Category Archives: Microsoft

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

Toyota and Microsoft launch connected car initiative

April 5, 2016 Jamie Davies

Japanese 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.”

Internet of Things, IoT, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Microsoft steps up IoT credentials

April 1, 2016 Jamie Davies

Scott Guthrie, EVP of the Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft

Tech giant Microsoft has launched a number of updates and features for both its Azure and Office platforms, in a move to bolster its position in the intelligent apps and IoT space.

Speaking at Build 2016, the company launched the general availability of 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.

“Microsoft is the only cloud vendor that supports the diverse needs of every organization and developer — from core infrastructure services to platform services and tools to software-as-a-service — for any language, across any platform,” said Scott Guthrie, EVP of the Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft.

“With 30 regions worldwide — more than every major cloud provider combined — Azure’s massive scale means developers and businesses alike can focus on creating the next generation of amazing applications, not their underlying cloud infrastructure. This makes our cloud the de facto choice for enterprises of today and tomorrow — and today, more than 85 percent of the Fortune 500 agree.”

The launch of Azure Service Fabric will allow developers to decompose applications into microservices, for increased availability and scalability. The company claims the offering will handle application lifecycle management for constant uptime and easy application scaling, and builds on the growing popularity of microservices in the industry and is accompanied by the promise of open-source programming frameworks for Linux later in the year. As with a number of Microsoft’s announcements over recent weeks, open-source has been a prominent product position for the company at Build 2016.

The company also highlighted its IoT starter kit would be available for anyone with Windows or Linux experience to build prototypes which use all of Azure’s offerings. Prices for the kit range between $60 and $150, which could potentially open up a new market of students, academics and casual users for the company.

For the more complex IoT projects, the company have also previewed Azure Functions which will enable developers to create apps which will automatically respond to events in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems. The preview is part of the greater trend of automated responses and reactions to events, and appears to be Microsoft’s response to AWS Lambda, which was launched in late 2014.

Qi Lu, EVP of the Applications and Services Group at Microsoft

Outside of the Azure platform, the company also announced a number of product updates and features for Office. “In terms of reach, Office is one of the few platforms in the world that provides developers with access to over a billion users across a variety of devices,” said Qi Lu, EVP of the Applications and Services Group. “The opportunity to build on the Office platform has never been greater.”

“With new extensions and new connections to the Microsoft Graph — an intelligent fabric that applies machine learning to map the connections between people, content and interactions across Office 365 — developers are empowered to build intelligent apps that can transform the landscape of work,” said Lu.

Alongside Lu, Starbucks CTO Gerri Martin-Flickinger showcased how he has been using the platform to create an add-on which enables customers to send a gift-card through Outlook, and also schedule meetings at the nearest Starbucks. “Building on the Office platform is reaching our customers right on their desktop or device and extending the Starbucks Experience to them in new and compelling ways,” he said.

As part of the announcement, Microsoft previewed six new APIs for the Microsoft Graph which let developers link Office 365 data to third-party solutions. One of which automatically identifies a series of times a predefined group of people are available for a meeting.

AI, Artificial intelligence, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Microsoft pushes forward with AI despite Tay set-back

March 31, 2016 Jamie Davies

Microsoft has announced a number of updates for its advanced analytics and machine learning offerings as part of its ‘Conversation-as-a-Platform’ push.

Despite the company facing criticism after its twitter-inspired PR stunt Tay backfired last week, the company has pushed forward within the artificial intelligence space, updating its Cortana Intelligence Suite and releasing its Skype Bot Platform.

“As an industry, we are on the cusp of a new frontier that pairs the power of natural human language with advanced machine intelligence,” said Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, at the Build 2016 event. “At Microsoft, we call this Conversation-as-a-Platform, and it builds on and extends the power of the Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere.”

The Cortana Intelligence Suite, formerly known as Cortana Analytics Suite, is built on the company’s on-going research into big data, machine learning, perception, analytics and intelligent bots. The offering allows developers to build apps and bots which interact with customers in a personalized way, but also react to real-world developments in real-time.

Microsoft also announced two new additions to the suite, Microsoft Cognitive Services, formerly known as Project Oxford and the Microsoft Bot Framework, both of which are still in preview.

The first, Microsoft Cognitive Services, has 22 APIs available for developers including emotion detection, speech analysis and Custom Recognition Intelligent Service. The face application programming interface made headlines last year, as the results of an app which estimated user ages was highly varied.

At the time, the team highlighted “the age and gender-recognition features are labelled as experimental features” and also said that despite the mistakes the app made, the fact that it trended on twitter meant that the volumes of data collected would aid the company in refining the technology over time.

