloud, which is not going away, and in these hybrid clouds is really just one and that’s us. We are building in a compatible way private cloud infrastructure based on Windows Server, and public cloud infrastructure based on Windows Azure, and we will talk to you about that today.
          Sixty-three percent of customers surveyed will say they really want a single vendor who can provide them both public cloud and private cloud. We think we are the only solution and certainly the best solution for customers who want that. We continue to advance with our cloud applications, our Bing search service has made progress each and every month, improving not only its market-share and its quality, but also the speed and performance with which we deliver our results, which should be a key indication to you on just how rich our cloud infrastructure is.
          Through your good work our Office 365 service has literally exploded. For the last few years we were saying SharePoint was the No. 1 fastest growing product at Microsoft. Then it was Lync, the No. 1 fastest growing product at Microsoft. Through your good work it’s Office 365. And what all of that means is our mutual customers are ready for the cloud, and our product line is ready for the cloud. People want full, familiar, world-class productivity tools in the cloud. Only we give people those tools that really let you get work done. There are pretenders who come from the consumer world, but there’s only one set of tools for your business customers who really need a productive, high-security, high-reliability, infrastructure in the cloud for their applications.

          image

          No. 2, big data, big data is I think one of the areas that is still very, very early actually in its exploitation. Big data means a lot of things to a lot of people, and it’s very important that we continue to push forward on these big data themes. You’re going to see demonstrations today of some of our tools, some of the work that we’ve done with Excel, and SQL Server, I guarantee you for people who have a lot of data, there is no question that the No. 1 sort of most familiar, easy-to-use toolset to get insight out of data comes from Excel and SQL Server.
          Ninety percent, literally, of the world’s data, this is a very interesting fact, ninety percent of the world’s data has actually been created in the last two years, 90 percent of all of the online data in the world in the last two years. What it says is there’s an explosion in this data. And so tools that let people mine it, get insights from it, and understanding from it are essential. We’re going to show you a demonstration of some of the things that you can do with our big data and BI suite later on today that I think will absolutely blow your mind.
          But, we’re also providing you with the infrastructure that lets you build out automated solutions for your customers, because over time most of the value in big data will actually be in having the data learn from itself and take automated actions on our joint customers behalf. We’re building out our Hadoop infrastructure on Azure, so that you can do a mix of things with structured and unstructured data. We are certainly doing a lot of work on SQL Azure, so that you can access the structured data in the cloud. Because of our investment in Bing, we know we have a lot of data. We are putting that data in a structured form, where you can use it as part of the applications you deliver.
          One of the key things that we showed at our developer conference a couple of weeks ago in Windows 8.1 is the way we’re starting to take entities that Bing understands and make them part of a platform for you to use as developers in your applications.
          Last but not least is the Azure Data Marketplace. There is going to be a lot of data that people are going to want to use inside their applications that don’t actually live inside the enterprises you serve. If you want to write a forecasting application for one of your customers that forecasts how many raincoats they need in each of their retail stores, I guarantee you the weather data is a helpful input. And yet most of our joint customers don’t keep the weather data in their enterprise systems. And so we want to let you mix and match public data and private data. We want you to be able to bring that data together in structured and unstructured ways. We want to bring it together in ways in which humans get the insights, and we want to give you the machine-learning infrastructure so that the computers themselves can actually help your customers respond to their customers in real time. The work we’re doing here you’ll hear about throughout the morning, and particularly the demonstrations you’ll see I think will really bring these things alive.

          image

          Social. Some people think social is one product. I don’t. Social is a way of working. How do four of us come together and collaborate on a project? How do we collaborate if we work in the same company? How do we collaborate if we work in different companies? How do I reach you if you are in my customer base and I want to do a seminar for you? Or I want to put on and have an event where we communicate real time? All of these are social activities that are involved in business. So it’s people to people, it’s people to businesses, it’s employees to employees, it’s all of the constituents, consumers, employees, customers, and partners. How do you bring them together naturally? Sometimes you want to do that on a real-time basis, and sometimes you want to be able to do that in a way in which people can participate asynchronously.
          I’m glad to have 15,000 people here today, but many more people will watch the video of this section in our partner community around the world. And it’s part of, if you will, the social infrastructure, letting people participate the way they want when they want. And we’ve woven this into the fabric of everything we do. Windows devices come from the get-go with integrated communications and social capabilities like Skype. Skype and Lync are being brought together to allow the consumer and the businessperson to interact together in real time.
          We continue to push forward in Outlook, adding more social capabilities directly into the e-mail client that is the base station from which most of us would communicate with other people. We acquired Yammer over a year ago, and you’ll see the way we’re using Yammer both inside companies and now enabling it to stretch between companies and their partners to involve real-time communication that feels very much like what somebody would do on Twitter or Facebook, but in a productivity context. We continue to push SharePoint social capabilities forward, and even in our Dynamics product line, even when we’re talking about line of business process, it is very important to collect the information from the social realm, and to be able to let people in formal line of business processes actually connect to social environments. And we’re going to show you some of that later on in the demonstration.

