(Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella)
At the recent Microsoft annual event Ignite 2020, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (Satya Nadella) said that as the world responds to the epidemic, recovers from the epidemic, and reimagines the human society and business in the post-epidemic era Digital technology has become extremely important, and digital transformation is imminent. Any organization that wants to win in an unprecedented environment of uncertainty must empower employees, cultivate new hybrid office methods, interact with customers in new ways, transform the business model of products and services, and ensure the safety of employees and customers. It is necessary to use data to form an endless cycle to achieve digital transformation and reshape the "resilience" of the enterprise. This is the strength of technology.
What is technical strength? Nadella pointed out that the so-called technological strength is three things: adopt the latest digital technology and integrate it into its own organization; to build its own unique digital capabilities, all organizations need all personnel in the organization to participate in the innovation process and be able to learn , Test and execute digital technology and business scenarios; trust technology, trust business model and its collaboration. The Microsoft Smart Cloud Matrix and comprehensive technology stack are built for technical strength. On October 20, 2020, the three-day Microsoft Tech Week was officially launched. Through a series of keynote speeches, technical courses, and customer and partner case sharing live online every day, Microsoft comprehensively introduced and interpreted Microsoft Intelligence Cloud Matrix's latest product technology innovations, business progress, and successful practices in different industries.
(Kang Rong, vice president of Microsoft Greater China, general manager of marketing and operations)
Kang Rong, vice president of Microsoft Greater China and general manager of marketing and operations, said: From application infrastructure, data and artificial intelligence, development tools and services, to security compliance, business processes, productivity and collaboration tools, Microsoft Smart Cloud Matrix builds A complete set of "data circulation system" has been set up to integrate all the key links of digital transformation.
Redefine the "resilience" of the enterprise
The 2020 epidemic has had a huge impact on the market. Although the domestic market has begun to recover, the international epidemic situation is still not optimistic. As Satya said: "Within two months, we have witnessed the progress of digital transformation that can only be achieved in two years." Kang Rong said that Microsoft believes that the concept of "resilience" is becoming more and more important for companies around the world. Because of unpredictable extreme crises like the global epidemic, every company must strengthen its resilience.
Microsoft believes that there are three dimensions in defining the “resilience” of an enterprise: The first is “response”, that is, the enterprise must communicate with all employees in a fast way, keep all employees safe, and communicate and cooperate with customers and partners in the ecosystem, especially Use certain methods to maintain factory productivity, retail point-of-sale operations, etc. The second is "recovery", that is, companies need to maintain strong flexibility when recovering, because it is impossible to predict what market challenges companies will face in the recovery situation, but because of customer demand, companies are required to provide services in a flexible manner to make employees more Be productive, communicative and cooperative. Finally, there is "reshaping". The epidemic may change the way of life and work around the world, such as how to reshape employee productivity and the way of close cooperation under the mixed mode of remote office and on-site office.
Kang Rong emphasized that the three elements of organizational resilience, “recovery, response, and remodeling” are a cycle, and companies must accelerate digital transformation to enhance resilience. Studies have shown that digital transformation can enable companies to reduce costs by 15% to 20% and increase employees’ work efficiency by 20-30%. For example, remote work avoids the commute time of one to two hours a day brought by big cities, thereby enhancing the flexibility of the enterprise. In addition, for companies that invest in digital transformation, the stability and efficiency of their business systems will also increase.
A study conducted by Microsoft and IDC, a market research agency, in the past six months showed that 63% of Chinese companies are accelerating their digitization process in the face of the impact of the epidemic, and 58% of companies choose to use data analysis and research to improve their Differentiate your products and services. Looking ahead to the digital transformation in the next 12 months, Chinese business leaders believe that technology (accounting for 30.2%), data (26.3), and talent (25%) are the three key elements to enhance business resilience, promote production and economic recovery.
Use the "computer of the world" to enhance "resilience"
Technological strength is extremely important for enterprises and organizations in the post-epidemic era. Because of the penetration of digital technology into all aspects of enterprises and organizations, and the use of digital platforms to reconnect the personnel, processes, businesses, customers, partners, etc. of enterprises and organizations, the stronger the penetration of digital technology, the integration of digital platforms with enterprises and organizations The closer, the more important the technical strength is to the resilience and lifeline of enterprises and organizations.
