Below is the English translation of the article published by Satya Nadella on July 20, 2022: “The Digital Imperative for Every Organization“.
“The following is an excerpt from my remarks at our annual partner conference, Microsoft Inspire, this morning.
Over the past few years, we have talked a lot about digital transformation, but today we need to go further — moving from talking about digital transformation to fulfilling the digital imperative for every organization. The time is now. It is what will make the difference between organizations that thrive and those that fall behind. Every organization in every sector will need to infuse technology into every business process and function in order to do more with less.
The need to do so has never been more urgent or more clear. In fact, I would argue it is existential. The next 10 years are not going to be like the last 10. Digital technology is a deflationary force in an inflationary economy. It is the only way to navigate the headwinds we face today.
Doing more with less does not mean working harder or longer. That is not going to scale. But it does mean applying technology to amplify what can be done across the organization, so that you can differentiate and build resilience.
And it all comes down to how we can help you — our partners — use the Microsoft Cloud to help customers overcome today’s challenges and emerge stronger. No other cloud offers our breadth or depth. And no other cloud offers not only the best-in-class products, but the best solutions across the entire technology stack.
Today I will highlight five digital imperatives for every organization to do more with less, and how we are creating new opportunities for our partners in the Microsoft Cloud.
Migrate to the Cloud
It starts at the infrastructure layer. Leaders across every industry are accelerating their migration to the cloud, and it is not just about lift and shift. IT and OT are coming together, and the cloud is fundamental to organizations being competitive in the future.
Every customer I talk to is clear that they need to align their IT investments to scale with demand, and moving to the cloud allows them to do exactly that, converting their spend from CapEx to OpEx. It is about helping customers drive operational efficiency, accelerate time to value, and reduce costs.
Across all our offerings, we deliver the best value at every stage of the cloud migration journey. To give just two examples: it is up to 80% cheaper to run Windows Server virtual machines on Azure and SQL Server on Azure than with our primary competitor. And it is not just about cost. We offer unique capabilities to simplify virtual machine management and SQL Server compatibility to make it easier to move, and we are investing significantly in migration and modernization programs to help customers move forward with confidence.
We are building the next-generation multi-cloud and multi-edge infrastructure to support this. It starts with Azure as the world’s computer. We have more datacenter regions than any other cloud provider, and over the coming year, we will launch 10 new datacenter regions in 10 markets, spanning four continents, providing faster access to services and helping address data residency needs.
Today, we are going even further to help partners around the world serve public sector customers. We are announcing the Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, which provides policies, controls, and technologies that will enable customers to meet a government’s specific sovereignty, security, and data privacy requirements.
This builds on our innovation with Azure confidential computing, which is already helping customers bring their most sensitive workloads to the cloud. The combination of our leading capabilities around confidential computing and sovereignty makes our cloud unique.
And our differentiation goes further. With Azure Arc, we bring the power of Azure anywhere so you can build applications with Azure services that can run in on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud environments. With Azure for Operators, we are bringing computing to the 5G edge. We have the largest partner ecosystem in the industry, helping deliver next-generation private wireless solutions. And, together with our partners, we are extending our infrastructure beyond our planet with Azure Orbital.
This ubiquitous fabric, from 5G to space, will enable a new generation of modern, connected applications that will create opportunities for our partners to transform entire industries.
A great example of this is Procter & Gamble, which last month chose our cloud to digitize more than 100 of its manufacturing sites around the world with the goal of increasing productivity and sustainability across all its operations. They are using our technology to build a new IoT platform that will analyze data from production lines, including production runs, downtime, changeovers, and more, to build the future of digital manufacturing, connecting the back office to the retail store.
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Empower Fusion Teams
Now let’s talk about empowering professional and citizen developers, and our approach to digital innovation and applications.
Today, every company is a digital company. Organizations are eager to equip fusion teams of professional and citizen developers with best-in-class tools so they can scale their impact together, and they are eager to adopt DevOps, which is rapidly becoming the default way to deploy code to production.
From Azure DevOps and GitHub to Visual Studio, we have the most complete platform and the most trusted cloud to help developers go from idea to code, from code to cloud, and from cloud to the world.
GitHub is where tomorrow’s innovation is built, openly, securely, instantly, and automatically. At every step of the way, by being cloud-first, end-to-end, GitHub delivers an unmatched developer experience, and costs up to 30% less compared to our primary competitor.
With GitHub, you get the best of both worlds: affordability and scalability. 90% of Fortune 100 companies use GitHub today. Take Mercedes-Benz as an example. Software development is not something they do on the side. It is the core of the company’s added value. 20,000 company employees, more than 10% of the total workforce, use GitHub as the central development platform to build, ship, and maintain software.
And with our Azure PaaS services, organizations can build modern, more resilient applications in the cloud. Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service for building and deploying modern applications at scale. We are committed to Java and are helping organizations modernize Java application portfolios with Azure Spring Apps Enterprise, which we built as part of our partnership with VMware.