          image

          Last but not least is mobility. This is an area where we’ve made huge strides in the last year. I had a chance to beat my chest a little bit, get excited about Windows Phone, but we’re also going to show you today what we’ve done with Windows 8.1, and what our hardware partners have done with Windows devices. You can buy beautiful Windows devices today in so many different shapes and forms. Windows PCs, everybody has a notion of what we mean by a Windows PC. But we’re going to show you small Windows tablets. They’re still all Windows all the time, but they’re hard to mistake for a PC.
          We’ll show you Windows two-in-ones, devices, which depending on how you configure them at any time will feel like a PC or can feel like a tablet. I happen to think this will be the most popular configuration for business people because they’ll want the ability to seamlessly go back and forth between their productive life, their consumptive life, and their personal life.
          I talked about Windows Phone. You’re going to get a chance to see the Surface. Hopefully many of you will choose to pick one up, but what we’re doing with Surface I think is also amazing. We’re trying to really lead the way on products like Surface Pro, and the use of the pen, which I think is pretty fundamental in mobility.
          While we’re making these investments in sort of Windows mobile form factors, if you will, we also continue to do work to support non-Microsoft devices. You’ve seen us certainly move with SkyDrive, with Lync, with OneNote, with a number of our offerings to embrace Android and Apple phones. We’re going to show you some technology today for managing mobile devices that apply outside the Microsoft sphere. So our mobility strategy, as centered as it may feel in our Windows devices, and they are beautiful, and they are the most productive, for those people who just don’t happen to have one, we’ll also show you a little bit of some of the technology that we’ll give you so you can stay well anchored in Windows and Active Directory as the center point for managing devices of all shapes, sizes and forms.
          At the end of the day we may see ourselves focusing on high-value experiences, and our customers may ask us collectively about cloud, and big data, and mobility, and social, but at the end of the day we deliver to you some products. And with those products in hand you turn around and try to serve our joint customers.
          Windows, we’ll show you 8.1 and I couldn’t be more pleased with the progress. Windows Phone, if you haven’t checked it out recently you must. Surface, I hope you get the opportunity to delve in and really explore at the partner conference. Office 365, including Yammer, and Skype, and Lync, and SharePoint and Excel, and BI, and all of these phenomenal capabilities, the footprint of what you can do with Office is continuously expanding. And when you leave here, we want to make sure you leave here understanding completely the breadth of footprint that Office is embracing. Windows Azure, and when I say Azure today I include Windows Server, and the full on-premise product line. Your ability to go out and articulate a hybrid cloud story with Windows Server, SQL Server, and Windows Azure is incredibly important to us. So we are going to try to equip you to do that by the time you’re done today.
          And then last, but not least, is Dynamics. Dynamics continues to evolve in its footprint, in its embrace of the cloud. Dynamics is an amazing business for Microsoft. I’ll bet we get less PR on the business that is billions of dollars for Microsoft, and where we probably have the most loyal committed partner base in the world, and the most loyal committed customer base. And for those of you who have not come back and looked recently at the amazing work that we’re doing in business applications I hope you’ll feel enthused to go do that by the end of the day.

          We will only succeed as a company if we arm you to go approach these challenges. You need to see these products. You need to understand their potential. You need to believe that they can help you serve our joint customers. You need to know each other. Some of you are experts in hardware. Some of you are experts in systems integration, some are developers, some are resellers. Bringing you all together and equipping you with the common base, so you understand where we’re going, what we’re doing, and collectively how we can serve our joint customers that’s what WPC is all about, and if we take advantage of this opportunity and certainly with the phenomenal product lineup that we have today, and we’ll roll out over the next month, we know absolutely that we can succeed together.

          Thank you all very much and enjoy WPC.

          Windows 8.1 Product Enhancements [msPartner YouTube channel, July 9, 2013]

          Tami Reller, CVP and CFO, Windows and Windows Live, provided updates and demos of Windows 8.1.

          See also: Windows at WPC 2013 [Blogging Windows, July 8, 2013]
          From: Tami Reller: Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 Keynote [Speech transcript, July 8, 2013]

