Microsoft Convergence 2015 – Here’s How Microsoft Will Change The Way You Work

In our increasingly connected world, it seems that technology often promises more than it can deliver. Microsoft, however, begs to differ.

Speaking at his opening keynote at the Convergence 2015 event in Atlanta today, company CEO Satya Nadella laid out his vision of how Microsoft’s products can help empower everyone from multi-national businesses to small smart-ups.

Systems

In a presentation entitled ‘Empowering business transformation’, Nadella explained how Microsoft is focused on building “systems of intelligence” to revolutionise the way we work, starting at a personal level.

“Any change driven by technology starts with individuals getting comfortable with new forms of technology and how we use them in our daily lives,” Nadella said, noting how services such as voice assistant Cortana and his Microsoft band fitness tracker help him throughout his day.

“Devices will come and go,” he added, “the most interesting thing is the data being collected”, giving the example of a collection of health data, uploaded to the cloud, could help create an online fitness record which could be shared with doctors and medical insurers, benefitting users both now and in the long run.

Transformation

As for businesses and larger organisations, Nadella noted how the digitisation of many processes is helping transform the way they work and operate every day.

“When we think about any industries…any of them are being transformed by what is being digitised within,” Nadella said, mentioning that 80pc of businesses by 2020 will have built apps, services or analytics solutions to provide them with intelligent data with which they can better understand their customers.

This includes the well-publicised growth of the Internet of Things, which Microsoft predicts will growing to around 26bn ‘things’ by 2019, but also the huge increase in data which will be in the cloud by this time, anticipated to hit 44 zetabytes (equivalent to a billion terabytes), what Nadella called, “an explosion of data”.

In order to better stay on top of this, Microsoft has announced several new analytics and cloud services in recent months, some of which were on display during Nadella’s keynote.

This included Delve, an Office service which allows employees to share and interact with the work created by their colleagues through a single program, and PowerBI, which allows business decision makers to create personalised dashboards allowing them to track statistics and usage of various business processes within their organisation using dynamic analytics tracking, both of which Nadella and Microsoft hope will improve the way you work and connect.

“We as a technology provider are very focused on one single thing – empowering you as individuals and organisations across every vertical and every size of business, and any part of the world, to drive your agenda and do the things you want to do for your business,” he said.

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