Category Archives: Azure

Azure, Microsoft, partnership, SAP, SAP HANA

SAP and Microsoft expand partnership

SAPPHIRE now

SAP CEO Bill McDermott (Left) and Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft (Right) speaking at SAPPhire Now in Orlando

Microsoft and SAP have extended a long-standing partnership to deliver broad support for the SAP HANA platform on Microsoft Azure.

The extended partnership will focus on greater integration between the two portfolios to simplify work-through integrations between Microsoft Office 365 and cloud solutions from SAP. The new team also claim the combined proposition will provide enhanced management and security for custom SAP Fiori apps.

The announcement builds on a previous relationship which was debuted in 2014, allowing SAP customers to build HANA applications in the Microsoft cloud platform, taking advantage of public cloud scalable resources, though the new partnership now incorporates more of the Azure security and management capabilities.

“This partnership is perhaps one of the broadest things we’ve done together,” said Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft. “Take the cloud. We’ve taken the best of SAP and the best of our hyper-scale cloud. It means SAP certifications are now certified on Azure, HANA is certified on Azure and S/4 HANA is certified on Azure.

We’ve taken our hyper-scale cloud and made it real for customers. Every application which SAP run is now compatible with Office 635 meaning we now have seamless integration. This recipe is going to accelerate the growth which our customers seek, by combining two product portfolios which are customers probably already use.”

As part of the new agreement, there will be a new deployment option for SAP HANA on the Azure cloud. The updates will certify SAP HANA to run development, test and production workloads on Microsoft Azure, including SAP S/4HANA, and will enable customers to run larger and more demanding workloads than previously possible. New integrations will also enable customers to combine Office 365 features (including communications, collaboration, calendar etc.) with SAP cloud-based applications including Concur, SAP Fieldglass and SAP SuccessFactors.

New developments which can be expected towards the latter end of the year also include the ability to deploy custom mobile hybrid SAP Fiori apps on SAP HANA Cloud Platform with an open standards plug-in framework, which will enable Microsoft Intune capabilities to be embedded within the app itself. The team believe these integrations will be available in Q3.

“We believe the IT industry will be shaped by breakthrough partnerships that unlock new productivity for customers beyond the boundaries of traditional platforms and applications,” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott. “SAP and Microsoft are working together to create an end-user experience built on unprecedented insight, convenience and agility. The certification of Microsoft Azure infrastructure services for SAP HANA along with the new integration between Microsoft Office 365 and cloud solutions from SAP are emblematic of this major paradigm shift for the enterprise.

The news follows another partnership announcement from SAP with Apple made in recent weeks. Apple has made multiple moves over the last 24 months to improve its position in the enterprise IT space, partnering with Cisco last year, to optimise iOS device performance across Cisco’s suite of enterprise communications services, and IBM in 2014, bringing IBM’s strengths in big data and analytics to Apple devices.

Azure, Enterprise IT, Managed services, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Rackspace

Rackspace extends Azure Fanatical Support footprint to Europe

Europe At Golden Sunrise - View From SpaceRackspace has announced the unlimited availability launch of its Fanatical Support services for Microsoft Azure customers in the UK, Benelux and DACH regions, as well as two new service levels, Navigator and Aviator.

The Fanatical Support was previously available in US markets, though the expansion puts the Azure service in line with its other offerings, such as for Amazon Web Services. The Navigator service offers access to tools and automation, whereas Aviator does the same, and goes further to offer a fully-managed Azure experience, providing increased man-hours, custom architecture design and all-year support, as well as performing environment build and deployment activities.

“It’s been nearly a year since Rackspace announced Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure, which we launched to assist customers who want to run IaaS workloads on the powerful Azure cloud, but prefer not to architect, secure and operate them first-hand,” said Jeff DeVerter, Chief Technologist for Microsoft Technology at Rackspace.

“Our launch of this offering marked an important expansion of our strategy to offer the world’s best expertise and service on industry-leading technologies, and is a natural progression of our 14-year relationship with Microsoft.”

As part of the announcement, the confirmed Help for Heroes would be one of the first UK organizations to utilize the new offering. The company has been utilizing the Azure platform for some time now, as a means to counter website downtime during periods of high traffic volume during fundraising campaigns.