          Tami Reller: … everything that we are talking about today is anchored by this idea that we can do something that no other company can. And that is one modern and complete experience across the devices that matter today. Your experience, your data, everything can travel with you. And it’s connected through this trusted foundation of Windows. This is one experience that is unique to Windows, but it’s also uniquely yours.
          I mean, we know that when a customer chooses an Apple product, they get a device that reflects Apple. When you choose an Android device, you get a device that reflects a dizzying number of points of view. But when you choose a Windows device, you get a device that reflects you.
          Start a Word document from your laptop, then easily finish it on a Windows Phone. You get music, video, and games from Xbox. The best of the Web with Internet Explorer. The best cloud storage in SkyDrive. And of course the best way to stay connected, Skype. And the absolute best in productivity with Office. All of this across every device providing the most complete experience from the start.
          Well, we’re believers, continue to be believers that user experience and the design is going to continue to be an important differentiator for Microsoft, and it’s also going to continue to be an important differentiator for the experiences that you are building for customers.
          What we’re finding is that businesses are seeking trusted partners who can not only write great code, that’s critical of course, but they can also design beautiful and engaging experiences for customers.
          Apps that are better designed, they absolutely achieve better ratings in the Windows store, and even equally as important, they are more engaging for customers, and they deliver greater monetization opportunities.
          So to support all of this, I’m excited to announce that in January we will be launching a new [partner] competency: The user experience design competency. And the whole idea behind this competency is to give you the best way to train your designers and to get recognized for your expertise with the Microsoft design language and user experience for app building.
          This competency will provide your designers with training and certification and gives your firm a head start in building great apps, and we think will help you recruit the best people. So I hope you’re as excited about this as we are, look for this in January.

          So we’ve been talking about devices and services for about a year now. And while so much of the opportunity that we see for us and that we see for you is still ahead, there’s a lot of great momentum to talk about.

          …
          Let’s take, for example, Windows Phone, which Steve did such a great job talking about. Our sales are growing six times faster than the overall smartphone market. Safe to say that we are now officially the third ecosystem in mobility. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you.
          Windows. We are moving forward. Steve did a great job talking about that. We’re moving forward, and you heard us talk about 100 million licenses. I can also report that we have over 20 million enterprise evaluations. So great in consumer and a lot of enterprise traction starting.
          And Windows 8, so far, has logged 60 billion hours of use. And our new customer activation continues at a consistent pace.
          Office. It’s a great example of a product that is used multiple times every day and it is known and loved by more than a billion people. The new Office is our fastest-selling release in history. Worldwide, one copy is sold every second.
          Additionally, one out of four enterprise customers are already on Office 365. And I love this next statistic. Partners lead three out of four enterprise Office 365 deployments, three out of four, great opportunity. Thank you so much for your role in moving businesses to the cloud. (Applause.)
          Amazing momentum on Skype. More than 300 million people use Skype each month. And that’s a service that can see up to two billion minutes of use per day on some peak days.

          So how our products come together really starts with the experience. And people are using our products as part of everyday life. Important parts of their life. And Steve talked about this as well.

          So I have this short video that I think does a great job of showing what we mean by this. Take a look.
          (Break for video segment.) [6:40 … 7:10 essentially for Office 365]
          … [Office 365: complete Office in the cloud … this is the Office enhancement … +extension to the Open program … +investment in partner enablement]
          … [Windows Phone: Lumias … suitable to build end-to-end enterprise solutions … tools to build enterprise solutions]
          … [xBox: … newest xBox One …]
          … [Surface and Surface Pro: … hand down more productive than iPad … better with Windows 8.1 …]
          … [Windows: … mobility is top for CIOs … Windows 8 tablets are best for the business … SkyDrive … destination for developers … more than 100,000 apps … LOB customers need partners … 2 out of 3 enterprise enterprise organizations are investing today in mobile applications … great UI enhancements, great usability functionality … migration from XP opportunity … Windows Accelerate program continued … new Touch Win program incentives directly to authorized distributors as well as reseller partners …]
          … [Windows 8.1: … 900 continuous improvements and hundreds of updates to our inbox apps … represents responsiveness, it represents rapid timeframe … feel natural on everything from a small tablet to a large work station …]

          [21:18 Jensen Harris showing Windows 8.1 via a jam-packed demo here for the next few minutes, including some things that we have never publicly shown before]

