The future is now, it's stable, it's secure, it's scalable and it should be offsite, according to Microsoft in its ongoing campaign to coax data away from its partners' premises and onto its Azure cloud servers. That's the word from Microsoft's annual Worldwide Partners Conference where its touting a future agenda led by cloud services.
Microsoft has been calling for all-around adoption of its cloud service, promoting both inward and outward facing elements of it cloud service to its partners. It said the hybridization and on-premises use of its cloud software will help it stand out in what it considered a three-way competition in the cloud, with Google and Amazon serving as the two other contenders.
Kicking off the 2014 WPC conference, Phil Sorgen, corporate VP for Microsoft, said to the more than 16,000 partners in attendance that productivity and platforms were at Microsoft's core. It was that foundation that would bring joint success between the company and its partners, stated Sorgen.
"We see people connected to multiple devices of their choice, running applications to help them do things that both make them more productive and candidly entertains them," stated Sorgen. "This is creating an abundance of data, data that can provide people with greater insight to make better decisions. And this exponential growth of connected users, devices and applications is being accelerated by the cloud. Simply stated, that's the world we live in."
While Sorgen said Microsoft considered itself a challenger rather than a champion in the cloud sector, he flaunted favorable numbers in front of the crowd to make his company's case. He said that Windows operating systems and Microsoft Office had 1 billion users, Windows Azure claimed 57 percent of Fortune 500 companies and Office 365 was the company's fastest growing commercial product.
Furthering its bid to encourage organizations to leverage Microsoft's cloud servers as a service organization can use to engage clients, Microsoft announced that its customer relationship management software, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, would be released under the company's Open License program.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, like the company's other productivity software, has been available for use in the cloud, on premises and in hybridized formats. The release of the software under the Open License program makes it a feasible option for mid and small-sized organization, looking to use the product themselves or resell it.
While Microsoft demoed its Power Bi service, data visualization software, it didn't spend much time promoting Azure's machine learning capabilities over the first few days of conference. However, it stated several lectures had been planned to provide more details on its machine learning, which has been in beta phase, and announced its intent to provide a Machine Learning University to help clients learn to leverage the software.
