Did you miss Satya Nadella keynote speech at Microsoft Inspire 2021?
Don’t worry. We have summarized it for you along with all the hero announcements at the event.
At Microsoft Inspire 2021, Satya Nadella talked about what differentiates the Microsoft Cloud and the investments and innovation they are making across every layer to help customers transform in this new era.
The key announcements this year are around 5 main themes: the digital transformation across industries, the future of work, innovating from cloud to edge, building a foundation for trust and security, and driving growth with the most partner-focused platform.
Here are the key announcements made by Satya Nadella in his keynote session-
- Azure Arc
- Enterprise Metaverse
- Power BI
- Power Platform
- Build collaborative apps with Microsoft Teams + Dynamics 365
- Hybrid Cloud
- Employee Experience: Microsoft Viva
- Windows 11
- Windows 365
- Industry Specific Cloud
- Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
- Cybersecurity
- Free extended security updates for 2008/R2 and 2012 servers – only on Azure
- Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP)
- Microsoft 365 Lighthouse
- Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection with Azure AD B2C
- Applications and data
- Reducing transaction fees—from 20% to 3%
Azure Arc
Microsoft is expanding its hybrid capabilities so that organizations can seamlessly build, manage, and deploy their applications anywhere. Azure Arc extends the Azure control plane across On-premise, Multi-Cloud, and the Edge. Azure application services can run anywhere with Azure Arc, meaning anyone can take their favourite Azure Application Services On-premise, on the Edge, or the Cloud.
Enterprise Metaverse
The new layer of the infrastructure stack that’s getting created as digital and physical worlds converge the Enterprise metaverse. This platform layer brings together IoT, Digital Twins, and Mixed Reality. With metaverse stack, you can start with a digital twin, building a rich digital model of anything, physical or logical, whether it’s assets, products, or complex environments spanning people, places, things, and their interactions.
The digital twin is bound to the physical world in real-time so you can monitor the environment and collaborate within it using Mixed Reality. You can run simulations, you can apply AI to analyse, and predict future states.
Power BI
Azure Synapse is at the core of this. It brings together data integration, data warehousing, and big data analytics, giving you the freedom to query data on your terms at any scale. With Synapse link, you can integrate your operational data stores on a real-time basis with your analytic stack.
With Azure Machine Learning, you can build advanced AI models to identify trends and predict outcomes. With Synapse and Power BI, an entirely new generation of SaaS applications is being created. A great example of this deep integration is Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Synapse.
Going forward, every business will need to reimagine the entirety of its customer experience. This requires a 360-degre view of your customers with the ability to turn insights into action in real-time.
All of this means that the Microsoft Cloud is the most differentiated data offerings at every layer, so you can build predictive and analytical applications. In such a data-rich world, data governance becomes mission-critical. With Azure Purview, Microsoft offers the most comprehensive data management and governance solution. You can map all your data no matter where it resides On-premise, in the Cloud, or in SaaS applications.
Power Platform
The next important consideration of the data stack is rich, powerful AI capabilities, bringing the power of GPD 3 to Power platform. If you can describe what you want to do in natural language, GPD 3 will generate a list of the most relevant Power effects formulas for you to choose from. The code writes itself.
Microsoft brings the power of their collaboration with Open AI to professional developers with GitHub Copilot feature, a new AI pair programmer, which helps them write better code.
As every organization looks to build its own digital capability, they need to modernize existing apps, build new apps, and have a standard way of doing both. App development is not just about pro developers, but includes domain experts, designers, marketeers, salespeople, customer service, all the other functions working together in these Fusion Teams.
The Microsoft Cloud is the only Cloud that provides a developer tool chain for everyone, no matter the technical experience across all platforms, whether it’s Azure, Windows or any other Cloud or client platform.
From Visual Studio to GitHub, Microsoft has the most popular tools to help developers go from idea to code and code to Cloud. Visual Studio has more than 25 million monthly active users and GitHub is now home to nearly 65 million developers who use the platform to write code together. A community of nearly 12,000 developers on GitHub contributed to the software that made the Martian Helicopter Flight possible.
Just like Office revolutionized productivity gains for knowledge workers, Power Platform is doing the same for domain experts. Power Platform is the next generation business process automation and productivity suite that is being used by nearly 16 million monthly active users.
People in every industry are building apps on this platform and scale their impact. It offers opportunity to bring together functions across an organization to digitally transform entire processes and create digital feedback loops from operations to customer service.
Build collaborative apps with Microsoft Teams + Dynamics 365
Collaborative applications will be critical for every company’s success to break down the silos between collaboration, communications, and business process. There’s an amazing reinforcing circuit between Microsoft Teams, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and your own applications that no other Cloud offers.
Collaborative apps bring together everything people in organizations want and need to do their job directly in the flow of work. Over the past year, Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 have become increasingly integrated with new features that make it easier to securely access and search for Dynamics 365 records within Teams and to meet, chat, and collaborate within Dynamics 365.