          … [Nokia Lumia 925 … 8-inch Acer Iconia W3 … in landscape games and productivity … +optimized Windows 8.1 specifically for portrait for working great on these small tablets e.g. Reading List, ergonomics …  ]
          Now I’m going to move over here to a Surface and I’m going to show you one of the most important near features in 8.1. Every month, 20 billion searches are performed just in the United States on Windows PCs — 20 billion searches every month. We looked at this as an opportunity to say if we made search better in this product, we would be making 20 billion things every month better for people. And so we’ve introduced search in 8.1.
          … [search hero: … curated, built-on-the-fly app that brings together information from Bing, information from your PC, files from the cloud, things from the Web, and puts it all together in one view … integrated with Maps functionality…]
          … [xBoxMusic app: … redesigned totally to make it fast, to make it efficient, and to focus on your collection of music …]
          [Dell all-in-one, 27 inches with touch … the world’s best Skype device, a Windows 8.1 PC … Start screen changes: all the things that you love on one screen … new personalization options … multiselect … Reading List … SkyDrive … picture editing built-in … a lot of new [built-in] apps: e.g. Food & Drink … hands-free mode … Windows Store big-big update: e.g. recommendation engine built one Bing … … OneNote syncing with SkyDrive …]
          image
          [Surface Pro: “play to Xbox One” … Miracast built-in … OneNote
          Windows Phone: OneNote syncing with SkyDrive           ]
          … [desktop PC: … doesn’t need touch …bring together the best of the modern UI and the best of the desktop UI and harmonize them in Windows 8.1 … Start button .. enterprise cosumer dashboard … productivity (… multitasking) taken to next level: e.g. new version of Outlook … ]
          Suddenly, I have something that is starting to look like a very productive work station. And I can move these windows around, I can put them where I want. We have maximize, we have resize, and all of a sudden you start to realize that there’s more than one way of doing awesome productivity. This uses all the pixels on my PC.
          And on this sort of smallish monitor, I can fit three. But if I had something like a 2550 x 1440 monitor, I could show four apps on the screen at once. And all of a sudden, now you’re way more productive than you could have been on the desktop. You’ve got your Twitter feed, you’ve got your full running mail app, you’ve got multiple browser windows or multiple mails up at once.
          image
          And it gets even better. If I attach a second monitor, then suddenly I can do the same thing on multiple monitors at once. So I have any collection of apps across my monitors in any configuration I want, any size I want, blending desktop and modern apps across my screens. I can bring the Start screen up on one and just leave it, and this doesn’t just work for two monitors, it works for three, four, five, six, seven, as many as I have. And so this sort of shows the power of Windows 8.1 and the modern UI even on a desktop engineering workstation making you more productive.

          [1:02:06]

          Tami Reller: … I’m also quite happy to be able to confirm today that Windows 8.1 will be available for our OEM partners in late August. Meaning that holiday devices, many of them will have Windows 8.1. So late August available to OEMs. So very pleased to confirm that today.

          What better timing to talk about our OEM devices? We’d like to do that. Please help me welcome to the stage Nick Parker. To do that, I’d like to open with a little video, a commercial we have on air that shows just why Windows 8 tablets are so special.

          (Windows tablet commercial video.) [1:04:05 … 1:04:35 essentially iPad 32 GB $599 vs. Windows Tablet $299 (Dell XPS 10 32GB) Limited time offer at Dell.com]

          Dell Tablet vs. iPad [WindowsVideos YouTube channel, June 13, 2013] here the limited time offer at the end stands at $399
          See how the Dell XPS 10 with Windows RT stacks up against the iPad. Check out more at http://windows.com/compare

          Nick Parker:

          … Windows Storage Server: e.g. Western Digital Sentinel, a 16-terabyte small business server … Windows Embedded 8: e.g. IEI [?Institute for Emerging Issues?] display panel … large-format touch, or the all-in-one: e.g. Dell XPS 18 also as a desktop replacement … ultrabook: e.g. the world’s thinnest and lightest one Sony VAIO Pro 13 … tablets with touch, and convertible form factors: e.g. Lenovo Helix … tablet with stylus … docking tablet, also as a desktop replacement: e.g. Latitude 10 … Fujitsu Arrows Tab waterproof tablet … Hewlett Packard ElitePad 900 the choice of Emirates Air for their in-flight device, also with a very innovative sleeve … Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2 , not just a small app running a stylus capability, but ink immersed as part of your input mechanism … Panasonic FZ-G1, the Panasonic Toughpad ruggedized computer … Acer W3 one-handed Windows … thinnest and the lightest tablet that you can get, as well as having all-day battery and integrated 4G, and those are capabilities built on the ARM platform: Asus VivoTab RT … phones: Nokia 925 and Nokia 520 … innovation: Acer Aspire R7 with innovation in hinge, Toshiba KIRAbook a 221-pixels-per-inch device, HP Rove the 20-inch IPS all-in-one for both desktop replacements as well as great home devices + complete flat tabletop mode for using an application that’s maybe multi-orientational …

          [1:22:24]

          Note that Samsung was complete missing from this device OEM roundup despite of its leadership ATIV Q, ATIV Tab 3 and ATIV One 5 Style devices, as you could read in 20 years of Samsung “New Management” as manifested by the latest, June 20th GALAXY & ATIV innovations [‘Experiencing the Cloud, July 2-5, 2013]

          Satya Nadella about Platform, Infrastructure, and Applications [msPartner YouTube channel, July 8, 2013] 

          Satya Nadella, President of Server and Tools, speaks about the enterprise.