(Azure Deep Sea Data Center)
Nadella stated on Ignite 2020 that Microsoft is currently the only complete technology stack solution provider that can support the adoption and integration of digital technologies, the construction of digital capabilities for corporate organizations, and ultimately achieve business success through digital technologies and capabilities. Microsoft's digital stack and platform Provide complete technical integration, internal architecture consistency, and openness and scalability of each layer of the technology stack, especially in the era of intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, providing a disruptive experience.
Let's first look at Microsoft's smart cloud Azure. As the "computer of the world", Microsoft Smart Cloud Azure meets customer needs and embraces openness at every layer, including the infrastructure layer, data layer, and application runtime layer. Microsoft is also migrating to the cloud for all expectations Of companies and organizations remove all obstacles, especially when it comes to data, sovereignty, and monitoring requirements. At present, Microsoft Azure has covered 61 regions around the world and obtained more than 90 security compliance certifications.
Microsoft is also pushing Azure to the edge with all its strength-from Azure Stack to Azure Edge Zone to Azure IoT. In particular, Microsoft provides a new distributed computing model to achieve consistency from the cloud to the edge, bringing computing power to the place where data is generated. At Ignite in 2019, Microsoft launched Azure Arc, which extends Azure services to any infrastructure. Today, Azure Data Services is also based on Azure Arc, extending Azure's comprehensive managed data services to a variety of clouds, data centers, edge nodes, and even offline scenarios. Azure SQL Edge extends the SQL data engine to IoT devices, supports data flow, storage, and AI across online and offline environments, thereby enabling disruptive industry scenarios, and Azure Sphere is still supporting millions of MCU-based Of IoT devices provide security protection...
Microsoft did not stop there, but pushed Azure into the deep ocean 117 feet deep, or even "outer space." Microsoft's Project Natick project deployed a data center in a 117-foot deep ocean outside Northern Ireland, verifying the possibility of the world's first full-scale deep-sea data center. The Azure Orbital service announced on Ignite 2020 allows anyone to obtain satellite data and services through Azure.
Data, artificial intelligence and development: connecting "resilience"
Currently, more than 95% of the world's "Fortune 500" companies trust and use Azure services. As Azure, the "computer of the world", has increasingly become the foundation of the "resilience" of enterprises and organizations, the development of data, artificial intelligence and application software based on the unified Azure computing platform has become the "resilience" connector for enterprises and organizations. , Is also a key link to get through the digital transformation of enterprises.
Nadella emphasized that with the rapid expansion of data types, speed, and scale, Microsoft Azure platform can help companies and organizations collect and process massive amounts of data, and learn and reason about the data. From finance to retail to manufacturing and genetic medicine, petabytes of data are collected and processed every day. And during the epidemic, when scientists must understand COVID-19 data and factories quickly adjust production lines and supply chains, how to quickly understand massive amounts of data in a real-time environment becomes more and more important.
To this end, Microsoft has restructured operational data services and analytical data services to meet the current urgent needs of enterprises and organizations for massive data analysis in a cloud-native way. Data services such as Azure SQL Hyperscale, CosmosDB, Synapse, and Synapse Link make Azure stand out in data processing and analysis. In particular, Azure Synapse is the first and currently the only PB-level data analysis service that can run all TPCH queries. Nadella emphasized that there is no other similar product that can achieve the same level of data analysis and processing capabilities. Microsoft is the only cloud service provider that can provide unlimited data and analysis cloud services and serve every enterprise and organization in a cloud-native manner. . Since the release of Azure Synapse last year, the number of customers handling PB-level workloads on Microsoft Azure has increased by 500%.
According to Kang Rong, last quarter, the growth rate of Microsoft Azure's data business in China was 74%. Microsoft Azure has continuously launched and updated a series of services and functions in the field of data services: Azure Data Box is officially released. The safe and reliable Data Box device helps customers transfer large amounts of data from the edge, the Internet of Things, or local to Azure without going through the network. ; Azure SQL Edge is officially released; Apache Spark-based collaborative analysis service Azure Databricks public preview; Azure Synapse Analytics will be released soon, etc.
In terms of artificial intelligence, Microsoft Research has conducted a lot of basic research, especially in the past four years, it has achieved breakthroughs comparable to humans, from object recognition to speech recognition to machine reading comprehension and the latest image recognition. A comprehensive acceleration. Nadella emphasized that Microsoft has spread these breakthrough scientific research results to all enterprises and industries through Azure AI services. Microsoft provides the best cognitive services to help build a company that can see, listen, speak, search, understand and accelerate decision-making. Various applications. The newly released Metrics Advisor Cognitive Service can help companies detect and analyze abnormalities in performance indicators, while Spatial Analysis spatial analysis service can help companies understand the movement and appearance of people in the physical space, thereby calculating the number of people in the physical space This is very important for the control of the epidemic’s crowds and contactless shopping.
