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Users own data in Office 365 as our AI empowers them: Microsoft

Users own data in Office 365 as our AI empowers them: Microsoft

Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella

By Nishant Arora,

Bengaluru : Amid increasing data breaches, tech giants are today busy deliberating on how to ensure privacy and security for the users. Where Microsoft is concerned, however, data ownership clearly remains with its customers – protected by enterprise-grade security solutions.

Microsoft’s Cloud-powered Office 365 – which according to the CEO Satya Nadella is the biggest growth opportunity for the company in its history — makes up the bulk of what it calls its “Commercial Cloud” services.

According to Rajesh Jha, Executive Vice President, Office Product Group at Microsoft, there are nearly 120 million “Commercial Cloud” users globally and over 29 million of them are Office 365 enterprise subscribers — and the onus is on the company to keep its data safe and secure.

“The data ownership belongs to the customers. We are just the custodians. Our Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms run on massive data sets in Office 365 and show the insights back in the application to the customers – allowing them to enhance their businesses. We have hundred of capabilities today running in our Cloud,” Jha told IANS in an interview here.

According to Jha, who is part of the senior core team that reports directly to Nadella, data should always follow the users and remain in their control.

“We take the data from the users, run AI and give the inputs back to them. This is what Office 365 does — working across platforms and giving customers evergreen capabilities to keep them up-to-date, helping them innovate in a secure and safe atmosphere,” Jha explained.

Redmond-headquartered Microsoft has three local data centres in India to serve the increasing demand coming from big enterprises, small and medium businesses (SMBs) and governments.

“India is an interesting market with hundreds of millions of connected devices and a robust mobile-first workforce. Microsoft Office in earlier days catered to knowledge or information workforce but now modern workplaces with first-line, mobile-only workers are our focus in the country,” Jha emphasised.

It has been a multi-year journey for Microsoft when it comes to its Office product.

“Its roots were in the desktop, which we used to deliver as on-premise software to the customers. With Office 365, we made it cloud-enabled that can be delivered on any platform. We are very happy with its quick adoption globally, including in India,” Jha noted.

Riding on its growing Cloud business, Microsoft reported revenue of $28.9 billion for the fourth quarter that ended December 31. Office commercial products and Cloud services revenue increased 10 per cent, driven by Office 365 commercial revenue growth of 41 per cent.

The State Bank of India (SBI) has deployed Office 365 to improve communication and collaboration among its workforce — one of the largest deployments of Office 365 in the country.

“SBI was looking for a new platform for a modern workplace — a solution that would empower their employees to work in a collaborative way on the go, bring the culture change and tap individual talent. They have moved entirely to Office 365,” Jha said.

Now this is a customer, said Jha, which sets a high bar when it comes to enterprise-grade security and privacy, and Microsoft is successfully able to give SBI that.

Not just SBI, “Office 365 is across the board, be it healthcare, transportation, government, education or small businesses. It has broad-based appeal,” the Microsoft executive added.

When it comes to AI, Nadella is betting big on it and the outcome could potentially have a huge impact on the software giant’s future.

“We get billions of signals from Cloud. We take those signals and, after using AI insights, we give the results back in the customers’ core products — be it government, small businesses or enterprises,” Jha told IANS.

In December 2016, Microsoft completed the acquisition of LinkedIn, for which it paid more than $26 billion.

“You will soon hear about Office 365-LinkedIn integration. It is already there internally at Microsoft, allowing us a unified experience. LinkedIn will also come in Dynamics 365 soon,” he added.

Dynamics 365 is a product line of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

The next big thing is Microsoft 365 – an intelligent solution including Office 365, Windows 10 and enterprise mobility and security that the company has recently announced.

(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)

—IANS

Cloud business growth helps Microsoft log $28.9 bn revenue

Cloud business growth helps Microsoft log $28.9 bn revenue

Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella

San Francisco : Riding on its growing Cloud business especially Azure offerings, Microsoft has reported a revenue of $28.9 billion for the fourth quarter that ended December 31.

This was up 12 per cent from $25.8 billion in the same quarter last year.

The company reported operating income of $8.7 billion – an increase of 10 per cent from last year.

