SATYA NADELLA SPOKE TO AN AUDIENCE AT HIS KEYNOTE MICROSOFT INSPIRE

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella ‘Inspire’ speech: Whether you are a young professional or a big business, 10 things you can learn

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke to an audience at his keynote at Microsoft Inspire, where partners from 140 countries gathered this week in Washington, DC. Nadella says, “don’t celebrate technology for technology’s sake. Our success is in our customers’ success.” This statement alone says a lot about how companies and businesses are transforming in the digital era. Technology impacts every aspect of our global society and economy, and Microsoft is a giant whose ecosystem drives local economies and creates massive growth in various sectors. So, when the CEO of a company which employs 17 million people in the world, speaks on technology, you sit up and take notice. Nadella says that Microsoft is not only building IT solutions solely to support conspicuous consumption, it is also working to make a positive impact in the world. He said, “Whether it is helping a 50-year-old insurance business modernise their line-of-business application, or growing a new business from scratch, Microsoft is betting on the future for our collective customers.”

The Microsoft Inspire event was attended by the company’s partners gathered here from across the globe, including 176 from India. From asserting that cloud is foundational to enabling digital transformation to moving beyond big data and even machine learning capabilities, the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke at length about the changing ways companies will function in the future. Meanwhile, currently, business leaders are looking at how they can apply digital technology and build systems of intelligence to rethink how to empower employees, engage customers, optimise operations and transform products

1. “While our mission and our commitment to partners is steadfast, technology and technology paradigms come and go. One such evolution is the move from a mobile-first, cloud-first world, to one that is rooted in the intelligent edge and intelligent cloud. This shift will bring about more digital technology in more mainstream ways into every life and every organisation.”

2. Three things characterise this evolution.
Muti-device, Multi-sense: “The first is how our digital experience is distributed across and spans devices, big screens, small screens, sensors in a room. The user experience is no longer bound to a device, it travels with you. And it’s multi-sense. The experience may start with touch on one device, and end with speech in another device, or ink. Multi-sense is what developers are building for. The experience itself is getting richer and distributed.”

AI: Artificial intelligence is getting built into every experience, and we need to take data and compute to where it’s generated. Whether in an autonomous car, on a factory floor, or in a hospital, every one of these experience is going to be powered by AI.

Serverless: Finally, you need a backend that facilitates this rich fabric. We are taking a single user experience and making it span multiple devices using emerging technology such as containers and serverless compute. We’re taking this intelligence and distributing it to the edge.”

3 “Business leaders are looking at how they can apply digital technology and build systems of intelligence to rethink how to empower employees, engage customers, optimise operations and transform products. We are making progress, but future growth depends on our collective

4. “After empowering people within an organisation, we have to take it a step further, to ensure we are transforming the processes and functions people work within it. Remember, every business process is being digitised. We want to take these systems of intelligence, these feedback loops, and connect them together, so they can provide predictive information.

5. “There is no longer a debate about whether to host data in a public or private cloud. It is clear that what we need is a distributed hybrid cloud infrastructure. The richness of your data should be represented in how it is stored. Finally, we’re moving beyond big data and even machine learning capabilities to be able to infuse cognitive capabilities, like computer vision and understanding natural language, into the applications you build.”