          From: Satya Nadella: Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 Keynote [Speech transcript, July 8, 2013] 

          … <before that: how to enable dynamic business … demoed across Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online Windows Intune, and System Center Configuration Manager, and Azure Active Directory … >
          image
          [30:08] When you think about having lots of data and having lots of rich processing capabilities, the next step is to be able to empower your end users with the best tools to drive insights. This is where we collectively have really created one of the most amazing phenomena when it comes to BI with self-service BI. We took the most ubiquitous tool around data in Excel, combined it with the power of SQL Analysis Services, and started the self-service BI revolution, and especially in combination with SharePoint, we really have done a fantastic job of driving insight at the edge of all data, big or small.
          Today I’m really pleased to announce the next giant leap, if you will, when it comes to self-service BI. We are announcing Power BI for Office 365 Preview. It takes all of the rich capabilities around data discovery, data navigation, visualization, collaboration, enterprise features around auditability, taking all of that, building it right into Excel and SharePoint, so that every user has friction-free access to it. They’re also delivering all of the rich cloud capabilities that power this natively in Azure. So that means all of the SQL analysis capabilities that power this experience are all there natively in the cloud.
          So to show you a glimpse of what this new solution, Power BI for Office 365, can do I wanted to invite up on stage Amir Netz.
          Amir.

          Power BI Demo [msPartner YouTube channel, July 8, 2013] for those who want to watch only this part, watch especially from [8:10] on especially (incredible demo/performance)