And we do not stop there. By 2025, 70% of new applications deployed for the enterprise will use low-code or no-code tools. With Power Platform, we have the leading suite for business productivity and process automation for experts across every industry, with 20 million monthly active users.
We are taking a unique approach in what is an expansive, high-growth market, bringing together robotic process automation, low-code and no-code tools, virtual agents, website creation, and business intelligence into a common platform to build end-to-end business solutions, reducing complexity as well as cost. Customers can save 80% or more compared to leading competitors.
Frankly, in this era of constraints, not everyone can invest in large, complex systems, but with Power Platform, anyone can have an incredible impact on an organization. And to be clear: this is not about a single app or a workflow or an automation. It is about accelerating the creation of digital capabilities across all functions of the organization. In fact, the number of organizations building centers of excellence around Power Platform has grown exponentially in recent years.
Globo, the largest media and television company in Brazil, is a great example. They have worked with our partner ecosystem to launch and run a Power Platform center of excellence:
Unify Data and Apply AI Models
Now let’s talk about data and AI. It comes down to two things: Getting your data estate in order and applying large AI models as platforms. That is the dual challenge.
It is hard to overstate the opportunity. What we are seeing is the convergence of previously disparate categories. We are the only company that has a complete data fabric, from the operational store to the analytics engine and data governance with our Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform.
This is not just about best-in-class. It is about best-in-suite. This enables organizations to spend more time creating value and less time integrating and managing their data estate.
Think about the time and effort involved in aligning your operational stores and analytics with new regulations, or imagine the total cost of ownership if you try to do all this integration on your own. Analytics alone on our Intelligent Data Platform is about 4.8 times faster and costs up to 59% less than other cloud analytics providers.
When it comes to AI, we are witnessing a paradigm shift as the world’s large AI models become powerful platforms in their own right. At Azure, we have built the most powerful AI supercomputer in the cloud, and we have used it to train state-of-the-art large AI models.
But it is not enough to talk about these models: it is about applying them. We are building models as platforms in Azure so you can apply these advances to any use case, including some of the greatest challenges we face as a society today.
Ørsted, which produces a quarter of the world’s wind energy, together with our partner Cognite, has used our tools to turn data from its offshore wind turbines into insights for predictive maintenance:
Collaborative Business Process
Let’s now move to the next digital imperative and our approach to modern work and business applications.
Hybrid work is here to stay, and it is clear that flexibility and wellbeing are non-negotiable as new models of work emerge.
Technology can help us navigate this shift. Every organization needs a digital fabric that connects people, places, and processes.
We are the only cloud that supports everything an organization needs to make this shift. Think about all the hybrid work solutions your organization needs today: meetings, chat, phone, scheduling, project management, cloud storage, analytics and automation, and the cost and complexity that comes with adding, deploying, and managing each of them.
Microsoft 365 brings all these solutions together into an integrated experience that makes work easier and smarter for employees. Customers can save more than 60% compared to a patchwork of competing solutions.
When it comes to people, it all starts with a new approach to collaboration, both inside and outside the organization. We need to be great at synchronous, asynchronous, in-person, and remote collaboration.
In Microsoft 365 and Teams, we are innovating to support all the ways people work, and today we are announcing exciting new features to make that possible.
We also need to prioritize the employee experience. When work is increasingly done anywhere and at any time, the employee experience must adapt accordingly. It needs to be digital-first, connecting all employees wherever they are and whenever they are working to facilitate engagement and retention.
That is our goal with Microsoft Viva, which is already used by more than 1,000 organizations as their digital employee experience platform, helping employees feel more connected to their company’s mission and culture. Viva brings together communications, communities, knowledge, learning, goals, and insights into the flow of work in Teams.
I am particularly excited about Viva Goals, which creates a different kind of alignment across a team or organization. It brings business objectives into the daily flow of work. Think about how powerful this is: When all objectives and key results are shared across the organization, everyone is aligned. Viva Goals will be available next month.
In the new world of work, it is more important than ever to connect people across the organization, wherever and whenever they work, so that everyone feels included and engaged. That is also why we are introducing Viva Engage, which helps employees build communities, foster engagement with leadership, tap into knowledge and answers, and build their own personal networks. It includes new experiences like Storylines so you can create and share what you are passionate about, discover and follow colleagues and leaders, and find answers to questions.
We are also expanding Viva to include new modules for specific functions, starting with Viva Sales. We have connected Dynamics 365 with Office and Teams to leverage customer and business data and use it to power systems of record. Viva Sales helps sellers capture information about what has happened between customers and sellers across the Microsoft 365 suite, eliminating the burden of manual data entry. It ensures that sales leaders have a unified view of activities, deals, and revenue, while removing the friction for sellers of keeping CRM systems up to date.
Our approach extends to where people work, in person or remotely, so you can unlock productivity wherever you are. Space, in fact, is the ultimate collaboration tool. We are not going to change it, but we are going to use it very differently.
