Tag Archives: ignite

tech

Microsoft will add an Azure-hosted Windows (and office) Virtual Desktop to Office 365 for small businesses

What if small businesses could add a virtual Windows desktop option to their Office 365 subscription, enabling users to log on to a remote desktop and run the full desktop versions of Office as well as other Windows applications, without the hassle of managing local PC desktops?

This is coming, according to information gleaned from the announcements here at Microsoft’s Ignite conference in Orlando. It is all part of a new Azure service called Windows Virtual Desktop, which sees Microsoft getting serious about desktop virtualisation on Azure for the first time.

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Microsoft Ignite is under way in Orlando, Florida

Windows desktop virtualization is already available on Azure, but Microsoft currently points you to its partners Citrix or VMWare for this. You will still be able to do this, and the third-party solutions still have advantages especially in terms of management and imaging tools, but of course they are expensive. Windows Virtual Desktop will be interesting to large organisations who are already licensed for virtual desktop access via licenses for subscriptions including Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and E5.

There will apparently be options for both hosted Windows 10, and shared hosting using Remote Desktop Services, but exactly what will be in the Office 365 offering is not yet clear.

A cost-effective solution for small businesses wanting a hosted virtual desktop on Azure is something new though and if Microsoft prices it right, I would expect it to be popular. Virtual desktops are handy for staff working at home or on the go, for example.

Will the pricing be right? That is not yet known of course. But it does look hopeful that Microsoft may be moving away from its policy of making Windows desktop virtualisation deliberately expensive in order to protect its licensing income. 

tech

Microsoft’s 82 Ignite announcements: what really matters

Microsoft’s PR team has helpfully summarised many of the announcements at the Ignite event, kicking off today in Orlando. I count 82, but you might make it fewer or many more, depending on what you call an announcement. And that is not including the business apps announcements made at the end of last week, most notably the arrival of the HoloLens-based Remote Assist in Dynamics 365.

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Not all announcements are equal. Some, like the release of Windows Server 2019, are significant but not really news; we knew it was coming around now, and the preview has been around for ages. Others, like larger Azure managed disk sizes (8, 16 and 32TB) are cool if that is what you need, but hardly surprising; the specification of available cloud infrastructure is continually being enhanced.

Note that this post is based on what Microsoft chose to reveal to press ahead of the event, and there is more to come.

It is worth observing though that of these 82 announcements, only 3 or 4 are not cloud related:

  • SQL Server 2019 public preview
  • [Windows Server 2019 release] – I am bracketing this because many of the new features in Server 2019 are Azure-related, and it is listed under the heading Azure Infrastructure
  • Chemical Simulation Library for Microsoft Quantum
  • Surface Hub 2 release promised later this year

Microsoft’s journey from being an on-premises company, to being a service provider, is not yet complete, but it is absolutely the focus of almost everything new.

I will never forget an attendee at a previous Microsoft event a few years back telling me, “this cloud stuff is not relevant to us. We have our own datacenter.” I cannot help wondering how much Office 365 and/or Azure that person’s company is consuming now. Of course on-premises servers and applications remain important to Microsoft’s business, but it is hard to swim against the tide.

Ploughing through 82 announcements would be dull for me to write and you to read, so here are some things that caught my eye, aside from those already mentioned.

1. Azure confidential computing in public preview. A new series of VMs using Intel’s SGX technology lets you process data in a hardware-enforced trusted execution environment.

2. Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise. Currently invite-only, this is intended to make it easier to write business bots “to improve workforce productivity” – or perhaps, an effort to reduce the burden on support staff. I recall examples of using conversational bots for common employee queries like “how much holiday allowance do I have remining, and which days can I take off?”. As to what is really new here, I have yet to discover.

3. A Python SDK for Azure Machine Learning. Important given the popularity of Python in this space.

4. Unified search in Microsoft 365. Is anyone using Delve? Maybe not, which is why Microsoft is bringing a search box to every cloud application, which is meant to use Microsoft Graph, AI and Bing to search across all company data and bring you personalized results. Great if it works.

5. Azure Digital Twins. With public preview promised on October 15, this lets you build “comprehensive digital models of any physical environment”. Once you have the model, there are all sorts of possibilities for optimization and safe experimentation.

6. Azure IoT Hub to support the Android Things platform via the Java SDK. Another example of Microsoft saying, use what you want, we can support it.