“This quarter’s results speak to the differentiated value we are delivering to customers across our productivity solutions and as the Hybrid Cloud provider of choice,” Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said in a statement late on Wednesday.

“Our investments in Internet of Things (IoT), data, and AI services across Cloud and the edge position us to further accelerate growth,” he added.

Revenue in the Productivity and Business Processes was $9 billion that increased 25 per cent.

Office commercial products and Cloud services revenue increased 10 per cent, driven by Office 365 commercial revenue growth of 41 per cent.

“Office consumer products and Cloud services revenue increased 12 per cent and Office 365 consumer subscribers increased to 29.2 million,” the company said.

Dynamics products and Cloud services revenue increased 10 per cent, driven by Dynamics 365 revenue growth of 67 per cent.

“LinkedIn contributed revenue of $1.3 billion during the quarter with sessions growth of over 20 per cent for the fifth consecutive quarter,” Microsoft said.

In December 2016, Microsoft completed the acquisition of LinkedIn, for which it paid more than $26 billion.

Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $7.8 billion and increased 15 per cent from the same quarter last year.

“Server products and cloud services revenue increased 18 per cent, driven by Azure revenue growth of 98 per cent.

Enterprise Services revenue increased five per cent driven by Premier Support Services.

Revenue in personal computing was $12.2 billion and increased two per cent.

Gaming revenue increased eight per cent, driven by Xbox hardware revenue growth from the Xbox One X launch. Surface notebook revenue increased 1 per cent, the company said.

Microsoft returned $5 billion to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends in the second quarter of fiscal year 2018.

“We delivered another strong quarter with commercial cloud revenue growing 56 per cent year-over-year to $5.3 billion,” said Amy Hood, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Microsoft.

—IANS

Office 365, Kaizala app helping Indian firms go digital: Nadella

Office 365, Kaizala app helping Indian firms go digital: Nadella

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

New Delhi : Faster adoption of Microsoft Office 365 and made for India ‘Kaizala’ app are helping several Indian enterprises — from banking to healthcare — unlock their true potential and transform digitally, India-born Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said here on Tuesday.

Addressing the India Today Conclave in the capital, Nadella said that in the world full of immense possibilities with disrupting technologies changing the business models, Microsoft has helped the State Bank of India (SBI) take a giant leap to Cloud and modernise its workplace.

“We are thrilled to partner with SBI on their digital transformation as they harness the Intelligent Cloud and build new digital capability to empower their employees; engage customers in new ways and transform their products and services, while maintaining security, trust and compliance with industry regulations,” Nadella said.

The SBI has chosen Office 365, the cloud-powered productivity solution, from Microsoft to improve communication and collaboration among its workforce.

This is one of the largest deployments of Office 365 in India, spanning SBI’s countrywide network of 23,423 branches, enabling 263,000 employees and servicing more than 500 million customer accounts.

“In the mobile-first and mobile-only country like India, the ‘Kaizala’ app is transforming Indian firms, from retail to healthcare, how they connect with customers and partners efficiently,” the Microsoft executive noted.

Microsoft ‘Kaizala’ has seen significant adoption among firms such as YES Bank, Apollo Telemedicine, United Phosphorous Limited and Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan, who are currently piloting the solution for their internal teams.

The Andhra Pradesh government is also using ‘Kaizala’ for real time governance.

Using ‘Kaizala’, firms can connect with their employees and the extended value chain.

The product offers a simple and familiar chat interface and goes beyond to make everyone more productive using Surveys, Polls, Jobs, Meetings and other actions, right in your chats.

“In this era of Intelligent Edge and Intelligent Cloud – and not to forget Artificial Intelligence (AI) that will drive this era — we need to make a great sense of humongous data that is around us to build right digital capabilities,” Nadella told the audience.

—IANS

Hit ‘Refresh’ to transform your life, the Satya Nadella way (Book Review)

Hit ‘Refresh’ to transform your life, the Satya Nadella way (Book Review)

Hit RefreshBy Nishant Arora,

Title: Hit Refresh; Author: Satya Nadella; Publisher: Harper Collins; Pages: 272; Price: Rs 599

When you hit “Refresh” in a web browser by clicking the little arrow — or press the “F5” function key — it quickly updates the web page, without wiping out anything but opening the page afresh.

