Microsoft Reveals Top IT Trends, Fresh Business Perspectives @ Summit 2014

Microsoft at its Mobility Summit Exhibition, disclosed key trends in reinventing productivity to empower individuals and businesses to do and achieve more.

At the exhibition Microsoft introduced its ‘Microsoft mobile-first and cloud-first word’, while demonstrating exciting new features of the improved operating system Windows 8.1, showing how Cloud strategy supports businesses.‎

‎In an exclusive interview with Nigeria CommunicationsWeek on the trends, Oluyomi Alarape, business group director , C& E, said, customers are collaborating with each other, sharing information and influencing decision-making and must not be overlooked by companies.

He said Microsoft has also discovered that “employees want to be able to find and talk to each other, and to build new value together across traditional hierarchies and silos. When social information becomes embedded in your tools and processes, you become a fully connected and engaged enterprise”.

Alarape added enterprises need solutions to ‎drive deeper, become more impactful while engaging with custimers.

These entail bringing together social capabilities across networking, collaboration, email, unified communications, and business applications to create new ways of engaging customers.

Microsoft ‎reaffirmed its efforts toward the provision of  comprehensive, integrated suite of social tools that spur interactions of customers and partners within consumer and business social networks; helping people bridge their business and personal lives and creating new ways of working and collaborating together.

From the cloud perspective, Ade Ajayi, business group director, MOD, said that successful digital businesses are holistically applying the concepts of mobile, social, and big data to reimagine their business.

According to him, Microsoft holds the view that cloud creates the connections that are not just p‎eople-focused, but enterprise-graded and that is the future of businesses.

This had necessitated the continuous upgrade of its suites like Windows 8.1 that has seen about150 new features added in the last 18 months.

Ajayi said the software giant has demonstrated how this world through the Office 365.

“Through the Office 365, Microsoft has been able to showcase how cloud ‎delivers experiences that appeal directly to employees and partners, increasing their engagement and allowing them to drive maximum productivity”, the Company explained.

The ‎enterprise-grade fundamentally changes how business operates and competes by partnering with a company that has the experience, reach, and footprint that can be trusted.

“No business is an island. Partner with the world’s largest developer base, with an integrated portfolio of cloud services across platforms, apps, and devices”, the Microsoft Mobility Report explained.

On mobility and productivity, Onur Altintas, business group director, Windows, Microsoft Nigeria, explained that the next wave in enterprise mobile will be focused on enabling a fluid, seamless mobile experience for users.

He added that going mobile is no longer about carrying a single mobile device, rather the ability for any user to pick up any device in the context of what they are doing, and have instant access to all of the “stuff”-settings, data, and applications that follow the user and flow seamlessly from device to device.

“Embrace device choice and anywhere access without compromising security”, he advised users while emphasising that “Windows 10 to be launched by next year will become pivotal in making this happen.

According to Altintas, organisations can grant it’s users access to their information from virtually anywhere, anytime, while still helping to protect their business information.

He said, “it’s possible, with the number of innovations unleashed by Microsoft, for you to even support compliant devices when they are personally owned rather than corporate provided, for maximum flexibility for users”.

‎He added that mobility and productivity solutions from the Company guarantee one can stay productive on the go with familiar, connected experiences.

Microsoft had earlier indicated that minimizing the learning curve is key to helping employees become more mobile.

To this end, Altintas said “We at Microsoft are committed to delivering best-in-class productivity experiences through business and social apps that work on the devices people want to use to get work done.

“For instance, ‎by using LOB solutions that already support a mobile experience (such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM). As well as taking advantage of an infrastructure for mobility, your developers can write one solution that delivers the best experience across the PC, tablet, and smartphone.

“This is made even easier when you can use the familiar tools, languages, and back-end infrastructure that you already have in place”.

‎The trio believe that by tapping into information about the users’ context like  their location and integrating their other apps and data like their contacts and social network memberships, an organisation can delight her customers with rich, immersive mobile experiences.

Essentially, ‎the cloud based solution helps in meeting the challenge of delivering content to users around the globe on a variety of devices such as scaling to meet demand, managing and distributing rich media content, streamlining development, and enabling you to focus on delivering the optimal user experience.

Microsoft also released its expectations on the part of CIOs, financial, HR,‎ marketing, health and other sectors.

In particular, it said, “Any data, big or small, can be a powerful force to accelerate competitive advantage. As an evolution of your overall business intelligence and analytics strategy, a tactical approach to Big Data can put you on the path to reimagine your enterprise.

It thus, advised chief executives to make their organizations more ‘intelligent’ by generating rich and valuable data with internet-enabled devices and sensors – transforming business operations and creating exceptional customer experiences.

“Use Data to your advantage: extend easy-to-use, powerful analytics and dynamic data visualization to your workplace. Enable a data-driven organization by weaving data and analytics into your business processes – making Big Data a natural evolution of your strategy”.