On the second day of Convergence EMEA, Microsoft’s three-day, Europe-based business conference, we continue to highlight new features, capabilities and partners that deliver on Microsoft’s promise to enable business transformation through innovative productivity tools and business applications.
Our commitment to creating technology that helps businesses transform extends to all of our platforms, and in the area of actionable analytics and real-time intelligence, we see a tremendous opportunity for growth. Within the Internet of Things (IoT), Microsoft has been hard at work engineering technology to lay the foundation for the next generation of IoT solutions, from individual devices to enterprise assets. In data, we bring actionable insights to our customers through machine learning and intelligent applications.
Through business applications, we are empowering organizations to intelligently run their operations and engage with their customers. We are able to extend this value at scale through a strong partner ecosystem.
In each of these important areas, we made the following announcements:
- New Power BI integration with Cortana: We are adding an exciting enhancement to the Cortana Analytics Suite with the preview of Power BI integration with Cortana. This makes it simple for businesses to harness and do more with their data by providing the ability to ask natural-language questions directly from Cortana with answers surfaced from Power BI data. These data-driven answers can range from simple numeric values like revenue for the last quarter to complex charts that show revenue trends over time – and even geographic maps that show results by country or region. Combined with the Cortana Analytics Suite, these capabilities introduce new opportunities to use Cortana to enable business to get things done in more helpful, proactive, and natural ways. More details are found on the Power BI blog.
- Introducing Power BI Quick Insights: This new feature brings the power of data to everyone by enabling users to run a variety of analytical algorithms on their data to search for potential insights with the click of a mouse. By automatically scanning and detecting patterns and trends in the data they load into Power BI, this new feature provides users new ways to find hidden insights in their data. To find out more, visit the Power BI blog.
- New Azure IoT Suite Preconfigured Solution: We have expanded our available preconfigured solutions with predictive maintenance, which enables customers to quickly realize the potential of IoT. The Azure IoT Suite allows enterprises to monitor assets and analyze data in real time. The predictive maintenance preconfigured solution takes that data and uses rich dashboards and visualizations to provide businesses with new intelligence to help identify warning signs of potential problems, predict when equipment needs maintenance, and preemptively service that equipment before problems occur. For more information, visit the IoT blog.
- Availability of Microsoft Dynamics AX, our enterprise-class ERP solution architected for the cloud, brings the power and intelligence of the next generation of cloud computing to people and organizations worldwide. The public preview of the new release will be available for partners and customers this month. Dynamics AX will be generally available in Q1 of CY2016. This latest Dynamics AX release delivers a new intelligent user experience to help people make smarter decisions quicker, new capabilities to enable faster implementation and easier management of the solution. It also gives businesses and people global availability and scale to work anywhere, anytime so they can grow at their own pace and on their terms. Read more about this new release on the Dynamics blog.
To help deliver the power and intelligence of the cloud to our customers, we are sharing an update on a partner program and highlighting some joint, cloud-based solutions from our partners:
- Expansion of Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT: Microsoft has expanded Azure Certified for IoT, which tests and certifies IoT-enabled platform, device, and operating system combinations to enable faster time to implementation. As part of this program, we welcome new industrial device partners including Adlink Technology, Arduino, e-con, Embedded Systems, Nexcom International, Samsung, STMicrocelectronics and Toradex.
- The next step in the partnership between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Lithium comes with the integration of Lithium’s Total Community with CRM to give customer service agents the power of crowdsourced customer care, backed up by real-time insights and data into customer behavior, expertise, and interests. Lithium’s enterprise-class customer intelligence and experience products enhance the service, sales, and marketing engine of Dynamics CRM to complete a closed loop solution for managing and fostering your most important relationships.
- InsideSales.com announced that its cloud-based sales acceleration platform, Accelerate for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, is now available. This will help users improve sales visibility, productivity and effectiveness in a way that delivers more immediate and meaningful results.
It’s been an exciting time in Barcelona not just for the innovations we are delivering to market, but more importantly, for how it will help customers in their transformations. During today’s keynote, we featured Real Madrid and how they are connecting with their fans around the world; Metro Bank and how they are transforming how banks connect with their customers; and companies like Rockwell and Caterpillar who are using predictive analytics to better manage and maintain their equipment throughout the world. We will continue to feature more great customers in the third and final day of Convergence EMEA and you can find more stories about customers and their transformations on the Microsoft Business Matters blog.