7. Azure Data Box Edge appliance. The assumption behind Edge computing is both simple and compelling: it pays to process data locally so you can send only summary or interesting data to the cloud. This appliance is intended to simplify both local processing and data transfer to Azure.

8. Azure Functions 2.0 hits general availability. Supports .NET Core, Python.

9. Helm repositories in Azure Container Registry, now in public preview.

10 Windows Autopilot support extended to existing devices. This auto-configuration feature previously only worked with new devices. Requires Windows 10 October Update, or automated upgrade to this.

Office and Office 365

In the Office 365 space there are some announcements:

1. LinkedIn integration with Office 365. Co-author documents and send emails to LinkedIn contacts, and surface LinkedIn information in meeting invites.

2. Office Ideas. Suggestions as you work to improve the design of your document, or suggest trends and charts in Excel. Sounds good but I am sceptical.

3. OneDrive for Mac gets Files on Demand. A smarter way to use cloud storage, downloading only files that you need but showing all available documents in Mac Finder.

4. New staff scheduling tools in Teams. Coming in October. ”With new schedule management tools, managers can now create and share schedules,employees can easily swap shifts, request time off, and see who else is working.” Maybe not a big deal in itself, but Teams is huge as I previously noted. Apparently the largest Team is over 100,000 strong now and there are 50+ out there with 10,000 or more members.

Windows Virtual Desktop

This could be nothing, or it could be huge. I am working on the basis of a one-paragraph statement that promises “virtualized Windows and Office on Azure … the only cloud-based service that delivers a multi-user Windows 10 experience, is optimized for Office 365 Pro Plus … with Windows Virtual Desktop, customers can deploy and scale Windows and Office on Azure in minutes, with built-in security and compliance.”

Preview by the end of 2018 is targeted.

Virtual Windows desktops are already available on Azure, via partnership with Citrix or VMWare Horizon, but Microsoft has held back from what is technically feasible in order to protect its Windows and Office licensing income. By the time you have paid for licenses for Windows Server, Remote Access per user, Office per user, and whatever third-party technology you are using, it gets expensive.

This is mainly about licensing rather than technology, since supporting multiple users running Office applications is now a light load for a modern server.

If Microsoft truly gets behind a pure first-party solution for hosted desktops on Azure at a reasonable cost, the take up would be considerable since it is a handy solution for many scenarios. This would not please its partners though, nor the many hosting companies which offer this.

On the other hand, Microsoft may want to compete more vigorously with Amazon Web Services and its Workspaces offering. Workspaces is still Windows, but of course integrates nicely with AWS solutions for storage, directory, email and so on, so there is a strategic aspect here.

Update: A little more on Microsoft Virtual Desktop here.

More details soon.

cloud computing, microsoft, tech

Microsoft Ignite: where next for Microsoft’s cloud? The Facebook of business?

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Microsoft has futuristic domes as part of its Envision event, running alongside Ignite here in Orlando. Ignite is the company’s main technical event of the year, focusing mainly on IT Pros but embracing pretty much the whole spectrum of Microsoft’s products and services (maybe not much Xbox!). With the decline of the PC and retreat from mobile, and a server guy at the helm, the company’s focus has shifted towards cloud and enterprise, making Ignite all the more important.

This year sees around 25-30,000 attendees according to a quick estimate from one of the PRs here; a little bigger than last year’s event in Atlanta.

Microsoft will present itself as an innovative company doing great things in the cloud but the truth is more complex, much though I respect the extent to which the business has been transformed. This is a company with a huge amount of legacy technology, designed for a previous era, and its challenge has been, and still is, how to make that a springboard for moving to a new way of working as opposed to a selling opportunity for cloud-born competitors, primarily Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google, but also the likes of Salesforce and Dropbox.

If there is one product that has saved Microsoft, it is probably Exchange, always a solid email server and basic collaboration tool. Hosted Exchange is the heart of Office 365 (and BPOS before it), making it an easy sell to numerous businesses already equipped with Office and Outlook. Email servers are horrible things to manage, so hosted has great appeal, and it has driven huge uptake. A side-effect is that it has kept customers using Office and to some extent Windows. A further side-effect is that it has migrated businesses onto Azure Active Directory, the directory behind Exchange Online.