“Being able to scale up quickly is important, but so is scaling down during times that are quieter,” said Charles Bikhazi, Head of Application Services at Help for Heroes. “As with any charity, we’re always looking to make cost savings where possible and that’s exactly what this solution has delivered. Now, we only pay for infrastructure that’s actually being used which ensures that costs don’t spiral out of control. The new offering gives us access to this much needed scalability and resilience without the burden of having to run the platform ourselves.”

Azure, Internet of Things Telecoms, M&A, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Solair

Microsoft grows Azure IoT offerings with Solair purchase

Microsoft To Layoff 18,000Microsoft has acquired IoT platform provider Solair in a bid to bolster its Internet of Things division, writes Telecoms.com.

The acquisition will see Solair integrate with the Azure IoT business within Microsoft, a move which Microsoft says will continue to enhance its IoT offering for enterprise consumers. While it wasn’t forthcoming with in-depth details, suggesting that more specifics are in the offing, Microsoft did highlight some of the areas in which Solair already has its solutions in live deployment.

Solair is already integrated into the Azure cloud, and provides IoT gateways and platforms to both connect and monitor IoTdevices and processes, coupled with customisable management software. According to Sam George, Partner Director for Microsoft’s Azure IoT division, Solair has proven success in developing and deploying industrial IoT services, about which there exists quite a lot of excitement at Microsoft.

“Solair’s IoT customization and deployment solutions, built on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, are engineered to help businesses in any industry utilize IoT to run more efficiently and profitably,” he said. “For example, Solair has brought the power of IoT to the Rancilio Group’s full line of espresso machines, allowing the Italian manufacturer to remotely monitor machines resulting in greater efficiency across the supply chain. Using the power of cloud-based data and analytics, Solair has helped the Rancilio Group reduce costs and increase revenue.

The cost of the acquisition to Microsoft is yet to be disclosed, although George did suggest further information and details of the deal are to be release in the not-too-distant future.

acquisition, Azure, Internet of Things, IoT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Solair

Microsoft adds more software capabilities to Azure IoT suite

AzureMicrosoft has announced the acquisition of Solair, an Italian IoT software company which currently operates in the manufacturing, retail, food & beverage and transportation industries.

Solair software, which runs on the Microsoft Azure platform, focuses on helping customers improve efficiently and profitably of their IoT initiatives. The acquisition continues Microsoft’s ambitions in the IoT market segment, delivering a more complete solution, as opposed to simply the Azure IoT platform.

“The integration of Solair’s technology into the Microsoft Azure IoT Suite will continue to enhance our complete IoT offering for the enterprise,” Sam George, Partner Director, Azure IoT at Microsoft. “We’ll have more specifics to share about how Solair is helping us build the intelligent cloud in the future. In the meantime, I’d like to reiterate my welcome to the Solair team.”

Solair has been in operation for five years now, and boasts a healthy number of customers including Rancilio Group, where it enabled a connected coffee machine maintenance strategy, and Minerva Omega where it created a remote maintenance and service strategy for the food processing group. Financial details of the acquisition were not released, and Microsoft did not release any specific details of how the business will be integrated into the overall Azure IoT suite.

“From the very start, our mission has been to help customers quickly and easily gain access to the huge benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT),” Tom Davis CEO at Solair. “By building our solutions based on real customer requirements that allow them to gain real value, I’m confident that Solair’s technology and talent will be able to make an important contribution to Microsoft’s Azure IoT Suite and Microsoft’s broader IoT ambitions.”

Microsoft has seemingly been on a mission to bolster its position in the IoT market, both organically and through industry acquisitions. At Build 2016, the team launched Azure Service Fabric and new IoT starter kits, as well as previews of new services to serverless compute for event-driven solutions, Azure Functions, and Power BI Embedded which allows developers to embed reports and visualizations in any application.

Azure, hybrid, hybrid cloud, IoT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Microsoft shifts focus to Chinese cloud market

MicrosoftMicrosoft has announced a successful year in the Chinese market, as well as intentions to step-up its expansion plans in the region, according to China Daily.

The company claims it now has more than 65,000 corporate clients, and appetite for its Azure offering in Chinese enterprise organizations is steadily increasing. As part of the expansion plans, Microsoft lowered its prices for Chinese customers earlier this month, seemingly in an effort to undercut its global competitor AWS, as well as local powerhouses such as Alibaba Tencent.

