Ignite - The Keynote Report
Monday morning, May 4, the city of Chicago was ready for the first-ever Microsoft Ignite conference. Ignite is our unified enterprise technology conference, bringing together the best of a diversity of IT Professional focused events.
You can read all about our arrival in the Windy City in yesterday’s blog post.
So we headed for the McCormick Place conference center with the shuttle buses and having picked up our conference badges on Sunday, nothing was standing in our way to watch Satya’s keynote, right? Except, there were another 23000 people with that very same idea J. But all in all, we got to our seats pretty smoothly – kudos to the event staff!
First on stage was our CEO Satya Nadella, talking about the importance of IT innovation and how vital this is for businesses to succeed: “No business can succeed and scale without IT innovating and transforming. Empowering IT professionals is a key part of Microsoft’s technology agenda spanning Windows 10, Office 365, Azure and other cloud technologies.”
Already on the first day we witnessed an abundance of announcements across our technology platform, and Satya painted the big picture on how all these announcements address three big challenges and opportunities for IT professionals:
More personal computing: think about how the platform allows for more ways of human interaction, such as ink, touch, gestures and even holographic computing. But personal computing also means dealing with personal data – we built trust into the core of the operating system. Finally, how can we ensure that all devices in an organization, corporate or end-user, can remain up-to-date. Enter Windows Update for Business!
Reinventing productivity and business processes: a user’sdevices and software are becoming dual-use. Business productivity tools will be more and more integrated in communications tools and all experiences should have intelligence built in. Announcing as well: public preview of Office 2016 (with real-time co-authoring!), Skype for Business Broadcasting, and organizational analytics in Office Delve. Demonstrated by Joe and Brad later in the keynote, we also saw how IT can ensure compliance and data protection in a friction-free end-user experience.
An intelligent cloud: an intelligent cloud drives application agility and brings together the best tooling and platforms. Introduced today and in preview this summer, Microsoft Azure Stack, brings the Azure user experience and both IaaS and PaaS into your datacenters.
Also, the next preview of Windows Server 2016 is now available, demonstrating that small can be big, introducing Nano Server, a lightweight installation option. Furthermore, we also introduced Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), which brings you a cloud-based management solution across any hybrid cloud, including Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMWare or OpenStack. Think of OMS as the backend version of what EMS brings to the client. OMS extends System Center 2016, which is also available in preview this week.
Brad Anderson also demonstrated a new product, and in preview today, Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA), which helps you identify breaches and threats using behavioral analysis and machine learning.Finally, our data platform also saw a huge announcement, with a public preview of SQL Server 2016 coming this summer! This new version will bridge between on-premises and cloud data even more and better. I’m definitely looking forward to being able to stretch tables across both.
Next on stage was Joe Belfiore, Corporate VP PC, Tablet & Phone, who again did some great demos to show how Windows 10 can bring more personal computing. The audience was especially awed by Continuum, Windows Hello and a demo of Cortana enabling you to ask natural language questions about your corporate data from PowerBI! Impressive is the least I can say.
Up next on stage were Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate VP Skype and Julia White, GM of Office, to talk about empowering the future of work and addressing the challenges of getting things done. I love this Gurdeep quote: “The workplace is a misnomer: work is not where you go but what you do.”
Next on stage Brad Anderson, Corporate VP Enterprise Client and Mobility , disclosing the future of IT with management, security and cloud infrastructure. There were amazing demos of Azure RMS and how document become self-tracking, providing compliancy and security while giving the user a friction-free experience. But also the new Advanced Threat Analytics service was very impressive. Check out all of Brad’s demos at https://aka.ms/BradIgniteRecap.
Finally, Terry Meyerson, Executive VP Operating Systems, closed the keynote with the Windows Update for Business announcement. This again brings great IT control, while giving end-user flexibility.
With such an impressive list of announcements and many more remarkable break-out sessions over the coming days, this Ignite conference is already memorable!
You can watch today’s keynote again and view more live streams and recordings on Channel 9.
Follow and contribute to Ignite on Twitter using the hashtag #msignite and follow our live updates via @technetbelux
Your humble reporters at Ignite,
Nick & Sigrid