Announcements that matter from Ignite 2019: Part – 2 Satya Nadella’s keynote address

Tech Intensity = (Tech Adoption x Tech Capability) ^ Trust
You may have seen the above algorithm make waves in the news post-Satya Nadella’s keynote around ‘tech intensity’ at Ignite this year. The accelerated pace of tech adoption today needs users getting access to the latest and relevant services, tools, and platforms. The freedom to create new services is what is referred to as tech capability.

It is essentially the ‘trust’ aspect of the equation where Microsoft emphasized the culture shift of creating confidence around new technologies, i.e., through ethical privacy, security, and protection practices. How well an enterprise utilizes its data or technology, as Nadella puts it, will define the competitiveness of every business going forward.

In part-1 of the blog, we talked briefly about eight of the announcements that are going to accelerate tech-adoption. Each of these innovations cut across domains in terms of applications in varied forms. Without ado, let’s dig into the rest.

• Microsoft AIRSIM: Autonomous systems have significant potential in solving time-intensive real-world challenges, for instance, supporting first responders in dangerous situations. AirSim is one such technology that goes beyond basic automation and culminates in the unique elements of machine learning, extensive testing, and simulation so that companies can deploy these in the real world.
• Visual Studio Online: This is Microsoft’s initiative of providing developers around the world with a complete toolchain using Visual Studio. VS Online extension allows developers to create the development environment right from the browser, with cloud-based workloads, and without the need for a powerful development machine. Intellicode is another provision that leverages AI to learn from the open-source world and brings that intelligence to your editing dashboard. Liveshare is another tool that allows live collaboration in such development projects, something that is extremely valuable and empowering teams from anywhere in the world.
• Dynamic 365 Customer Insights: Nadella pointed out that today, almost 73% of the business data is not analyzed, limiting the next generation of automation or predictive analytical power. To drive value in collaboration and business productivity throughout the enterprise, there needs to be a constant feedback loop between the elements. Dynamic 365 Customer Insights is built on its Customer Data Platform (CDP), to unify data from a diverse range of sources to help businesses be proactive with their data, instead of reactive – all in real-time.
• Private channels in Microsoft Teams: Users of Teams can now speak privately to each other through the introduction of private channels. These are accessible and viewable to only specified personnel or teams who are dealing with confidential or sensitive content. Despite not being heavy in tech intensity, private channels have been one of the most awaited features to facilitate open dialogues within teams and imbibe trust.
• Fluid Framework – Office 365: One of the most interesting additions to the open collaboration initiative from Microsoft 365 is Fluid Framework, a new technology that enables a variety of productive experiences for collaboration across teams. It offers three capabilities. First, it lets multiple users co-author features collaboratively. Second, a componentized document model that lets authors break down content into collaborative blocks, delegate them across applications, and combine all of them into a flexible, new kind of document. And third, intelligent agents that boost speed (by suggesting edits or translating texts in real-time).
• Custom Background – Teams: While background blur was a hit in Ignite 2018 towards minimizing distractions, Custom Backgrounds is the next frontier in video meetings. With this, businesses can display the image they want to show in the background, e.g., company logos, or diagrams they wish to display.
• Virtual Consults: A boon to industries like healthcare, Virtual Consults lets users set-up and conduct virtual consultations using Teams. It comes with several of Teams AI-driven features such as transcriptions, cloud recordings, and background blur, wherein attendees have the ease of access and experience right from their browser or mobile app.
• Microsoft Edge + Bing: To extract more from the web, the new version of Microsoft Edge is built on Chromium (higher performance from its previous version), comes with higher compatibility and superior privacy and security. Knowledge workers can now easily access Microsoft Search within Bing across devices (mobile and web) to search company information quickly and from anywhere.
• Share Collection- Edge Browser: This new feature of Share Collection as part of Microsoft Edge makes it easy to collect, organize, and export content both from the web and internal to the company. This ease of connecting external and internal internet will make collaborations and knowledge sharing much more agile.

To conclude:

There is so much more to unbundle on each of the products that will impact the way businesses operate, draw knowledge & insights, collaborate, and even create new technologies to solve real-world problems.

That said, Ignite’s keynote had one common thread. Microsoft is providing the world with capabilities that are up to speed with ease of integration and knowledge coupled with an interconnected and holistic end-to-end experience so that every business – big or small – can reach their tech intensity/maturity.

As a trusted partner for millions of end-users worldwide and an enterprise cloud adoption accelerator, YASH is excited to be a part of this revolution that is changing the way people work and use technologies for driving business outcomes.

If you are among the few who missed out on watching the keynote, you can find it here.

Want to know how YASH Technologies can help your business integrate and custom-fit these business tools to your organization’s needs? Check out our entire range of Microsoft services and solutions.

• Keynote
• Microsoft Ignite 2019
• product announcements
• Satya Nadella