“Though the GDP growth is slowing down, Chinese companies still need to focus on three points to remain relevant and competitive: innovation, productivity and the return of investments,” Ralph Haupter, CEO of Microsoft in China. “And cloud computing can help in all of the above three aspects. We will focus on manufacturing, retail, automotive, media and other industries to further expand market share.”

While China has proved to be one of the top priorities of the majority of the cloud players in recent years, a recent report from BSA highlighted the region was one of the poorest performers in the global IT community. Measuring each country of their cloud policies and legislation, as well as the readiness of its enterprises, China ranked 23 out of the top 24 IT nations worldwide, mainly due to poor performance in the data privacy, cybercrime, promotion of free trade and security categories, though it was one of the worst performers across every category.

Despite concerns from the BSA, Ji Yanhang, an analyst at Analysys International, believes the market has strong potential, stating “China’s national strategies, such as boosting high-end manufacturing, will increase demand for cloud services in the coming years.”

The announcement follows last weeks’ quarterly earnings call, where CEO Satya Nadella reported that Office commercial products and cloud services revenue grew 7%, Office consumer products and cloud services revenue grew 6% and Dynamics products and cloud services revenue grew 9%. Azure revenues grew 120% over the period, though this is down from 140% growth in the previous quarter.

Azure, Big Data, IoT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Rolls-Royce

Microsoft and Rolls Royce collaborate to build next-gen intelligent engines

Rolls RoyceMicrosoft and Rolls Royce have announced a new collaboration to bring the next generation of intelligent engines to the aviation industry.

Rolls-Royce will integrate Microsoft Azure IoT Suite and Cortana Intelligence Suite into its service solutions to expand its digital capabilities, particularly around its Totalcare service offering, which aims to improve the lifespan of its assets for customers. The partnership builds on underlying trends within the industrial and manufacturing industry in moving from a reactive to proactive maintenance and repair model, using IoT to detect faults in real-time, but also identifying the tell-tale signs of such faults at industrial scale, prior to them becoming a problem.

“Our customers are looking for ways to leverage the digital landscape to increase efficiency and improve their operations,” said Tom Palmer, SVP of Services and Civil Aerospace at Rolls-Royce. “By working with Microsoft we can really transform our digital services, supporting customer’s right across engine-related aircraft operations to make a real difference to performance.”

At the Hannover Messe event in Germany, both Microsoft and Rolls Royce will demonstrate the new capabilities, including using the Azure IoT Suite to collect and aggregate data from disparate, geographically distributed sources and Cortana Intelligence Suite to analyse the data itself. Data sets will include engine health data, air traffic control information, route restrictions and fuel usage data, with the aim of increasing the assets fuel efficiency, as well as detecting anomalies and ongoing trends.

“Rolls-Royce has always been a pioneer in engine services, and this collaboration will create a new digital engine for Rolls-Royce to deliver an even better service to its customers across its world-class engine fleet through Microsoft Azure,” said Jason Zander, Corporate VP of Azure at Microsoft.

Microsoft also announced at the event it has been working with the OPC Foundation to ensure industry IoT scenarios is compliant within OPC Unified Architecture (UA) standard. The OPC UA provides a standardized communication, security, and metadata and semantics abstraction for the majority of industrial equipment, ensuring interoperability between devices, assets and the platform to interpret the collected data.

Microsoft’s support for the standard covers its entire IoT portfolio including local connectivity with Windows devices to cloud connectivity via the Microsoft Azure platform. The announcement also included extended support for OPC UA open source software stack, ensuring any Windows 10 devices running the Universal Windows Platform can connect and openly communicate with other IoT devices via OPC UA.

“As Industry 4.0 reaches a tipping point, we believe that openness and interoperability between hardware, software and services will help manufacturers transform how they operate and create solutions that benefit employees’ productivity,” said Sam George, Director of Azure Internet of Things at Microsoft. “Microsoft’s support of OPC UA in Azure IoT and Windows IoT will reduce barriers to industrial IoT adoption and help deliver immediate value.”

Azure, Big Data, connected car, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Toyota

Toyota and Microsoft launch connected car initiative

ToyotaJapanese car brand Toyota has teamed up with Microsoft to launch Toyota Connected, a new joint venture to further the car manufacturer’s efforts towards autonomous vehicles.

Toyota Connected builds on a standing relationship with Microsoft to leverage Azure cloud technology to make the connected driving experience smarter. Based in Plano, Texas, Toyota Connected will expand the company’s capabilities in the fields of data management and data services development initiatives.

