Every business is being transformed by mobility and cloud. New device types and form factors powered by a growing number of apps and services are inspiring new ways of doing business, connecting with customers and engaging with partners. The accelerating pace of innovation is straining traditional IT systems and, as a result, the move to cloud is accelerating. Customers are looking to shift their enterprise workloads to the cloud and manage and analyze the data exploding around them. They also want to transform business processes – and in some cases, entire industries – through innovation and Microsoft’s Cloud can help.
One of the first areas we help customers realize the benefits of cloud computing in is storage. In fact storage is the first bridge to cloud for many customers and one of the fastest growing patterns of consumption, along with compute. As customers move storage to the cloud they naturally look to move their enterprise workloads – but to do that they need improved performance from storage subsystems. Azure Premium Storage, generally available today, delivers on that need. With up to 64,000 IOP’s per VM it supports Microsoft’s most demanding workloads, including Dynamics, SharePoint, and SQL Server, as well as MongoDB and Cassandra. For more technical details on Premium Storage, including how to turn it on in just a couple steps, click here to hear from Mark Russinovich, Azure’s Chief Technical Officer.
“Things” are everywhere and whether you call it the Internet of Things, the Industrial Internet, the Internet of Everything, or as we call it, the Internet of Your Things, it represents an incredible opportunity. Every customer I talk to is looking for ways to embrace this opportunity and the developers I talk to want services that make it easier to build IoT apps. Azure Stream Analytics, also generally available today, is a near real time event processing engine that helps customers gain insights from devices, sensors, infrastructure, application and nearly every other thing. Stream Analytics is fully integrated with Azure Event Hubs to deliver an end to end solution that helps process, analyze and reason over massive amounts of unstructured or structured data in near real time. To learn more about Azure Stream Analytics, Event Hubs and event processing engines, click here.
As cloud computing evolves, one of the biggest opportunities we have is to help customers transform their business processes with services like Azure Machine Learning or, even core business models, with end to end solutions like Azure Media Services. Earlier this week, at the National Association of Broadcasters Show (NAB), we announced new services to help broadcasters offload even more of their IT needs so they can focus on what is important to them – the content. News announced at NAB includes Live Encoding Preview, general availability of the Azure Media Player and the addition of support for Spanish to Azure Media Indexer. With these new capabilities content owners and partners can better prepare, protect, distribute and monetize media content in the cloud. To learn more about our Azure Media Services offerings, click here.
In addition to the news today, and earlier this week at NAB, last week we announced:
- Plans to deliver Windows Server Hyper-V Containers & Windows Server Nano Server to help Windows customers embrace the container technology and utilize Windows Server capabilities with all the benefits of lightweight cloud optimized code base.
- The ability for all customers, in over 86 countries, to purchase, configure and deploy more than 3000 applications and services from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
It’s been a busy few weeks for the Cloud + Enterprise division at Microsoft delivering the mobile-first, cloud-first solutions that will help transform your business. Please try them out, let us know what you think and stay tuned for upcoming announcements from BUILD and Ignite.
Takeshi Numoto
Takeshi Numoto is the corporate vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise Marketing Group at Microsoft.