I am extremely honored to be delivering the keynote next week at the Data Platform Summit (DPS) in Bangalore. DPS is one of the events that I am looking forward to participating in as it will provide me with a pulse on data and analytics in the Asia Pacific region. More importantly, the event gives me a chance to connect with you — our customers, partners, and overall community.

As a preface, I want to share with you some of the exciting work happening on the Azure Data team at Microsoft and invite you to take a closer look. It is no secret that today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world is evolving to the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, the new frontier for computing and data management. And IT decision makers and developers are at the forefront, driving this evolution.

We see three key trends that are defining and shaping the evolution of data management. 

1. First, data continues to grow exponentially and it’s not stopping any time soon. The explosion of data creates an urgency to deliver insights.
2. Second, the rate of cloud adoption is increasing. Investments in public cloud technologies drive the need to collect data and innovate further at a global scale.
3. Finally, data fuels artificial intelligence. The more data that is collected and processed, the more accurate and powerful the AI algorithms become. 

Recognizing these trends, I’m excited to talk to the community about how the Azure Data team is chartering a set of priorities for data and analytics to help our customers and our community achieve more. Only Microsoft delivers a consistent and global platform optimized for hybrid cloud for all applications and data. We provide both the flexibility to maintain consistent hybrid cloud environments, and the rich choice of migration and modernization options.

Data modernization on-premises: Modernize apps to SQL Server 2017.

Last year, we released SQL Server 2017— a major update introducing cross-platform compatibility with Linux. With over 5.6 million downloads so far, this is the fastest adoption of any SQL Server release. For those of you running SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2, you’d be interested to know that we recently announced Extended Security Updates, which helps you secure your workloads for three more years after the end of support deadline of July 9, 2019. This gives you more time to determine your future path — either upgrading to SQL Server 2017 or rehosting your applications to Azure with no code changes (see SQL Database Managed Instance below). Learn about the new features in SQL Server 2017 and SQL on Linux.

Data modernization to Azure: Lift, shift, and modernize your applications on database-as-a-service solutions.

If you’re looking to migrate your on-premise SQL Servers to the cloud, SQL Database Managed Instance is a great option that requires no application code changes. We expanded the Azure Hybrid Benefit program to include support for SQL Server. With this program, you can move your on-premises SQL Server licenses with active Software Assurance to Managed Instance, helping you save up to 55 percent*.  You can also leverage the free, self-guided process in the Database Migration Service to migrate at scale from multiple sources to your target database with minimal downtime. This includes OSS migrations to the Azure Database Services for PostgreSQL and MySQL.

Globally distributed apps: Migrate NoSQL applications with globally distributed database service.

Azure Cosmos DB was built for the cloud to support tomorrow’s modern app patterns and scenarios. Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft's globally distributed, multi-model database. With the click of a button, Azure Cosmos DB enables you to elastically and independently scale throughput and storage across any number of Azure's geographic regions, ideal for real-time personalization, big data, AI, gaming and IoT scenarios. You can easily unlock value and respond to customers anywhere in the world — with single-digit latency, backed by SLA guarantees across throughput, latency, availability, and consistency — something no other database service can offer.

Processing over 100 trillion transactions per day, Azure Cosmos DB is leveraged by customers like ASOS and Jet.com, who are using it to achieve massive scale and fuel business innovation. Moreover, we are seeing many customers migrate their existing NoSQL applications, such as MongoDB and Cassandra, to Azure Cosmos DB to get these industry-leading benefits.

Cloud scale analytics: Modernize data warehouse to leverage OSS and governance.

Companies are often times data rich, but insight poor. Integrating data systems is critical to solving this challenge. The faster you can unlock the power of data, the faster you can innovate. With SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Data Factory, and Power BI, you can do just that by creating your analytics hub while reducing costs. The latest version of SQL Data Warehouse, the Compute Optimized Gen2 tier, sets new performance standards for cloud data warehousing. Customers now get up to 5 times better query performance, 4 times more concurrency, and 5 times higher computing power compared to the previous generation. New instant data movement capabilities allow for efficient movement between data warehouse nodes.

We also recently announced the general availability of Azure Databricks, which combines the best of the Apache® Spark™ analytics platform and Microsoft Azure to help bring insights and enable collaboration.

As you can see, data is ubiquitous. We are enabling a portfolio of solutions to support the entire life cycle of data ingestion, exploration, prep, analysis, and archival. The most amazing things happen when developers bring together multiple databases and services to build truly unique end-to-end solutions and simply use the right tool for the job.

I am excited to see you all next week at DPS!

Rohan

*The cost does not include Software Assurance cost.