Hoping to cement its position with enterprise developers and information technology staff as it expands into the cloud, Microsoft Corp. today unleashed a torrent of new products and features at its Ignite 2018 conference in Florida.

In conjunction with Chief Executive Satya Nadella’s opening keynote this morning, the company unveiled dozens of updates spanning just about every part of its enterprise portfolio, from Azure to Office 365. And as was to be expected, many of the major announcements placed an emphasis on artificial intelligence.

Universal AI tools for Office 365

One of the biggest highlights from Nadella’s keynote was the introduction of two AI-powered tools for Office 365 that seek to change how workers interact with the productivity suite. The first, Ideas, will embed what is essentially a context-specific recommendation engine in each of the suite’s core applications. It shares a lot of similarities with the Explore feature in G Suite. 

Microsoft has started the rollout by making the tool available for Excel this morning. Users will now see an icon to the right of the “ribbon” toolbar that they can click to bring up the Ideas sidebar. There, the tool shows potentially useful patterns in the data populating the spreadsheet and suggests chart templates that could be helpful for visualizing the data.

Ideas is set to roll out to other core Office 365 applications, most notably Word, at an unspecified future date. It will be accompanied by Microsoft Search, the other new AI tool, which will replace the current search bar in not only the applications that make up the productivity suite but also Windows and the business version of Bing.

Microsoft Search promises to bring greatly expanded access to business data. In addition to their own files, the tool will let workers look up files from other parts of the organization and view curated items manually added to results by administrators. Moreover, Microsoft Search doubles as a kind of text-based shortcut, allowing the user to bring up quickly an Office 365 feature not shown on the toolbar by typing in the first letters of its name.

Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told SiliconANGLE that he think Ideas and Search “complete” Office 365 compared with G Suite.

Azure Digital Twins and new data services

Microsoft’s upgrades to Office 365 are joined by a much longer list of enhancements to its Azure cloud platform, including a few brand-new services.

One is Azure Digital Twins. The service targets the growing number of companies embracing the “internet of things,” one of the growth areas that Microsoft is prioritizing alongside AI. Azure Digital Twins makes it possible to create a visual representation of a physical asset, be it a single device or an entire building, and use the representation to digitally plan out changes. This digital twin also lends itself to powering workflows for automating day-to-day management tasks such as optimizing a facility’s energy consumption.

Windows Virtual Desktop, another new service, lets companies spin up cloud-based Windows 10 and Windows 7 instances for employees, while a feature called Azure SQL Database Hyperscale will make it possible to store up to 100 terabytes of information in a single database instance. The latter capability is part of a broad update to Azure’s data management services that brings numerous smaller enhancements as well. Moorhead noted that Windows Virtual Desktop no doubt will catch the attention of rivals VMware Inc. and Citrix Systems Inc., which own that market.

On the occasion, Microsoft also unveiled SQL Server 2019, the next iteration of its widely used relational database. The release will bring integration with the Hadoop Distributed File System and Apache Spark, two popular technologies for processing unstructured data. This means that enterprises will gain the ability to process unstructured data in the same platform they’ve been using to hold their structured relational business records.

Open Data Initiative

Microsoft introduced new features for Office 365 and Azure in previous Ignite events as well, but some of the other announcements that it made this year have come as a much bigger surprise. Chief among them is the company’s formation of a partnership dubbed the Open Data Initiative with Adobe Systems Inc. and SAP SE.

Under the collaboration, the companies will work to implement a means of easily moving customer data between their respective marketing, sales and data management platforms. The goal is to provide a straightforward way for organizations piece together a complete view of buyers from the records spread out across their various systems.

“Customers have always had concerns over their data and the depth of the silos that data now resides in across multiple cloud systems,” said Nicholas McQuire, vice president of enterprise research at CCS Insight. “This market reality has impeded the cloud market especially for advanced services like AI and internet of things.”

Although details are light, he added, “the move is an important statement of intent that should help customers with these challenges. It should also encourage more cloud software vendors including Google and Salesforce to join forces to address this data challenge.”

Moorhead also attributed a lot of significance to Microsoft’s move to ally with Adobe and SAP, which he considers the biggest news of the day. “These three companies have most of the corporate data and if you want to do on-premises AI, you need to have the data together,” he said. “Salesforce is the most negatively impacted as it isn’t a part of the common data model.”

Another announcement from Ignite that should catch organizations’ attention is the introduction of Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise. It’s a bundle of development tools that essentially opens up the virtual assistant for corporate customers, enabling them to build custom voice applications on top. Microsoft said that Cortana-powered applications can handle fairly advanced tasks such as filing reports and scheduling meetings.

TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, is covering Ignite this week, and interviews more than two dozen executives, partners, customers and analysts, will be posted here.

Photo: Stu Miniman/SiliconANGLE