In terms of software development, Azure, the most popular code development tools Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and the Github open source community form the most complete development tool chain. Currently, more than 24,000 Chinese developers have joined Azure worldwide. Development Engine (GEP). It is worth mentioning that Microsoft is still opening its core capabilities to developers. For example, by opening the infrastructure of Teams to developers in the form of APIs, these can add the same communication as Teams to the company’s own applications. Collaboration.
Microsoft Smart Cloud Matrix, activate data feedback loop
Data is the most precious resource of enterprises in this era and the key to reshaping the "resilience" of enterprises. In terms of digital transformation, Microsoft provides a very important service, which is to assist customers to form a complete data feedback loop, also known as the "Digital feedback loop". Only a complete digital feedback loop can make the company's "resilience" more tenacious.
What is a data feedback loop? For example, Kang Rong uses Microsoft's IoT technology to collect information to help customers get through the data model, but uses artificial intelligence and big data analysis tools to analyze the data and show the results to the appropriate employees to help them make the best results. The fastest and most accurate decision is the complete digital transformation, and more and more customers now need to use the services and products provided by Microsoft to create a data feedback loop.
Kang Rong emphasized that the Microsoft Smart Cloud Matrix, composed of Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, LinkedIn, and GitHub, will provide customers, developers, and partners from all walks of life around the world with cloud services, productivity platforms, The complete technology chain and services of business applications, low-code and open source development, give full play to the powerful synergy of the Microsoft cloud ecosystem, accelerate the formation of a data feedback loop for enterprises, and open up all key links of digital transformation: empower employees with intelligent collaboration , Close customer communication with personalized experience, transform products and services with technological innovation, and optimize business operations with intuitive insights. All these links can be strictly protected by Microsoft Smart Cloud's highly unified enterprise-level identity authentication, security, management, and compliance measures .
Microsoft 365 is the integrated platform for Microsoft productivity. Windows operating system, Office office applications, Teams video conferencing, Outlook mail and schedule management, Edge browser, plus security guarantees based on identity authentication, security, management, and compliance, Together they constitute an indispensable productivity experience every day. In the first half of this year, the number of active users of Microsoft Teams increased by 5 times. In the third quarter of this year, the Microsoft 365 security business in China increased by 87% year-on-year, and 90% of new Office users in the Chinese market chose to adopt Microsoft 365. Microsoft also announced that the Enterprise Mobility + Security Suite (EMS, Enterprise Mobility + Security Suite) operated by 21Vianet will officially land in the Chinese market. It will include several security and compliance components to protect enterprise business through intelligent security technology.
Dynamics 365 can help companies in different industries to connect customers and businesses closely by opening up data and processes, so as to adapt to changes more quickly and achieve full digitization of business processes. Dynamics 365's total revenue in fiscal year 2020 exceeded US$3 billion, and its revenue increased by 38% in the last quarter, of which the Dynamics 365 cloud business in China increased by 132% year-on-year. Häagen-Dazs, a well-known ice cream brand with more than 400 stores and more than 5 million members in China, is the first to adopt Dynamics 365 and Azure cloud platforms operating in China to build a store and membership management platform , Through the application of intelligent system suites in all aspects of store management, a brand-new breakthrough in chain brand business process management and member interaction has been achieved.
Microsoft's low-code development platform Power Platform provides a fully visual, low-code development experience for the whole people, which can not only realize the integration, customization and expansion of Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and Dynamics 365, but also with third-party commercial applications and data Services are seamlessly connected. As a core component of the Power Platform, Power Apps has achieved an annual growth rate of up to 5 times and the number of active users has increased by 2.7 times. Currently, more than 86% of the "Fortune 500" companies adopt Power Apps. Xiaomi chose to use Power Platform to build a new generation of global retail management platform, and develop and launch business applications more easily and quickly through low-code methods.
To sum up: On Microsoft Ignite 2020, hundreds of product, technology and service updates were released. These technology updates are superimposed on existing intelligent cloud and edge platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Surface, etc. In order to accelerate the process of digital transformation, the digital technology and digital transformation will be deeply promoted to all aspects of the operation and management of enterprises and organizations. I believe that on the Microsoft digital platform, more companies will be able to build stronger corporate "resilience" and successfully meet the next black swan challenge. (Text/Ningchuan)