“Toyota Connected will help free our customers from the tyranny of technology. It will make lives easier and help us to return to our humanity,” said Zack Hicks, CEO of Toyota Connected.  “From telematics services that learn from your habits and preferences, to use-based insurance pricing models that respond to actual driving patterns, to connected vehicle networks that can share road condition and traffic information, our goal is to deliver services that make lives easier.”

The connected cars market has been growing healthily in recent years, but is not new to Microsoft or Toyota as the two companies have been collaborating in the area of telematics since 2011, working on services such as infotainment and real-time traffic updates. A 2015 report stated that connected car services will account for nearly $40 Billion in annual revenue by 2020, while big data and analytics technology investments will reach $5 billion across the industry in the same period.

The new company itself has been given two mandates; firstly to support product development for customers, dealers, distributors, and partners, through advanced data analytics solutions, and secondly to build on Toyota’s existing partnership with Microsoft to accelerate R&D efforts and deliver new connected car solutions. The company have stated that its vision is to “humanize the driving experience while pushing the technology into the background”.

The launch of Toyota Connected will able enable the organization to consolidate R&D programs into one business unit, which it claims will ensure that all initiatives remain customer centric. Initiatives will focus around a number of areas including in-car services and telematics, home/IoT connectivity, personalization and smart city integration.

As part of the launch, Toyota will also adopt Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, employing a hybrid solution globally, whilst also housing a number of Microsoft engineers in its offices in Plano.

“Toyota is taking a bold step creating a company dedicated to bringing cloud intelligence into the driving experience,” said Kurt Del Bene, EVP, Corporate Strategy and Planning at Microsoft. “We look forward to working with Toyota Connected to harness the power of data to make driving more personal, intuitive and safe.”

Azure, Azure Site Recovery, Disaster Recover, Microsoft, Storage and Information Management

Azure Site Recovery: 4 Things You Need to Know

Disaster recovery has traditionally been a complex and expensive proposition for many organizations. Many have chosen to rely on backups of data as the method of disaster recovery. This approach is cost effective, however, it can result in extended downtime during a disaster while new servers are provisioned (referred to as Recovery Time Objective or RTO) and potentially large data loss of information created from the time of the backup the time of the failure (referred to as Recovery Point Objective). In the worst case scenario, these backups are not viable at all and there is a total loss. For those who have looked into more advanced disaster recovery models, the complexity and costs of such a system quickly add up. Azure Site Recovery helps bring disaster recovery to all companies in four key ways.

 

Azure Site Recovery makes disaster recovery easy by delivering it as a cloud hosted service

The Azure Site Recovery lives within the Microsoft cloud and is controlled and configured through the Azure Management Portal. There is no requirement to patch or maintain servers; it’s disaster recovery orchestration as a service. Using Site Recovery does not require that you use Azure as the destination of replication. It can protect your workloads between 2 company-owned sites. For example, if you have a branch office and a home office that both run VMware or Hyper-V, you can use Azure Site Recovery to replicate, protect and fail over workloads between your existing sites. It also has the optional function of being able to replicate data directly to Azure which can be used to avoid the expense and complexity of building and maintaining a disaster recovery site. 

 

Azure Site Recovery is capable of handling almost any source workload and platform

Azure Site Recovery offers an impressive list of platforms and applications it can protect. Azure site recovery can protect any workload running on VMware Virtual Machines on vSphere or ESXi, Hyper-V VMs with or without System Center Virtual Machine Manager and, yes; even physical workloads can be replicated and failed over to Azure. Microsoft has worked internally with its application teams to make sure Azure Site Recovery works with many of the most popular Microsoft solutions including Active Directory, DNS, Web apps (IIS, SQL), SCOM, SharePoint, Exchange (non-DAG), Remote Desktop/VDI, Dynamics AX, Dynamics CRM, and Windows File Server. They have also independently tested protecting SAP, Linux (OS and Apps) and Oracle workloads.

 

Azure Site Recovery has predictable and affordable pricing

Unlike traditional disaster recovery products that require building and maintaining a warm or hot DR site, Site Recovery allows you to replicate VMs to Azure. Azure Site Recovery offers a simple pricing model that makes it easy to estimate costs. For virtual machines protected between company-owned sites, it is a flat $16/month per protected virtual machines. If you are protecting your workloads to Azure then it is $54/month per protected server. In addition, the first 31 days of protection for any server is free. This allows you to try out and test Azure site recovery before you have to pay for it. It is also a way for you to use Azure Site Recovery to migrate your workloads to Azure for free.