For India-born Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, hitting refresh in life is something any person or organisation looking to make a sustained impact over a long period of time must learn to do and implement.

Some people and organisations have one major “hit refresh” moment and others hit refresh often.

In “Hit Refresh” — while taking the readers through his personal journey from Hyderabad to the company’s ongoing transformation at Redmond, Washington State, in the US — Nadella is confident that the knowledge he inherited in India is helping him write new codes of life for Microsoft’s global audience: Be it Cloud, Microsoft 365, Windows 10 and the emerging disruptive technologies.

“Looking back, I have been influenced by both my father’s enthusiasm for intellectual engagement and my mother’s dream of a balanced life for me,” he writes.

After attending schools in Srikakulam and Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, Mussoorie, Delhi and Hyderabad — and later flunking an IIT entrance exam — Nadella landed in the US.

There was no master plan but a call from Microsoft, for him, “was time to hit refresh again”.

Today, Microsoft is at the leading edge of Cloud-based technologies as it infuses capital into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for an inclusive, democratic “Intelligent Cloud” architecture.

For Nadella, the future belongs to AI-based computing and Microsoft is building the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer and making the infrastructure available to everyone.

On Monday, during his keynote address at the ongoing “Microsoft Ignite” event in Orlando, Florida, Nadella said Microsoft has been working to invent a universal, programmable quantum computer and to identify revolutionary applications that will run on it.

In the book, Nadella sheds light on the ongoing activities and future plans to build new computational methods for programming the quantum computer.

“Through quantum computing, we can unlock solutions to problems in areas such as AI, clean energy, global warming, materials design and much more,” Nadella told the packed house at “Microsoft Ignite”.

At “Station Q”, writes Nadella, Microsoft researchers and collaborators are working days and nights to overcome challenges in the path towards universal quantum computing.

“At Microsoft, we’re on the cusp of empowering a quantum revolution with our unique, topological approach,” he told the gathering at the Orlando event, hoping that “quantum computing will make AI even more intelligent”.

Bill Gates, who has known Nadella for more than 20 years, writes in the Foreword: “Satya has charted a course for making the most of the opportunities created by technology while also facing up to the hard questions.”

“Ideas excite me,” Nadella explains. “Empathy grounds and centres me.”

In his latest blog on the book, Nadella wrote: “Books are so often written by leaders looking back on their tenures, not while they’re in the fog of war. What if we could share the journey together, the meditations of a sitting CEO in the midst of a massive transformation?”

“Hit Refresh” is about individual change, about the transformation happening inside Microsoft and the technology that will soon impact all of our lives: AI, Mixed Reality and quantum computing.

The book is “about how people, organisations and societies can and must transform and ‘hit refresh’ in their persistent quest for new energy, new ideas and continued relevance and renewal”.

“We should be optimistic about what’s to come. The world is getting better, and progress is coming faster than ever. This book is a thoughtful guide to an exciting, challenging future,” Gates writes.

Don’t just buy the book to know who Nadella is. Instead, buy it to hit the refresh button in your life from “a principled, deliberative leader searching for improvement — for himself, for a storied company, and for society”.

(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)

—IANS

Microsoft seeks to empower every Indian: Satya Nadella

Microsoft seeks to empower every Indian: Satya Nadella

mssatyaNew Delhi (IANS) Microsoft’s focus on India is to empower every citizen and organisation so that they can perform better than their potential and achieve more fopr themselves and the country, the US giant’s chief executive Satya Nadella said here on Monday.

“Every time I come here, I go back energised. Its infectious to see the creativity here. It’s important to dream big and create big,” Nadella told the media, after a meeting with Microssoft developers, as also entrepreneurs and students.

“I had only two passions that have driven my dreams — poetry and computer science,” said, who started his speech quoting Mirza Ghalib, the noted Urdu and Persian poet of the 19th century.

Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha, who was also present at the event, said “Microsoft is a platform for India’s growth.”

Looking at Nadella, the minister added: “The kind of innovation you do in Seattle, New York, London and other places will not work in Jhanda Chowk in Hazaribagh (a constituency represented by Sinha). We need to innovate in India for India.”