Alongside Office 365, the Azure cloud has matured into a credible competitor to AWS. There are still shortcomings (a few of which you can expect to be addressed by announcements here at Ignite), but it works, providing the company with the opportunity to upsell customers from users of cloud infrastructure to consumers of cloud services, such as Azure IoT, a suite of tools for gathering and analysing data.

The weakness of Microsoft’s cloud efforts has been the moving parts between hosted services and Windows PCs, and legacy pieces that do not work as you would expect.  OneDrive has been a persistent annoyance, with issues over reliable document sync and limitations over things like the number of documents in a folder and the total length of a path. And where are my Exchange Public Folders, or any shared folders, in Outlook for IoS and Android? And why does a PC installation of Office now and again collapse with activation or other issues, so that the only solution is removal and reinstall?

At Ignite we will not hear of such things. Instead, Microsoft will be presenting its vision of AI-informed business collaboration. Think “Facebook of business”, powered by the “Microsoft graph”, the sum of data held on each user and their files and activity, now combined with LinkedIn. The possibilities for better-informed business activity, and systems that know what you need before you ask, are enticing. Open questions are how well it will work, and old issues of privacy and surveillance.

Such things also can only work if businesses do in fact commit more of their data to Microsoft’s cloud. The business case for this is by no means as simple as the company would have us think.

cloud computing, microsoft, professional

Microsoft at Ignite: Building on Office 365, getting more like Google, Adobe mysteries and FPGA magic

I’m just back from Microsoft’s Ignite event in Atlanta, Georgia, where around 23,000 attendees mostly in IT admin roles assembled to learn about the company’s platform.

There are always many different aspects to this type of event. The keynotes (there were two) are for news and marketing hype, while there is lots of solid technical content in the sessions, of which of course you can only attend a small fraction. There was also an impressive Expo at Ignite, well supported both by third parties and by Microsoft, though getting to it was a long walk and I fear some will never find it. If you go to one of these events, I recommend the Microsoft stands because there are normally some core team members hanging around each one and you can get excellent answers to questions as well as a chance to give them some feedback.

The high level story from Ignite is that the company is doing OK. The event was sold out and Corporate VP Brad Anderson assured me that many more tickets could have been sold, had the venue been bigger. The vibe was positive and it looks like Microsoft’s cloud transition is working, despite having to compete with Amazon on IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and with Google on productivity and collaboration.

My theory here is that Microsoft’s cloud advantage is based on Office 365, of which the core product is hosted Exchange and the Office suite of applications licensed by subscription. The dominance of Exchange in business made the switch to Office 365 the obvious solution for many companies; as I noted in 2011, the reality is that many organisations are not ready to give up Word and Excel, Outlook and Active Directory. The move away from on-premises Exchange is also compelling, since running your own mail server is no fun, and at the small business end Microsoft has made it an expensive option following the demise of Small Business Server. Microsoft has also made Office 365 the best value option for businesses licensing desktop Office; in fact, I spoke to one attendee who is purchasing a large volume of Office 365 licenses purely for this reason, while still running Exchange on-premises. Office 365 lets users install Office on up to 5 PCs, Macs and mobile devices.

Office 365 is only the starting point of course. Once users are on Office 365 they are also on Azure Active Directory, which becomes a hugely useful single sign-on for cloud applications. Microsoft is now building a sophisticated security story around Azure AD. The company can also take advantage of the Office 365 customer base to sell related cloud services such as Dynamics CRM online. Integrating with Office 365 and/or Azure AD has also become a great opportunity for developers. If I had any kind of cloud-delivered business application, I would be working hard to get it into the Office Store and try to win a place on the newly refreshed Office App Launcher.

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Office 365 users have had to put up with a certain amount of pain, mainly around the interaction between SharePoint online/OneDrive for Business and their local PC. There are signs that this is improving, and a key announcement made at Ignite by Jeff Teper is that SharePoint (which includes Team Sites) will be supported by the new generation sync client, which I hope means goodbye to the ever-problematic Groove client and a bit less confusion over competing OneDrive icons in the notification area.

A quick shout-out too for SharePoint Groups, despite its confusing name (how many different kinds of groups are there in Office 365?). Groups are ad-hoc collections of users which you set up for a project, department or role. Groups then have an automatic email distribution list, shared inbox, calendar, file library, OneNote notebook (a kind of Wiki) and a planning tool. Nothing you could not set up before, but packaged in a way that is easy to grasp. I was told that usage is soaring which does not surprise me.

