SEATTLE, May 10, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Satya Nadella,
Scott Guthrie and Harry Shum welcomed thousands of developers to
Seattle for Build 2017 —
Microsoft's annual developer conference. During his opening keynote
Nadella announced that Windows had reached 500 million Windows 10
monthly active devices and noted how — together — Windows,
Microsoft Office and Microsoft Azure offer developers more than a
billion opportunities to connect their innovations with Microsoft
customers. Microsoft also announced new Azure data and cloud
services to help developers quickly modernize their existing apps,
new AI and Azure services that allow any developer to more easily
build intelligent apps, with understanding and natural user
interaction capabilities, and showcased new data, IoT edge and AI
services built for a future with an intelligent cloud and
intelligent edge.
"In a world of near infinite compute power and an exponential
growth in data, we are focused on empowering every developer to
build applications for this new era of intelligent cloud and
intelligent edge," said Satya
Nadella, CEO, Microsoft.
A vision for more intelligence — from the cloud to the
edge
Our world is overloaded with information, every minute, and yet
it is in this very information — data — that opportunities and
insights abound. To help customers realize these opportunities,
Microsoft shared an early peek into innovations it is bringing to
bear to help every person and organization achieve more. In support
of this vision Microsoft announced the following:
- A preview of Azure IoT Edge, technology that extends the
intelligence — and other benefits — of cloud computing to edge
devices.
- Extensions to the Microsoft Graph to combine insights
from the world of work with device insights and contextual
awareness of the physical world.
- Technology that will allow you to search the real world in the
same way you search the digital world, helping to keep your data
safe and secure while making you more productive.
The cloud for every developer, and tooling to target any
platform and device
Microsoft showcased how it is meeting developers where they are,
and helping them be more successful, with new Microsoft Azure and
Visual Studio services and tools to help modernize existing
applications and quickly build intelligent apps for all major
platforms:
- Introducing Azure Cosmos DB, built from the ground up to
power planet-scale cloud services and data-intensive applications —
from IoT to AI to mobile — with incredible performance, fault
tolerance and support for every type of data, including graph. It
is the industry's first globally distributed, multimodel
database service to deliver horizontal scale with guaranteed
uptime, throughput, consistency and single-digit millisecond
latency at the 99th percentile. Developers get incredible
flexibility with the only schema-free database service, with
support for popular NoSQL APIs, that also offers five well-defined
consistency choices while auto-indexing all your data.
- New MySQL- and PostgreSQL-managed services that
join Azure SQL Database to give developers expanded choice and
flexibility on a service platform that delivers high availability
and scalability, with minimal downtime, and data retention and
recovery.
- An early preview of Microsoft's new database migration
services, which will allow Oracle and SQL Server customers to
more easily move their data and quickly modernize their apps.
- Azure SQL Database improvements:
-
- A new Managed Instance private preview, which offers
customers SQL Server instance-level compatibility and makes it even
easier for organizations to migrate existing SQL Server apps to
Azure SQL Database.
- General availability of Threat Detection and preview of
Graph support.
- General availability of Visual Studio 2017 for Mac,
which enables developers to work seamlessly across Windows and Mac
environments with full support for mobile, web and cloud workloads,
and previews of Docker tools, Azure Functions and Xamarin.IoT
support.
- Support for containers of nearly every type, on every platform,
with the general availability of Windows Server Containers
support in Azure Service Fabric, with Visual Studio tooling,
and a preview of the ability to use Docker Compose support for
Service Fabric to deploy containerized apps to Service Fabric —
enabling developers to deliver mission-critical, scalable apps and
services.
- DocuSign supports a rapidly growing customer base of
300,000 companies and more than 200 million users across 188
countries. The company today announced Microsoft Azure is its
preferred cloud for global expansion, starting in Canada. DocuSign uses Azure SQL Database to
process enormous volumes of digital transactions.