          Amir Netz demonstrates the new Power BI
          AMIR NETZ: Thank you, Satya.
          Power BI brings self-service analytics to the cloud and the power of the cloud directly into Excel. It opens amazing new ways for users to connect with data. So let’s take a look. We have here on the screen our Excel 2013. And I want to create a report about our datacenters. I don’t have the data. With Power BI we can actually go and find the data that we need. You see here online search, I am going to use it to go and find the data for my report.
          I’m going to type in my search query and just here within Excel Power BI is searching for millions of public data tables, and finding the data that I might need. It comes from Wikipedia, it comes from the marketplace, it comes from Bing, but because I’m a Microsoft employee I’m also getting data not just from the public data sources, I’m also getting data from my enterprise data assets. Those were mapped into the catalogue of Power BI. So here we see a table from my data warehouse, and I can go and add that table to my Excel, and just like that Power BI connects and aligns the data directly to my sheet just like that. It’s so easy.
          Now I want to create my report. I’m going to go and use PowerView. It’s also integrated into Excel 2013. So let’s go and create a nice report here. We’re going to take a look at the   let’s take the location of the datacenter, the square footage of the datacenter, let’s make it a bit larger. It’s Excel 2013 so we can just convert it immediately to a map. We can go and categorize my datacenters by generation. Just with a few clicks, a beautiful report and it’s not the only report I have here in my workbook. I have a couple more.
          So this report here shows me the storage of Azure, just an amazing explanation of the growth in the business. This one here shows me the subscriber’s growth in the business. You see almost 200 percent in just over a year. I mean I can slice and dice and look at segments of users, and see the growth there. So I have this beautiful report, interactive, and I want to share it with other people and to do that I go to the file menu, I do a save as and I’m saving it to the Power BI side in Office 365.
          And now what does this site look like? Let’s see how this site looks like in SharePoint Online. This is it. You can see how well organized it is. You see my Azure report, my Office 365 report. It’s clean. It’s crisp. It’s beautiful. I want to go and take a look at one of those reports. I click and of course, because the reports are all created inside Excel, Excel is the application used to be able to browse the reports in my browser. So you can see here the explanation of growth you see in the compute resources of Azure, you can go and look at the other reports of that, the database growth, and of course the whole thing is fully interactive. So I can go select different time slices and in the browser get the full interrogation of the data.
          It’s very easy to share, very easy to explore, but it’s more than that, it’s a full enterprise offering. So let’s take a look and see all the options that we have here. So see this menu here, take a look at what we have. I can share with other people, I can protect the data, I can schedule data refresh, where Power BI will reach back from the cloud to the enterprise, go to the original data sources, bring the data on the regular basis up to the cloud, up to the report that we have here. I can track the data usage by my users. And one more thing I can do here, I can add that report to my mobile favorites. And you can see this mobile star here, now that report is here and it’s showing up on my mobile device. It’s a beautiful application Power BI. It’s fully interactive as you use it. And it’s not just this report. I have a full gallery of reports that I can use here. You can see I can browse through that. It’s just the best way you can have to consume reports on the go.
          So you’re seeing what kind of a gorgeous, great offering we have here. But, there’s one more thing, one more capability that I think you need to see, because in my opinion it’s the true game changer. So for this I’m going to take a look at another Power BI slide. Look at this one here, and make it a bit larger. This one Power BI slide is for a media company. And you see it has these reports that we created in Excel. But, there’s another role here, we call it “Featured Answers.” And these are the most common questions my users ask about the data. For example, show our sales pipeline. I’m clicking on it and now Power BI connects automatically to the sales pipeline data source and shows me the results. Now it looks like a comp report, but it is not. It is the beginning of a conversation with Power BI.
          So I can compute that, show our sales pipeline only with opportunity size greater than $20,000. And as I type I immediately get the answer. You can see that there are six opportunities greater than $20,000. It’s very easy, right. (Applause.) Now one of those opportunities is this rock-themed event series. And I want to continue the line of interrogation I want to ask questions about that, so I can go and ask maybe the top rock classics. And notice I’m using, something magical happens. As I was typing the questions the results came up and I actually realized I’m asking about songs. So I moved away from the pipeline data set, automatically it connects me to a different one. This one is the historical data set for all the music charts in the United States. So I can see that “Bohemian Rhapsody” here, by the way my favorite song of all time, is the top rock classic. And I know it’s right, because Power BI tells me what it understood from me.
          Look at that. It tells me that when I said rock I meant rock songs. And when I said classic, I meant a certain period of time, the ’70s and the ’80s. It is not the oldies from the ’50s. And when I said top it said you probably want to rank it by something, so you rank it by the number of weeks it stayed on the charts. So I like that interpretation, but not exactly. And again, Power BI comes to help me. It says, hey, I know what you mean now. So how about instead of ranking by weeks on the chart, I offer other options, rank it by the weeks the song stayed at No. 1. And I can see that “I Love Rock and Roll” is showing at No. 1. And every other part of the sentence is understood with Power BI.
          So you say, maybe you don’t want to look at songs, you might want to look at artists or albums. Maybe not rock, here’s other genres. How about pop? Let’s go with pop. And see “Physical,” Olivia Newton John, the top pop classic from that era. It’s just an easy and fun way to interrogate the data. Let’s take this for example; let’s ask for songs about true love. And I can see immediately five different songs, one of them by Bing Crosby, another by Elton John, all called “True Love” showing up on the charts. I can ask questions about people that I know. Songs about Bill Gates, and you’d be surprised there’s actually a song called Bill Gates showing up on the charts, three years ago. Yes, by Lil Wayne, one week on the charts. I looked at the lyrics. It actually is truly not a love song.
          We can ask more business questions like number of songs. You can see we have 2,600 songs in the database. Let’s list it by year. And now notice how the system automatically detects what I’m asking, giving me a much better visualization. This is a better way to look at it as a chart, automatically. I don’t have to say anything. And you can see this very interesting chart. It shows how many songs showed up on the music charts every year. And you can see in the late ’60s and early ’70s over 700 different songs on the charts. And then we go to the new millennium you see how it’s kind of dropping gradually and it’s less than half of that when you get to the new millennium. And then there is some recovery. But, when you turn on the radio and it seems like it’s the same song playing again, and again, and again, well now you know, we actually do listen   you have the proof. We do listen to way less songs than people in the ’60s and ’70s listened to, very interesting.
          Now the picture is even more interesting when you look at it by genre. And again, the system just changed the visualization for me on the fly, and look at that, this is the pop genre. And you see the peak that we saw before, the decline, and some of the recovery. Rock starts the same way, peak, decline, but it doesn’t recover. Something is going on here. And look at that hip-hop. From the mid-’80s hip-hop is growing and growing, and growing and it’s not taking from pop, it’s taking all the market share from rock. So you can see how the data is telling you this fascinating story of the music industry just like that.
          [8:10] Now, of course you might want to know other questions. For example, what is the best song of all time? And you can see that we have here Jason Mraz with “I’m Yours.” The first time I saw that I said, who the heck is Jason Mraz? But I had to go look at the data three times and unfortunately it is Jason Mraz, scientifically speaking, it’s the best song of all times, over a year and a half on the chart, like no other song. It’s amazing. And of course, the age old question, who is the best artist? And now we get here, again, a different visualization, and you can see here that you have Mariah Carey, you have The Beatles, we have Usher, we have Elvis, really fantastic artists that we have here. But, these are very different periods of time and it’s really hard to compare The Beatles from the ’60s to Mariah Carey from now. So maybe other visualizations can help me. And with Power BI we can switch the visualization. Look at that, I have a whole list of visualizations. I can change it to a table, for example. It doesn’t help me to explain it. But, there’s one more visualization here that we call the king of the hill. And this one is just specifically designed to explain changes over time.
          Now we can see here, let me just explain how it works. It’s kind of a bubble chart. In the middle we have the biggest bubble, it will be the artist that has the most weeks at No. 1 on the chart is the king, right. It’s going to be the center big bubble, around it will be the contenders, the people who want to take the center position from it, the other artists with less weeks on the charts. And we’re going to animate over the time dimension.
          So we start with 1955, Frank Sinatra, Pat Boone, and we’ll see the Motown area, so we’re going to see here the Platters joining in. But, in 1957 something amazing happened, Elvis Presley breaks through with “All Shook Up,” and he is the king. This is Elvis in the center. He is going to have over 100 different songs on the Billboard 100. It’s just dominating. But, in the ’60s come and so over the pond the greatest band in the history of music, The Beatles are showing up. And they would have 26 No. 1 hits. They’re going to have eight consecutive ones. They just dominated the rest of the decade into the ’70s, and they’re breaking up. And this is kind of a weird condition. Look at that, Three Dog Night, never heard about them? Forget about them, because the next one is going to be Elton John, he’s a legend. Candle in the Wind is still the No. 1 selling single of all time. This is also the disco era. So we have the Bee Gees, I danced to their songs with my first girlfriend. And of course, it was Olivia Newton John, a giant mega-star in the early ’80s.
          And now look at that, what do you have in the ’80s, Paul McCartney, going to be followed by Michael Jackson, going to be followed up by Madonna, going to be followed up by Whitney Houston. This is a parade of the greats we had in the ’80s, George Michael, Paula Abdul, I have no idea what she is doing here. Now, we’re seeing Mariah Carey, she is going to dominate the ’90s. She’s going to have a fight with Boys To Men. But, look at it, she’s in that fight and she’s pushing them out. She is going to continue with 79 weeks at No. 1. She is going to dominate the ’90s. But, the ’90s are coming to an end. Santana is taking over. He is going to take over and then it’s the hip-hop and rap, with Nelly, Kid Rock I cannot stand, and then Usher he is a genius, wonderful, wonderful. But, look at that, it’s Mariah. She’s over here again. She’s looking for a fight in the 2000s, and she’s pushing them out. And now we are getting ready for the era of the divas. Rihanna, look at it she’s taking over. Katy Perry is trying. Adele is trying. But, no Rihanna is here to stay. Thank you, Rihanna. Thank you Power BI.
          Thank you all. [43:30]
          SATYA NADELLA: Thank you, Amir.