 

Azure Site Recovery is secure and reliable

Azure Site Recovery continuously monitors the replication and health of the protected workloads from Azure. In the event of an inability to replicate data, you can configure alerts to email you a notification. Protecting the privacy of your data is a top priority in Site Recovery. All communication between your on premises environment and Azure is sent over SSL encrypted channels. All of your data is encrypted both when in transit and at rest in Azure. Performing failover testing with Azure Site Recovery allows you to do a test failover without impacting your production workloads.

 

For these reasons, companies should be considering adding Azure Site Recovery to their business continuity and disaster recovery toolbox.

 

[If you’re looking for more Microsoft resources, download our recent webinar around strategies for migrating to Office 365]

 

By Justin Gallagher, Enterprise Consultant

Azure, Enterprise IT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Microsoft adds RedHat Linux, Containers and OneOps options to Azure

AzureMicrosoft has launched a trio of initiatives aimed at widening the options of its potential clients of its Azure cloud services.

It made the announcements through the Azure Blog, which promises the availability of new RedHat Enterprise Linux ‘instances’ (i.e. units of computing resources), a new application lifecycle manager, OneOps, and showcased a preview of an imminent Azure Container service.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances are available from the Azure Marketplace. According to the blog, 60 percent of the images available are now Linux-based. Microsoft claims its hybrid model can be running ‘in minutes’ with Red Hat Enterprise Linux images available on Azure Marketplace on a Pay-as-you-go model with hourly billing.

Among the eligible products are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Server, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Web Server, Red Hat Gluster Storage and Red Hat OpenShift.

“Both Microsoft and I love Linux,” said Corey Sanders, Azure’s Director of Program Management. The new instances will help cloud users cater for on-demand workloads, development and testing and cloud bursting in a simple, easily quantifiable system, Sanders said. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 and 7.2 images are now live in all regions, except China and the US Government.

The imminent Azure Container Service – currently available for preview – will build on previous Docker and Mesosphere initiatives to make it easier to provision clusters of Azure Virtual Machines onto containerized applications. The process will be a lot quicker since the machines will have been pre-configured with open source components, Sanders said.

Sanders also disclosed that Microsoft has certified for the Azure Marketplace a group of Linux images created by Bitnami. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s new OneOps offering on Azure, which gives clients the user of an open-source cloud and application lifecycle management platform, is a product of a collaboration with the WalmartLabs team (the IT offshoot of retail giant Walmart).

Azure, Internet of Things, IoT, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Microsoft creates Azure hub for Internet of Things

azure iotMicrosoft has put its new Azure IoT hub on general availability. In a statement, it claims the new system will be a simple bridge between its customers’ devices with their systems in the cloud. It claims that the new preconfigured IoT offering, when used with the Azure IoT Suite, can be used to create a machine to machine network and a storage system for its data in minutes.

The new Azure IoT Hub promises ‘secure, reliable two-way communication from device to cloud and cloud to device’. It uses the open protocols widely adopted in machine to machine technology, such as MQTT, HTTPS and AMQPS. Microsoft claims the IoT Hub will easily integrate with other Azure services like Azure Machine Learning and Azure Stream Analytics. The Machine Learning service uses algorithms in an attempt to spot patterns (such as unusual activity, hacking attempts or commercial trends) that might be useful to data scientists. Azure Stream Analytics allows data scientists and decision makers to act on those insights in real time, through a system with the capacity to simultaneously monitor millions of devices and take automatic action.

Microsoft launched the Azure IoT Suite in September 2015 with a pledge to guarantee standards through its Certified for IoT programme, promising to verify partners that work with operating systems such as Linux, mbed, RTOS and Windows. Microsoft claims its initial backers were Arduino, Beagleboard, Freescale, Intel, Raspberry Pi, Samsung and Texas Instruments. In the three months since the IoT Suite’s launch it has added ‘nearly 30’ more partners, it claims, notably Advantech, Dell, HPE, and Libelium.

“IoT is poised for dramatic growth in 2016 and we can’t wait to see what our customers and partners will continue to build on our offerings. We’re just getting started,” wrote blog author Sam George, Microsoft’s partner director for Azure IoT.