Teams customers will receive access to Dynamics 365 data within Teams at no extra cost regardless of whether they’re Dynamics 365 licensee.
The Microsoft Cloud is the only Cloud that supports everything an organization needs to adapt to this hybrid work. It starts with Teams. Teams has over a 145 million daily active users, almost double the number a year ago. It’s where people meet, chat, call, collaborate, and automate business processes all within the flow of work.
Teams is the future of work. Over the past 18 months, Microsoft has introduced more than 300 new features from new presenter mode that place you right in front of your content to create a stronger connection with your audience and new Teams rooms.
Innovations like front row, a new meeting layout that makes you feel like everyone is in the room together, AI-powered camera technology to offer video views for remote participants. To fluid components that make it simple to collaborate asynchronously and synchronously across Teams and Microsoft 365. It extends beyond collaboration to learning.
Hybrid Cloud
Microsoft’s ambition is to make it much easier for employees and external parties to share content and information and to create new opportunity for all of you. It’s all powered by the Microsoft Cloud, the only Cloud for hybrid work.
Everything from people practices, to places, to business processes will need to be re-imagined. Hybrid work represents an enormous opportunity as every organization needs digital solutions to keep their people connected and thriving wherever they work from.
Microsoft Viva
In hybrid work, it’s critical that organizations continue to foster social capital to keep employees connected wherever they are. Microsoft Viva brings together communications, learning, well-being, and knowledge directly within the flow of work so that employees have the information, the resources, and support they need to succeed and thrive, and stay connected with each other and their company’s mission.
Windows 11
The past year has proven how central the PC is in keeping people in organizations connected, productive, and secure. With Windows 11, Microsoft is re-imagining everything from the operating system to the store to unlock new opportunity and build a more open ecosystem for developers and creators. Windows 11 offers personal agency and real choice to users. It’s a stage for world’s creation and it’s a platform for platform creators.
Windows 365- Windows with Cloud PC
With Windows 365, we’re making Windows available, not just on Windows devices, but any device harnessing the power of the Cloud. This has never been done before and think about it, just like applications were brought to the cloud with SAS, Microsoft is now bringing the operating system to the Cloud with Windows 365.
With Windows 365, the operating system itself becomes hybrid, accessible on the device as well as the Cloud. With just a few clicks, you can set up your Cloud PC and stream the full Windows experience from the Microsoft Cloud to a personal or a corporate device. You can pick up right where you left off because the state of your Cloud PC remains the same even when you switch devices.
In this new era of hybrid work, Windows 365 provides organizations, whether they’re a business of one or 1,000, with greater flexibility and secure way to empower their workforce to be more productive and connected regardless of the location.
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
With the Cloud for sustainability, Microsoft brings together capabilities across Cloud and creating an entirely new business process category to help every organization address this very urgent need. It is a SaaS offering that enables organizations to record, report, and reduce their emissions towards net zero, with plans to support water and waste tracking more easily and effectively.
Cybersecurity
Microsoft intercepted and thwarted a record 30 billion email threads and 31 billion authentication attacks last year and are currently tracking 40 plus active nation-state actors and over 140 threat groups.
What differentiates our approach is organizing identity, security compliance, as well as device management in an interdependent whole and extending protection to all data devices, identities, platforms, and Clouds.
The Microsoft Cloud is the only Cloud with best-of-breed and best-of-suite security capabilities to help every organization adopt a zero-trust architecture, while also reducing the complexity, cost, and risk created by stitching together point solutions. Microsoft is recognized as a leading vendor in cybersecurity with leadership positions in five Gartner MQs and seven Forrester Waves.
Free extended security updates for 2008/R2 & 2012 servers (Only on Azure)
Microsoft announced extended Security Updates for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2, and SQL Server 2012, free only on Azure. Customers running 2012 releases of Windows Server and SQL Server on-premises can purchase Extended Security Updates while those running 2008 releases, will get additional year of free extended security updates only on Azure.
Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP)
Over the last 24 months, AMP has helped 4500+ customers successfully move to Azure with the right mix of expert help and best practice guidance. Azure Migration Program is evolving to become the Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) with expanded support for app modernization scenarios, including newly added support for Azure Spring Cloud and Azure Cosmos DB.
Microsoft 365 Lighthouse
Microsoft 365 Lighthouse provides managed service providers with one central location and standard security configuration templates to secure devices, data, and users for small and medium business customers that are using Microsoft 365 Business Premium. It empowers partners to quickly identify and act on threats, anomalous sign-in, and device compliance alerts.
Reducing transaction fees—from 20% to 3%
Microsoft also announced reduction in their fees from industry-standard 20 percent to three percent for every transactable application published across app source and Azure marketplace.
Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection with Azure AD B2C
Integration of Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection with Azure AD B2C to help customers protect their end customers from account abuse, thus protecting their own business.
Applications and data
The app governance add-on feature to Microsoft Cloud App Security and an extension to the priority user group capability in Insider Risk Management to include fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC) are both now in public preview.
