Microsoft Azure Tour in Frankfurt

 Peter Arbiter kicked off the Azure Tour and the keynote with a small introduction of what we will experience during this day.

Brad Anderson (@InTheCloudMST), Corp. Vice President at Microsoft Corp., oversees the Enterprise Mobility and talks about the journey to the cloud in the keynote.

Microsoft is helping organizations to reinvent business productivity, build the intelligent cloud and making personal computing more personal.\

Why the cloud? It makes us more efficient, more agile and provides differentiation.

In terms of efficiency, customers are always getting more opportunity and capability with new features that are deployed every day. Pay for what you need and hybrid scenarios.

Agility is all about how you can make your developers, customers better and faster. Speed, flexibility, elastic scale.

Differentiation: All the pieces makes you so much better.

Many partners use one or more of the cloud services: SAAS solutions, Cloud infrastructure, Higher-level services, e.g. Eurovision, Siemens Healthcare, Rockwell, taking advantage of the incredible scale that Azure provides.

Dr. Arthur Kaindl, General Manager Digital Health Services at Siemens: industry leader in medical imaging and labs, 90% worldwide. The application Siemens Teamplay helps diagnose patients, to avoid misdiagnosis, to come towards better decision for the benefit of the patient. Images are uploaded to the cloud, generate huge data, eliminate noise to come to precise analytic results. Direct radiologist to something that he hasn’t looked at. Otherwise information might get missed. Over 22 000 hospitals. Using machine learning to help guide to correct diagnosis. Chat functionalities, exchange data and interact. Research groups talk to each other on specific clinical questions. Timeframe: first line of code April 2014, release in June 2015. 15 months development cycle. Crucial to get quickly into the market. Sensitive nature of the data, created a safe and secure environment with highest level of data security and integrity through the cloud. Journey to the cloud: from traditional engineering, with the cloud approach you can shift your development to another dimension. First product mobile-first cloud-first, utilize cloud as a service and start in a different way can become quicker. Use DevOps, to bring something fast to the market and react fast to the change in the market. Change healthcare to help mankind. Getting the clinicians on the network, Freemium. Create enough data to help feed the information to help clinicians to help patience. Amazing story where technology helps save lives.

Microsoft Cloud:

• Productivity and business SAAS apps with Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics, Power BI.
• Enterprise mobility with Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite
• Microsoft Azure
  • Developer and app platform with Visual Studio and Azure App Service
  • Data and analytics with SQL Server and Cortana analytics Suite
  • Internet of things with Azure IoT Suite
  • Cloud infrastructure with Azure, Azure Stack, Operations Management Suite

You must have a cloud partner with data centers around the world, Microsoft has double than Google and Amazon. Hybrid scale and enterprise-proven. Hybrid environment. Open and flexible, support apps in the platform that you want. Developer and IT productivity, Platform for SAAS extensibility, support tools that your developers want to use. Microsoft acquired Xamarin a few days ago. Must be trustworthy, you gotta have a level of security, not just from bad guys but also from government.

What is the German cloud? Peter Arbitter, Director Cloud + Enterprise at Microsoft Germany. Customers come to Microsoft with the “German angst”: data security and privacy. Combining the best of two worlds: German cloud with hyper scale, Deutsche Telekom runs the cloud. What is Microsoft doing differently with the German cloud compared to Amazon? They run data centers in Germany but operations is still in America. Problem is the patriotic act. This is overcome with the German cloud, Deutsche Telekom operates the German cloud so German company that is not subject to the patriotic act.

Today’s spotlight:

• Cloud infrastructure: you have to have the capability to take your app to the cloud as is, hyper scale and global footprint, empower your devs and IT pros to do what’s best for the business.
  • Azure IaaS with Victor Arzate: we take a look at the Azure Portal, Marketplace with industry leading vendors tested and certified, we create a virtual machine, estimate price charged by the minute. Deploy a server with location and size of my choice  within minutes. Monster VMs: 32 cores, 448 Gb memory!
  • Lean in. Redefine the future by using the cloud. Cloud is the future. Used by Heineken, Pantaenuis Yacht Insurance (Azure as extension to data centers, backup, recover entire data center in a few hours), United Nations Development Programme
• Data and analytics: in organizations there is data that is not used, you have the ability to move all this data to the cloud, combine it with other data sets, take the data and make it accessible, learn from the data. Too many silos in organizations. Put data to work. Unlock the data and unlock the value!
  • Azure SQL Data Warehouse + Power BI with Joachim Hammer: we look at how easy it is to create a warehouse in the Azure Portal nd we are ready to analyze to date within just a few minutes, bring the data to life with Power BI and start visualization, create reports and compare data.
  • Used by Lotus F1 Team (analyze data in the cloud and make the car faster), Ford , GermanWings pmOne.
• Application development: accelerate the time from having an idea to hosting it in the cloud.
  • Azure App Service with Nazim Lala: flexibility, agility and speed for building an app and having it in the cloud. We look at the power of creating a web application in the cloud using the Azure Portal. You can choose the language of your choice. You can use many source controls from Visual Studio Team Services, to GitHub, to OneDrive,… Changes are automatically synchronized. Scaling the application is extremely simple: scale up by moving it into a larger VM or scale out to get more VMs to run your application. The power of the platform is you can create rules with metrics to automatically scale your app: if my app’s CPU percentage goes over 80% then scale it up or if it goes down scale it down.
  • Used by nexxtv, Alaska Airlines, Ultra Tendency (catastrophe in Fukishima in Japan, assemble mobile Geiger counters using the cloud, citizens of Japan could measure and upload activity, people could see the radiation count, set up HDInsights Cluster and generate heat map, boot up when needed and release cluster when done).

Cloud can change what we do. Embrace it. Lean into it. Empower people to achieve more. Microsoft will do their part to reinvent business, make personal computer more personal and to build the intelligent cloud platform.