With Teams Rooms, we are closing the gap between people working remotely and those in the office with innovations like Front Row. In collaboration with original equipment manufacturers, we are supplying intelligent cameras designed to enhance people’s presence in Teams Rooms.
It is also why I am so excited about Windows 365, which is designed to help organizations empower workers to be more productive and more connected, regardless of their location. Between Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop, you have the most diverse set of options so everyone can work how and where they want.
It has been a year since we launched Windows 365, and it has been incredible to see how many people and organizations are using it to power hybrid work. We continue to expand where and how Windows 365 can be used, and today we announced that it will soon be available for use by the US government and government contractors.
Our approach to space extends to the metaverse and how we are bringing together the digital and physical worlds. We are taking a software-led approach so that everyone can benefit from these experiences, regardless of the device they are on. That is what we are building with Mesh for Teams, which I have been using internally and is accessible from anywhere on any device, including VR headsets, HoloLens, tablets, phones, and PCs.
This secular shift extends to every business process. Think about this: If Teams is where we work, we will want to access everything right there in the flow of work, giving back our scarcest resource: our time. The software needed to manage these mission-critical business processes must move from traditional ERP, CRM, and supply chain management systems of record to being much more data-driven, collaborative, and AI-powered.
Teams, together with Power Platform and Dataverse, are driving this across all business applications. Leading third-party ISVs have built deep integrations with Teams, helping customers bring every business process and function directly into the flow of work.
Dynamics 365 is designed for this new world of business processes. Our intelligent business applications connect data, processes, and teams, ushering in a new era of hyperconnected business and delivering unmatched value. Customers can save up to 50% compared to our primary competitors.
And today we announced the Microsoft Digital Contact Center platform, which brings together Dynamics 365, Azure Communication Services, Teams, Power Platform, and Nuance into a single open, extensible, and collaborative platform to deliver seamless omnichannel customer engagement.
Siloed data systems, along with high interoperability and maintenance costs, too often hinder the best personalized customer experience. Because our Digital Contact Center is a single unified platform, it reduces costs and enables instant visibility into trends across all service channels.
When we make everyday experiences collaborative, we can bend the productivity curve of an entire organization. It is also why I am excited to see so many customers and partners leveraging Teams as the organizing layer for a new class of line-of-business collaboration applications. I believe these applications could become the biggest drivers in today’s labor market because they bring together knowledge workers and frontline workers in the context of their communications and drive the next level of automation and productivity.
More than 80,000 of these applications have been built by organizations across every industry. For example, United Airlines has built a new scheduling solution within Teams:
Prioritize Security
Let’s now move to our final imperative: security. The numbers are quite clear. Organizations are experiencing an increase in both the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks.
We are bringing together technology, threat intelligence, and human expertise to deliver a comprehensive security, identity, compliance, and management solution that enables our partners to solve the security challenges of customers across every industry, on any cloud and on any client platform. We integrate more than 50 security product categories, once again reducing cost and complexity. On average, customers save more than 60% when they turn to us, compared to a multi-vendor solution.
Our solutions are powered by more than 24 trillion threat signals per day. It starts with Microsoft Entra, our new vision and portfolio for identity and access. It extends to Microsoft Purview, which is the future of data compliance and governance; Microsoft Priva, which includes new capabilities to help your customers manage privacy; and, of course, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Sentinel. And with Microsoft Security Experts, you can draw on our own threat researchers. Our expertise is now your expertise.
We see organizations around the world trusting our security solutions to protect some of their most important data, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has worked with our partner ELCA to use our technology to reunite families in the midst of a humanitarian crisis:
**
Everything I have discussed adds up to the Microsoft Cloud. The Microsoft Cloud is the only cloud that lets you take advantage of both the best-in-class products and the best solutions across the entire technology stack, across all the areas that matter most to customers so they can do more with less.
We want to be the best partner for our partners, and we are investing in your success. We have committed to helping our partners better meet customer needs, helping them earn specializations and deep technical training across all the solution areas I have discussed.
We have made it easier for partners to engage with us and drive their own profitability, which is why we have reduced our transaction fee in the commercial marketplace from 20% to 3%, so they can invest more in their own growth, and today we are announcing additional investments, such as free access to our best developer tools to help ISVs build and publish their applications faster.
The numbers speak for themselves: Partners who bet on us grow faster and generate higher margins, and for every dollar of revenue we generate, partners who build differentiated software solutions on the Microsoft Cloud generate 10 more dollars. But it goes beyond that.
We want you to succeed, so you can help the world around us succeed more. It has never been more important to connect what we build with what the world needs us to build. This is our collective purpose.
Every year, the winners of the Partner of the Year Award exemplify what is possible when we connect technology with the challenges of our customers and the world, and I want to close by sharing the story of a partner that has used our tools to make a real difference in New South Wales, Australia. With the rising number of people experiencing homelessness, the winner of our community response partner of the year used Power Platform and Dynamics 365 to provide better services to people in need and better visibility for policymakers: