At Microsoft Ignite 2021 last night, CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the company’s premier enterprise conference with a virtual keynote focused on the critical role of the public cloud, and the key attributes that he believes will drive the next generation of innovation.
Ignite features 48 hours of free and continuous digital content. On Day 1, this included a fireside chat with Panos Panay, chief product officer of Windows & Devices, and Roanne Sones, corporate vice president of Azure Edge & Platform.
Highlights from Ignite include these key announcements:
- Innovations in Teams and Microsoft 365 include external collaboration, enhanced meeting security, and real-time customer journey orchestration capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing.
- A new cloud solution, Azure Percept, is a family of devices and services that powers real-time insight at the edge through hardware accelerators. These are integrated with Azure Machine Learning and AI capabilities and allows users to build solutions anywhere on their edge network journey.
- Professional developers are often tasked with quickly creating business solutions to help organizations adjust in an unprecedented environment. To aid innovation and support professional developers, new low code updates in Power Platform and Azure will equip them with features that seamlessly automate legacy applications and support a vision for low code programming across power Platform applications and across the cloud.
- Azure Data is providing new solutions and tools that enable customers to discover data, derive meaning from it, and maximize its business value – including Purview-Synapse integration and expanded data sources for Purview, along with new Cosmos DB features.
- Azure and Microsoft 365 updates to improve security, compliance and identity; empowering defenders to manage, defend and protect employees, data, work, and personal safety.
- Businesses can now use Azure Communication Services to connect customers, using their custom-built app, with internal users on Microsoft Teams via voice, video, or chat. Customers can connect to employees using Teams without any app download or required authentication.
The second day of the keynote can be watched here.