          Hopefully you got a good feel for the power of Power BI in Office 365, and now just imagine if you can sort of replace all of the pop data and music data with your business data and your customer data. Mix it up, in fact, with some of the public data inside of Bing, and doing these kinds of demos where people are able to get insights from all of the data that they have inside their organization, and doing a join of that with, in fact, information that’s available publicly. We think that this is the next big leap when it comes to BI and insight around big data. [44:16]

          So let’s switch gears and talk about application development. I know many of you in the room have lots of projects that you’re doing application development for. This is something that we have historically done very well together with Visual Studio and .NET. And, in fact, all of our client and server runtime platform. But this is going through a sea change. And, therefore, we are building and retooling for the sea change a few apps that you want to build.

          image
          It all starts by having a platform that is capable of both infrastructure as a service and platform as a services. So that’s IaaS plus PaaS. And that means any mission-critical Web application you want to build, any mobile front-end you want to build, where you’re automating a business process with a mobile front-end; any cloud service you want to build, you want to have this rich capability of both infrastructure as a service and a platform as a service. And you want to be able to deliver that, by the way, in both Windows Azure, as well as on Windows Server. So that symmetry of development runtime is also very important, and that’s what we’re building out.
          Since you’re building applications for enterprise customers, you’ll want to have real richness of business logic. And this is where we are making some changes, and innovations, which are going to fundamentally change the economics and the repeatability of your business application development, or mission-critical application development. From identity, you saw Azure AD already from an IT perspective, but from a developer perspective now you have a fully programmable identity management solution where you can handle multiple identities, consumer identities as well as enterprise identities.
          We have BizTalk services in the cloud now where you can use that to be able to automate your enterprise application integration, or even B-to-B integration. We have all the richness of the data platform I talked about previously that now you can incorporate as part of your solutions without having to really build that all on your own, whereas you now will be able to make API calls.
          And, lastly, perhaps most interestingly, is you can, in fact, incorporate all of Office 365 as part of your solution. Office 365 has a very modern API surface area across the entire length and breadth, both on the client side as well as on the server side, that you can now program as part of your solution. Think about all the document workflows within the enterprise business application context that you can incorporate.
          Of course, at the end of the day, what matters to you as well as your customers is productivity. And that’s where we’ve always led with the fantastic tooling in Visual Studio. We’re taking that a step further to make rapid application development, especially with the Lightswitch features inside of Visual Studio 2013, we’re making it possible for you to build your Web applications or business applications with Web fronts that much more simple for you to do rapid application development, especially in combination with Office. So the combination of Visual Studio, Lightswitch, the services that go with Visual Studio, either on TFS or on Azure with source code control, project management, build, test, all of those services come together to really improve your productivity.
          image
          And we have many, many customers and partners who are taking advantage of this. The one I wanted to highlight was a solution built by .NET Solutions for IT, a financial services company in the UK. And it’s a very cool solution in the sense that they were able to take a very innovative approach to doing codes where they were monitoring the in-car telematics getting back information to Azure, then rendezvousing that with a code system which was on premise to be able to do real-time codes, and do custom codes for their customers. So that’s a pretty innovative way to think about mobile applications, Web tier, as well as being able to service relay back to data inside of your enterprise. And that richness of both tooling and capabilities in the runtime are unparalleled and unique to what we do with the combination of Windows Server and Windows Azure.
          So I’m really pleased to announce the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Preview. I really encourage those of you who have .NET practices, Visual Studio expertise, now you can take the tooling coming out, the runtimes that are coming out as part of Windows Server, Windows Azure, as well as Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone, and really build this next generation of mobile applications as well as Web applications, and cloud services.
          I’m also pleased to announce SQL Services, or SQL Database Premium Services for Windows Azure. Windows Azure has been going through significant growth, and particularly there’s not a solution that’s built in Windows Azure that does not use SQL Azure. And we are now introducing some capabilities that allow you to make those reservations. That means you can bring your most mission-critical applications over to the cloud. This is, again, something that we are going to be very unique. We are unique already with the fact that we have a PaaS-based SQL Service. And now we are making it much more ready for mission-critical applications.

