It looks like the limelight of the entire week has been hogged by Microsoft Ignite. The company’s premier event for IT professionals, Technology practitioners, and decision-makers.;
Through the series of this Ignite event, the tech giant used to roll out its new capabilities across its major platforms. Amazingly, igniting the same wave in 2019, Microsoft is introducing a comprehensive range of new tools and services to help companies and individuals to harness their data for work. And to take advantage of key Azure tools irrespective of their cloud provider.;
This year, the event has gone awry and in spite of making consumer developments, the company is making many announcements for developers.
Undoubtedly, if we evaluate some recent developments, this event is perfect to call a news-heavy. Ahead of the event, the company provided 87-page documents to the analyst and journalist which amass around 175 separate documents.;;;
Here are five key announcements from Microsoft in connection with Ignite 2019—
Azure Synapse Analytics
Widely known as Microsoft “limitless” analytics service”, Azure Synapse Analytics serves as a combination offering data warehousing & big data analytics.
The service, which can use either server-less or provisioned resources, provides “a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning applications,” Microsoft said.
The most amazing thing here is that users can use existing data warehousing set-up with Azure Synapse. Examples cited by Microsoft include integrating Apache Spark with SQL. If we put this from the developers perspective, this service empowers data professionals to collaborate, manage, and analyze their most important data without replacing existing data warehousing set-up.
Azure Arc
Taking its cloud services on another level, Microsoft is making Azure tools available even to users who are on other cloud platforms.
So for that Microsoft is launching the solution, Azure Arc. Technically speaking it offers services and management to customers on other cloud infrastructure. Amazingly, it includes its arch-rivals, Amazon and Google.;;;
The management capabilities are also extended to Linux and Windows servers, on any infrastructure across on-premises, multi-cloud and edge.
Additionally, with Azure Arc, customers now have the flexibility to deploy Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale where they need it, on any Kubernetes cluster.
Microsoft 365: Project Cortex
With many updates in Azure, Microsoft 365 platform has also got revamped at Ignite 2019. Project Cortex which is a new service in Microsoft 365 package that harness AI to automatically classify all of an organization’s content into topics. This forms a network of knowledge that will enhance individual productivity & organizational intelligence. It will also act as a helping hand in identifying experts on specific topics, and impart knowledge through interactive experiences across Microsoft;
It uses machine learning to analyze all of the documents & contracts in repositories of third parties as well. Then it surfaces them in Microsoft apps like Outlook, Teams and its Office apps when appropriate.
Power Automate
Power automate is nothing but a new name of Microsoft automated workflow solution. It offers API and UI based automation for enterprises through a unified platform. But from now on, Microsoft is empowering this service with robotic automation capabilities.
Dubbed UI flows, the capabilities enable automation of repetitive tasks, as well as legacy applications, in order to simplify workflows.
Creating a UI flow is a simple and familiar point-and-click / low-code experience that makes it easy for users to turn manual tasks into automated workflows by recording and playing back human-driven interaction with software systems that don’t support API automation,” said James Phillips, corporate vice president for business applications, in a blog post.
Apart from these developments, Microsoft Ignite 2019 has some other announcements as well, like—
- Microsoft is planning to release its Edge Chromium browser early next year with a new logo. The tentative date of launch is January 15 with availability on Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Mac OS.
- Microsoft has also launched some new features with Cortana (Voice-Assistant Service) experience. In Outlook on iOS, Cortana can read a summary of your messages from your inbox. Additionally, from now on, Cortana can send a daily summary of your calendar appointments.
Ending Notes
By looking through the announcements, the 2019 Ignite conference of Microsoft is more leaned towards to make it platforms more accessible with third parties with special influence on data analytics. However it will end on November 8 so it is only halfway down the road, and we are still waiting for some big announcements to come.
