Inspiration and Announcements from Microsoft Inspire 2019
Thousands of Microsoft partners and employees filled T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on July 15 for the kick-off of Microsoft’s three-day partner event, Microsoft Inspire. Microsoft executives shared their thoughts on the tremendous growth opportunities of the continued digital transformation, describing how the power of partnerships can help us all accelerate success.
Highlights of the first day included the announcement that Azure Lighthouse is generally Available. This is a new capability that is going to be a game-changer for managed service providers or for IT management of large corporations taking a leap into Azure. From one central dashboard, you can centrally govern and manage resources that belong to multiple tenants. This means enforcing policies, pushing templates, centralizing alerts and more. The message is clear: Microsoft wants to help people manage cloud at scale.
The second day saw an explanation of the Azure Migration Program and the new Azure Migrate Hub. Microsoft aims to make the migration experience as seamless and transparent as possible. The new Migration Program will provide clients with resources, tools, and partners that can help them assess the best way to transform their on-premises infrastructure to a secure, reliable and cost-effective Azure solution. Hand in hand with this announcement was the release of the Azure Migrate Hub. This is a new portal experience that provides a dashboard, metrics, and reports on the status of an Azure Migration as well as live tracking of migration processes like VM or database replication from on-premises to Azure.
The third day highlighted the fact that Azure Data Share is now in preview. Data sharing happens every day between individuals and business, using all sorts of different protocols and with widely varying degrees of security. Microsoft wants to help clients continue to share data as much as needed, but in a way that is manageable and secure. Azure Data Share fills this gap, providing one centralized service that can help share data that lives in Blob Storage or Data Lake Storage (with more data provider services to be added). The idea is to manage the endpoints and the authorization within one place so that you always know what is being shared and with whom.
Attendees to Microsoft Inspire learned about industry-specific solutions, new strategies to drive customer acquisition and retention, and enhanced training and readiness opportunities. Some of the event highlights included a deep dive into building stronger partner-to-partner relationships, succeeding in an evolving IoT landscape, and unlocking new data to help win customers.
Microsoft also shared the company’s top priorities and biggest market opportunities for 2020, such as Analytics and AI, MSFT 365 security, teams extensions, and adoption, Dynamics 365, and PowerApps. It was an exciting event with a ton of great information.
Recordings of the Corenotes and sessions are available on-demand on the
MyInspire website
. And we will be covering the major announcements and more later on this month on the
Datascape Podcast
.