I do not mean to diminish the importance of Azure, the cloud platform. Despite a few embarrassing outages, Microsoft has evolved the features of the service rapidly as well as building the necessary global infrastructure to support it. At Ignite, there were several announcements including new, more powerful virtual machines, IPv6 support, general availability of Azure DNS, faster networking up to an amazing 25 Gbps powered by FPGAs, and the public preview of a Web Application Firewall; the details are here:

My overall take on Azure? Microsoft has the physical infrastructure to compete with AWS though Amazon’s service is amazing, reliable and I suspect can be cheaper bearing in mind Amazon’s clever pricing options and lower price for application services like database management, message queuing, and so on. If you want to run Windows server and SQL server in the cloud Azure will likely be better value. Value is not everything though, and Microsoft has done a great job on making Azure accessible; with a developer hat on I love how easy it is to fire up VMs or deploy web applications via Visual Studio. Microsoft of course is busy building hooks to Azure into its products so that if you have System Center on-premises, for example, you will be constantly pushed towards Azure services (though note that the company has also added support for other public clouds in places).

There are some distinctive features in Microsoft’s cloud platform, not least the forthcoming Azure Stack, private cloud as an appliance.

I put “getting more like Google” in my headline, why is that? A couple of reasons. One is that CEO Satya Nadella focused his keynote on artificial intelligence (AI), which he described as “the ability to reason over large amounts of data and convert that into intelligence,” and then, “How we infuse every application, Cortana, Office 365, Dynamics 365 with intelligence.” He went on to describe Cortana (that personal agent that gets a bit in the way in Windows 10) as “the third run time … it’s what helps mediate the human computer interaction.” Cortana, he added, “knows you deeply. It knows your context, your family, your work. It knows the world. It is unbounded. In other words, it’s about you, it’s not about any one device. It goes wherever you go.”

I have heard this kind of speech before, but from Google’s Eric Schmidt rather than from Microsoft. While on the consumer side Google is better at making this work, there is an opportunity in a business context for Microsoft based on Office 365 and perhaps the forthcoming LinkedIn acquisition; but clearly both companies are going down the track of mining data in order to deliver more helpful and customized experiences.

It is also noticeable that Office 365 is now delivering increasing numbers of features that cannot be replicated on-premises, or that may come to on-premises one day but Office 365 users get them first. Further, Microsoft is putting significant effort into improving the in-browser experience, rather than pushing users towards Windows applications as you might have expected a few years back. It is cloud customers who are now getting the best from Microsoft.

While Microsoft is getting more like Google, I do not mean to say that it is like Google. The business model is different, with Microsoft’s based on paid licenses versus Google’s primarily advertising model. Microsoft straddles cloud and on-premises whereas Google has something close to a pure cloud play – there is Android, but that drives advertising and cloud services rather than being a profit centre in itself. And so on.

There were a couple more notable events during Nadella’s keynote.

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Distinguished Engineer Doug Burger and one of Microsoft’s custom FPGA boards.

One was Distinguished Engineer Doug Burger’s demonstration of the power of FPGA boards which have been added to Azure servers, sitting between the servers and the network so they can operate in part independently from their hosts (see my short interview with Burger here).

During the keynote, he gave what he called a “visual demo” of the impact of these FPGA accelerators on Azure’s processing power. First we saw accelerated image recognition. Then a translation example, using Tolstoy’s War and Peace as a demo:

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The FPGA-enabled server consumed less power but performed the translation 8 times faster. The best was to come though. What about translating the whole of English Wikipedia? “I’ll show you what would happen if we were to throw most of our existing global deployment at it,” said Burger.

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“Less than a tenth of a second” was the answer. Looking at that screen showing 1 Exa-op felt like being present at the beginning of a computing revolution. As the Top500 supercomputing site observes, “the fact the Microsoft has essentially built the world’s first exascale computer is quite an achievement.” Exascale is a billion billion operations per second.

However, did we see Wikipedia translated, or just an animation? Bearing in mind first, that Burger spoke of “what would happen”, and second, that the screen says “Estimated time”, and third, that the design of Azure’s FPGA network (as I understand it) means that utilising it could impact other users of the service (since all network traffic to the hosts goes through these boards), it seems that we saw a projected result and not an actual result – which means we should be sceptical about whether this would actually work as advertised, though it remains amazing.