          image

          [49:28] So the last piece of the presentation today is cloud infrastructure. Now all of the things that we talked about rely on cloud infrastructure. And our goal has been to build the most robust cloud infrastructure. And to live the cloud lifestyle we build Windows Azure using our server software. So when we sort of say we are serving millions of virtual machines on Windows Azure, it runs, in fact, on Windows Server 2012 hypervisor. So that’s an amazing feedback cycle. Not just that, but all of our first-party workloads, from Office 365 to Bing to Xbox Live, are all running on Windows Azure capabilities. So that this reinforcing feedback cycle is what battle tests our cloud infrastructure.
          We are, again, unique in that we take that same cloud infrastructure that we are using on a day-in and day-out basis inside of Azure as well as our first-party applications, and making it available as part of Windows Server and System Center for others to be able to build their own cloud. And that’s what really gives us the ability to deliver a true boundary-less datacenter infrastructure with consistency to our customers.
          We think that that is very, very important to be able to really service the needs that enterprise customers have around infrastructure and support of their applications, and this is something that we believe we are setting the pace, and no one else in the industry, neither Amazon nor VMware can promise or deliver this level of consistency, this level of mission-critical readiness because of the battle testing of all the diverse set of first-party workloads.
          We have lots and lots of partners who are already taking advantage of it. One example that I wanted to highlight today is what Skyline Technologies did for Trek Bicycles. They really took advantage of all of the capabilities of this boundary-less datacenter. They built out a private cloud solution. They, in fact, used the IaaS capabilities inside of Azure to be able to deploy the retail management solution. They even built a PaaS solution on Azure to be able to automate all of the partner management. So again, you can see how having this consistency gives you the flexibility to be able to take advantage of all the resources in your datacenter, in your partner datacenter, and in Windows Azure, but still have the one consistent virtualization and management pane of glass from an IT perspective.
          So now to really show you this boundary-less datacenter in action, I wanted to invite up on stage Jeff Woolsey from our team. Jeff. [52:08]

          Related post: Partners in the cloud for modern business [Satya Nadella on The Official Microsoft Blog, July 8, 2013]

          Today, at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), I am excited to announce new programs and services that are designed to help our partners and customers embrace the challenges and opportunities associated with cloud computing and big data.
          The first new program we are announcing is Cloud OS Accelerate. As part of this new program, Microsoft and key partners – Cisco, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, HP and Dell – will invest more than $100 million to help put thousands of new private and hybrid cloud solutions into the hands of customers. We are also announcing a new Windows Intune offer, effective Oct. 1, that will help connect partners and customers with the latest in cloud connected management at a 30 percent discount. These new programs, and others you will hear about throughout the Worldwide Partner Conference, are designed to help our partners realize the opportunities in cloud computing – today.
          We are also announcing previews of new technologies– including:
          · Power BI for Office 365 – our new self-service business intelligence (BI) solution that combines the data analysis and visualization capabilities of Excel with the power of collaboration, scale and trusted cloud environment of Office 365. This new solution will help partners deliver powerful BI solutions to small and medium businesses everywhere. Customers and partners can sign up here.
          · New Windows Azure Active Directory capabilities that will make it possible for ISVs, CSVs and other third parties to leverage Windows Azure’s directory to enable a single sign-on (SSO) experience for their users, at no cost. Customers can sign up here.
          · A Premium offer for Windows Azure SQL Database, which delivers reserved capacity for more powerful and predictable performance. This will allow partners to raise the bar on the types of services and products they can offer to customers. A limited preview will be available in a few weeks, so sign up today so we can notify you when it’s ready.
          This news wraps up a wave of new enterprise cloud announcements from the Server and Tools Division, including: new versions of Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, SQL Server 2014 and Windows Intune at TechEd North America and TechEd Europe; the general availability of Windows Azure Mobile Services and Windows Azure Web Sites at Build 2013; and a new strategic partnership with Oracle to improve customer flexibility and choice.
          The technology to help our partners realize the opportunities in cloud computing and big data is here and the time to collectively help our customers embrace these mega trends is now. Together, Microsoft and our partners helped customers successfully navigate the client-server and enterprise IT technology transformations. Going forward, we’re committed to doing that again for enterprise cloud.

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