The second, Microsoft Bot Framework, can be used in any programming language, enabling developers to build intelligent bots which can converse with customers in a variety of platforms including text/SMS, Office 365, and the web. The bots can also connect to social channels such as Twitter and Slack. The company claims that the bots can be utilized in a number of different complex scenarios though only simple ones, such as ordering a pizza or booking a hotel room, have been demoed so far.

The company also announced the launch of its Skype Bot Platform, enables developers to build bots which can interact with customers through Skype’s multiple forms of communication, including text, voice, video and 3-D interactive characters. The preview bots are very simple and limited for the moment, however once the bots are combined with the Cortana Intelligence Suite there could be potential for the bots to appear more human.

While it is early days for the Microsoft AI platforms, the team are riding the waves of both positive and negative headlines, seemingly leading the industry in the AI space. The company’s competitors are also pushing hard in the AI world, though the weight behind the announcements this week could imply that Microsoft are investing in a more serious manner than others in the industry.

Enterprise IT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Open Source

Microsoft announces R Server availability inside Azure HDInsight

March 29, 2016 Business Cloud News

Microsoft has announced the availability of R Server inside Azure HDInsight, the company’s Hadoop-as-a-service aspect of Azure Data Lake.

Speaking at Strata + Hadoop World, the company is seemingly hoping to capitalize on the growing trend of open source technologies. Microsoft R is now 100% compatible with Open Source R and any library that exists can be used in the R Server context.

Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics in early 2015 as a means of entering the R-based analytics market, and has since delivered SQL Server R Services on SQL Server 2016 CTP3. R is one of the world’s most widely used programming languages for predictive analytics.

“By making R Server available as a workload inside HDInsight, we remove obstacles for users to unlock the power of R by eliminating memory and processing constraints and extending analytics from the laptop to large multi-node Hadoop and Spark clusters,” said Oliver Chiu, Product Marketing, Hadoop/Big Data and Data Warehousing at Microsoft. “This enables the ability to train and run ML models on larger datasets than previously possible to make more accurate predictions that affect the business.”

The company claims that by making the R Server available as a workload inside HDInsight, it will remove memory and processing constraints allowing developers to better utilize the power of Hadoop and Spark clusters. If correct, organizations will be able to run machine learning models on larger datasets, increasing the accuracy of business predications which are made by the model.

“This gives you the familiarity of the R language for machine learning while leveraging the scalability and reliability built into Hadoop and Spark,” said Chiu. “It also eliminates memory and processing constraints and easily extends their code from their laptop to large multi-terabyte files producing models that are more powerful and accurate.”

AWS, Cisco, Enterprise IT, HPE, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis

HPE holds off Cisco for cloud infrastructure top spot

March 21, 2016 Jamie Davies

Findings from Synergy Research Group have HPE as the number one provider in the cloud infrastructure equipment market, narrowly outperforming Cisco over the course of 2015.

Total revenues for the cloud infrastructure equipment segment reached over $60 billion in 2015, with HPE accounting for just over 12%, and Cisco just under. Dell, Microsoft and IBM complete the top five, each controlling about 7% market share.

“There continues to be particularly impressive growth in the public cloud infrastructure market as AWS and other cloud operators are having tremendous success in attracting enterprises to their ever-expanding range of service offerings,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder. “But enterprises too are buying ever-larger volumes of infrastructure to support their private or hybrid cloud deployments. Across the board there is a massive swing away from enterprises running workloads over more traditional and inflexible IT infrastructure.”

Synergy’s research showed between Q4 2014 and Q3 2015 total spend on infrastructure hardware and software to build cloud services exceeded $60 billion. Spend on private cloud accounted for more than 50% of these revenues, though public cloud is growing at a faster pace. HPE currently leads the private cloud space, with Cisco in second, however the roles are reversed for the public cloud segment.

While HPE and Cisco remain dominant in the server and networking segments, both companies have been releasing a number of new products in recent months to diversify their offering. Last week, HPE launched its ‘machine-learning-as-a-service’ on Microsoft Azure, which combines 60 API’s to provide machine learning capabilities. While HPE is seemingly capitalizing on the growing ‘as-a-service’ trend, Cisco is focused on its cloud-based collaboration service, Cisco Spark, which was launched with Verizon recently.

Microsoft features in the list due to its position in the server OS and virtualization applications market, where as Dell and IBM have demonstrated strong offerings in a broad number of cloud technology markets. Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualization software combined accounted for 95% of the Q4 cloud infrastructure market.

While hardware and software to build cloud services revenues exceeded $60 billion, other areas of the industry demonstrated stronger growth. Public IaaS/PaaS services had the highest growth rate at 51%, followed by private & hybrid cloud infrastructure services at 45%.