For more information on these announcements, visit:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-innovations-at-microsoft-build-2017-helping-developers-achieve-more/
New developer on-ramps to the world's largest productivity
platform
With more than 100 million monthly commercial active users,
Office 365 is where the world works. Today Microsoft announced
plans to better connect developers with Office 365 customers around
the globe:
- Any developer can now publish for Microsoft Teams, the
new chat-based workspace in Office 365. Coming soon, apps in Teams
will be more discoverable for end users through a new app
experience. Developers can also add new capabilities to Teams
apps, including third-party notifications in the activity feed,
Compose Extensions and Actionable Messages.
- Microsoft also made new Microsoft Graph APIs available
to developers, including APIs from SharePoint and Planner. The
Microsoft Graph gives developers access to Office 365 data and
intelligence and helps connect the dots between people,
conversations, projects, schedules, processes and content. These
insights help developers build smarter apps, enabling smarter ways
to work.
- Developers and ISVs who host their production SaaS applications
on Microsoft Azure and sign up through the Azure website can now
have their apps' data and workflow automatically extended to
authorized Office 365 customers through standard connectors for
PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. To help ISVs expand their business
even further, Microsoft is also providing additional incentives to
its sales force when they jointly co-sell eligible SaaS apps and
services to enterprise customers.
AI to augment the capabilities of every developer,
organization, platform and person
Microsoft also highlighted its vision to amplify human ingenuity
with intelligent technology, bringing AI to every developer through
the unique combination of the Microsoft cloud and AI. New cognitive
services, platform innovations in the Microsoft Bot Framework,
advances in deep learning tools, continued infusion of AI into the
company's products and services, and intelligent insights offered
through the Microsoft Graph unlock this opportunity for developers
and new growth scenarios for businesses. New announcements included
the following:
- The company added new services to the industry's broadest
offering of cognitive services and now 29 services for developers,
with unique customization options. That enables developers to
infuse off-the-shelf or custom intelligence capabilities such as
vision, speech, language, knowledge and search into their app and
bot experiences in any scenario. New services include Bing
Custom Search, Custom Vision Service, Custom Decision Service
and Video Indexer. A new PowerPoint add-in called
Presentation Translator, which leverages Microsoft's
Translation APIs, was featured, allowing real-time translation to
multiple languages during any presentation. The new Cognitive
Services Labs were also launched, enabling developers to
experiment with new services, such as a Gesture API, still
in the early stages of development.
- Using the new adaptive cards supported by the Microsoft Bot
Framework, developers can write cards once that look great
across multiple apps and platforms. Using the Bot Framework,
developers can also now publish to new channels including Bing,
Cortana and Skype for Business, and implement Microsoft's payment
request API for fast and easy checkout in their bots.
- Azure Batch AI Training is a new Azure offering,
available in private preview only, that will allow developers and
data scientists to configure an environment with parameters and run
their models against multiple CPUs, multiple GPUs and eventually
field-programmable gate arrays.
- In addition to Harman Kardon's
Invoke intelligent speaker with Cortana, partnerships were also
signed with HP on devices and Intel on reference platforms to
deliver Cortana-enabled devices.
- The Cortana Skills Kit is now in public preview.
Developers can build skills for Cortana by creating a bot and
publishing it to the new Cortana channel of the Bot Framework. This
is available across Windows 10, Android, iOS and the new
Cortana-powered Harman Kardon Invoke speaker. The Cortana Skills
kit is currently available in the U.S. only.
- A demonstration was provided on how multiple Microsoft products
and services, including Dynamics 365, Office 365, Microsoft
Teams, Cortana Skills, Microsoft Graph and Sentiment Analysis, will
be integrated into Tact, the sales experience platform that turns
any connected device into a AI-powered virtual sales assistant,
later this year.
For more information on these announcements, visit:
https://blogs.microsoft.com/?p=52541284
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) is the leading platform and
productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and
its mission is to empower every person and every organization on
the planet to achieve more.
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