One more puzzle before I wrap up. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen appeared on stage with Nadella, in the morning keynote, to announce that Adobe will make Azure its “preferred cloud.” This appears to include moving Adobe’s core cloud services from Amazon Web Services, where they currently run, to Azure. Narayen:

“we’re thrilled and excited to be announcing that we are going to be delivering all of our clouds, the Adobe Document Cloud, the Marketing Cloud and the Creative Cloud, on Azure, and it’s going to be our preferred way of bringing all of this innovation to market.”

Narayen said that Adobe’s decision was based on Microsoft’s work in machine learning and intelligence. He also looked forward to integrating with Dynamics CRM for “one unified and integrated sales and marketing service.”

This seems to me interesting in all sorts of ways, not only as a coup for Microsoft’s cloud platform versus AWS, but also as a case study in migrating cloud services from one public cloud to another. But what exactly is Adobe doing? I received the following statement from an AWS spokesperson:

“We have a significant, long-term relationship and agreement with Adobe that hasn’t changed. Their customers will want to use AWS, and they’re committed to continuing to make that easy.”

It does seem strange to me that Adobe would want to move such a significant cloud deployment, that as far as I know works well. I am trying to find out more.

cloud computing, microsoft

Microsoft pivot: Ignite is now its key conference

I have been covering Microsoft for quite a few years and it was always clear to me that the must-attend event, if you want to keep up with the company, was the Professional Developer Conference (PDC), and after that was scrapped, its successor developer event Build.

The reason for this is that at PDC or Build the company gives in-depth presentations on the latest features of its developer platform. Pivotal events that I recall include PDC 2003 where we learned about the “Three pillars of Longhorn”, PDC 2008 where Windows 7 was previewed, and Build 2011 where Windows 8 was unveiled.

Two of these three worked out badly for the company, and one fantastically well. The three pillars of Longhorn became the two pillars of Vista after a notorious “reset” of Windows development, while Windows 8 was so hated in the PC community that Microsoft retreated to the more familiar and desktop-oriented Windows 10 a few years later.

Windows 7 on the other hand was such a success that even today, more than a year after the release of Windows 10, many PCs ship with Windows 7 pre-loaded and 10 as an upgrade option. Well, maybe that is a sign of failure (of the later versions) rather than success; but however you choose to spin it, it has been hugely popular.

Perhaps I should also mention PDC 2000 where the .NET Framework was announced (strictly, it was announced at TechEd Europe the previous week, but I digress). That one worked out pretty well I guess, though not without internal conflict between the C++ folk and the .NET Folk – played out in both the Longhorn story and the Windows 8 story.

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The reason though why these events were so strategically revealing was that nothing at Microsoft mattered more than the direction of Windows. These events were about informing and attracting developers to the Windows platform.

Alongside its developer events, Microsoft has always held others aimed more at system administrators, events like TechEd (especially the USA variant), MEC (Microsoft Exchange Conference) and Microsoft Management Summit (last held in 2013). While always interesting, it seemed to me that these IT Admin events were less strategic than the developer events, because the Windows platform was the foundation of the company’s business and it was at the developer events that you saw this platform evolve.

In August 2013 Microsoft co-founder Steve Ballmer stepped down as CEO, to be replaced by server guy Satya Nadella, accelerating the company’s pivot away from Windows and towards Office 365 and Azure as its key platform. Microsoft’s cloud runs on Windows of course, even if many of the VMs on Azure end up running Linux, but the company is now keen to emphasize its support for any operating system – or to be more precise, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and that vague thing IoT – presumably on the basis that broad endpoint support makes its cloud offering more compelling.

I could write screeds about Windows 10 and its evolution, about which I have mixed feelings. Windows for sure remains critically important to Microsoft, and indeed to all of us who feel that it meets needs that its competition does not address. (The answer is not always “just use a Mac”, if only because of Apple’s addiction to premium pricing and high profit margins).

Nevertheless, it is the cloud and hybrid cloud offerings that come first in today’s Microsoft, and Windows server rather than Windows 10 that is more strategically important.

That is why Microsoft Ignite, which starts on Monday 26th September 2016 and is aimed primarily at IT administrators, that is now the key event. Here we will see the formal launch of Server 2016 as well as Azure and Office 365 news; and I plan to pay close attention.