“In many ways 2015 was the year when cloud became mainstream. Across a wide range of cloud applications and services we have seen that usage has now passed well beyond the early adopter phase and barriers to adoption continue to diminish,” said Duke. “Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues and high growth rates that will continue long into the future, making this an exciting time for IT vendors and service providers that focus on cloud.”

hybrid cloud, Linux, Microsoft, News & Analysis, server

Microsoft strengthens cloud offering by bringing SQL Server to Linux

March 8, 2016 Jamie Davies

Microsoft is bringing its SQL Server to Linux, enabling SQL Server to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows and Linux, as well as on-premises and cloud.

The move has surprised some corners of the industry, as Microsoft moves away from its tradition of creating business software that runs only on the Windows operating system. It has historically been difficult to manage certain Microsoft products on anything other than a Windows server.

Microsoft has always sold PC software which can be run on competitor’s machines, though Chief Executive Satya Nadella broadened the horizons of the business upon appointment through a number of different initiatives. One of the most notable moves was decoupling Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing system from Windows and this weeks’ announcement seems to continue the trend.

The news has been lauded by most as an astute move, strengthening Microsoft’s position in the market. According to Gartner, the number of Linux servers shipped increased from 3.6 million in 2014 from 2.4 million in 2011. Microsoft in the same period saw its shipments drop from 6.5 million to 6.2 million. The move opens up a new wave of potential customers for Microsoft and reduces concerns of lock-in situations.

Microsoft EVP, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Scott Guthrie commented on the company’s official blog “SQL Server on Linux will provide customers with even more flexibility in their data solution,” he said “One with mission-critical performance, industry-leading TCO, best-in-class security, and hybrid cloud innovations – like Stretch Database which lets customers access their data on-premises and in the cloud whenever they want at low cost – all built in. We are bringing the core relational database capabilities to preview today, and are targeting availability in mid-2017.”

The announcement also detailed a number of key features for SQL Server 2016, focused around the critical avenues of data and security. Security encryption capabilities that enable data to always be encrypted at rest, in motion and in-memory are one of the USPs, building on Microsoft’s marketing messages over the last 12 months.

Furthering efforts to diversify the business, Microsoft announced that it would be acquiring mobile app development platform provider Xamarin, last week.

Incorporating Xamarin into the Microsoft business will enhance its base of developer tools and services, once again building on the theme of broadening market appeal and opening new customer avenues for the tech giant.

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

Azure Site Recovery: 4 Things You Need to Know

March 2, 2016 GreenPages Blog

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

February 18, 2016 Business Cloud News

Microsoft 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).

blockchain, Database, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis

IBM and Microsoft race to develop Blockchain-As-A-Service

February 17, 2016 Business Cloud News

IBM has made 44,000 lines of code available to the Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger Project in a bid to speed the development of a Blockchain ledger for secure distributed online financial transactions.

IBM is now competing with a number of vendors, such as Microsoft Azure and Digital Asset, to bring Blockchain services to market either as a Bitcoin crypto currency enabler or for wider applications in financial services trading and even the IoT.

In a statement IBM said it wants to help create a new class of distributed ledger applications by letting developers use IBM’s new blockchain services available on Bluemix, where they can get DevOps tools to create and run blockchain apps on the IBM Cloud or z System mainframes. New application programming interfaces mean Blockchain apps will now be able to access existing transactions on these systems to support new payment, settlement, supply chain and business processes.

IBM also unveiled plans to put Blockchain technology to use on the Internet of Things (IoT) through its Watson IoT Platform. Information from RFID-based locations, barcode-scans or device-reported data could be managed through IBM’s version of Blockchain with devices communicating with the ledger to update or validate smart contracts. Under the scheme, the movement of an IoT-connected package through multiple distribution points could be managed and updated on a Blockchain system to give a more accurate and timely record of events in the supply chain.

The vendor intends to foster greater levels of Blockchain app design activity through its new IBM Garages that will open in London, New York, Singapore and Tokyo.

In Tokyo IBM and the Japan Exchange Group have agreed to test the potential of blockchain technology for use in trading in low transaction markets. As the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project evolves, the joint IBM and JPX evaluation work will adapt to use of the code produced by that effort.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is to launch its own Blockchain as a service (BaaS) offering within in its Azure service portfolio with a certified version of the online ledger scheduled to be launched in April.

In January 2016, Microsoft announced that it is developing Blockchain related services in its Azure’s DevTest Labs. In November BCN reported that Microsoft has launched a cloud-based ledger system for would-be bitcoin traders.

Microsoft is also inviting potential service provider partners pioneer the use of Blockchain technology in the cloud.

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