Today, I’m sharing the progress we’re making toward our goal to increase diversity at Microsoft globally. Our 2019 Diversity and Inclusion Report is our most comprehensive to date, and reflects our data, our journey, our learnings, and our employees’ stories. With this year’s report, we renew our commitment to our mission to consciously and intentionally include everyone.

In 2019, we made progress on our diversity and inclusion objectives, as reflected in the numbers. But there is another part of our journey that year-over-year data can’t convey: the depth of our commitment and the range of programs in place to keep diversity and inclusion at the heart of the work we do. And although we’re gratified to see the movement, we know we cannot take our focus off the work that needs to continue.

In addition to the numbers, the report reflects day-to-day learnings, and how we’re applying this knowledge to build trust and adapt as we go. For example, this year we enhanced some of the ways we measure and analyze our data to give us a more detailed look at specific areas where we’re hoping to improve.

Here are some of the new additions to this year’s reporting:

• The Inclusion Index, shared publicly for the first time in this report, is an internal sentiment measure that helps us understand the effectiveness of company efforts by measuring employee perceptions about their experiences at Microsoft.
• Equal pay data is being expanded to reflect the global representation of men and women in the U.S. plus the five largest markets outside the U.S. based on employee population. This data represents almost 80% of our workforce, giving us a more nuanced understanding of our pay practices globally.
• We’ve distinguished directors and executives from each other in the category we previously labeled as “Leadership,” and called out metrics for women and racial and ethnic minorities among managers and individual contributors, to better examine representation throughout the workforce.

I do want to note that the data listed below does not include our broader Microsoft family of companies — LinkedIn, GitHub, Compulsion, Playground Games, Ninja Theory, InXile, Obsidian Entertainment and Undead Labs. The full report shows snapshots of data with and without these companies as well as a look at LinkedIn’s and GitHub’s reports that were also released today.

From June 2018 to June 2019 we saw encouraging gains in the representation of our employees. In terms of race and ethnicity, we saw modest year-over-year growth in total representation in all categories, including in tech and in leadership roles at both the director and executive level. Overall, racial and ethnic minorities represent 46.7% of the U.S. workforce, up 2.2 percentage points from 2018.

This year, continuing a positive trend dating back to 2016, there were steady increases in the representation of women globally at the company in all the aspects we measured, including tech and leadership roles. Overall representation of women increased 1.1 percentage points to 27.6%. At leadership levels, women currently represent 37% of our company’s executives responsible for leading a geographic market, with women currently leading three of our largest global markets.

We aspire to a workforce and culture that truly reflects the societies where we work, around the world, and there is clearly more we need to do.

Equal pay
In the U.S. women earn $1.001 for every $1.000 earned by their counterparts who are men, and racial and ethnic minorities earn $1.006 for every $1.000 earned by their white counterparts. As we expanded our equal pay data to include data on women and men from the U.S. plus the five largest markets outside the U.S. — collectively representing about 80% of our workforce — we see that women in those combined geographies earn $0.999 for every $1.000 by their counterparts who are men.  At Microsoft, we are committed to the principle of equal pay for equal work for our employees and strive to pay employees equally for substantially similar work.

Inclusion Index
Our Microsoft Inclusion Index, shared publicly for the first time, reflects that 88% of employees agree that they experience positive aspects of inclusion at Microsoft. With our scale and global reach, this is a positive indicator, but we know we have a responsibility to engage those who are not part of that 88%.

Our broad responsibility
With our corporate mission, our scale, and our global reach, we have a responsibility to do far more than just raise awareness about inclusion. We are uniquely positioned to drive the conversation, to have a meaningful, tangible impact on how people experience Microsoft products and services, and how they engage within our workplace and with the company in general. Our responsibility is not just to those who work with us, but to the larger technology industry, the industries we serve and the communities where we live.

I encourage you all to read the full report to explore much more detailed data, insights, employee stories, and initiatives, as well as our learnings to see how we’re applying this knowledge.

The post The Microsoft Diversity and Inclusion Report reveals momentum and learnings for the future appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Imagine an autonomous vehicle navigating a smoke-filled mine looking for survivors, personal belongings or any other clues to find anyone who might be alive. It identifies objects it sees and decides which paths to take first. As it reaches the limit of where it can explore, a drone sitting on the vehicle flies off to explore the hard-to-reach corners of the mine. All of this is done without any communication with the outside world. Believe it or not, this isn’t science fiction! Team Explorer from Carnegie Mellon University and Oregon State University did exactly this to win the first event of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Subterranean Challenge.

Today we live in the age of data-driven artificial intelligence (AI), where machine intelligence systems solve difficult problems by considering hundreds of millions of trials or training episodes. Hard problems in perception and decision making that were considered too tough by the community even in the recent past are today being successfully solved using techniques such as reinforcement learning (RL).

I’ve often thought about how advances like these in machine perception and automated decision-making could help us do things like build intelligent robots, and in particular tackle the challenges of optimal control of dynamical systems. And since my early days as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, I’ve been fascinated by the tight loop between perception — using computer intelligence to sense surroundings — and action — using this feedback and data to make decisions. Today, our work teaching computers to play games (e.g., mastering Ms. Pac-Man) has the ability to fundamentally change the way we will build control systems in the future. The potential applications could impact a wide range of industries with profound impact on safety and productivity — going well beyond just the self-driving cars that dominate today’s news cycles.

Today’s engineered devices and systems use rules-based logic to bring together the scientific principles, technology and mathematics which have been painstakingly discovered over time by subject matter experts and engineers. But what if our engineers of the future could build control systems infused with machine intelligence that go beyond rules-based logic, and respond in real-time to changing environments to accomplish their goal? Technologies such as RL that are seeing tremendous success in solving video games will be key to building real-world sequential decision-making mechanisms and will power our next generation of autonomous systems.

Helping engineers build action-perception loops for the real world
Translating the success of RL in video games to real-world autonomous systems carries big challenges — for example, no one loses a life making the wrong move in a video game! AI can’t learn from its failures as easily in the real world, where the potential cost of mistakes can be huge. Additionally, newer AI techniques are data hungry. For example, it takes hundreds of millions of tries before a seemingly respectable policy can be trained for many of these gaming tasks. So, operating physical systems like machines or chemical processes for millions of cycles to generate data to train AI can be a very expensive proposition.

Today, I’m excited to talk about how new breakthroughs in the world of machine teaching and creating high-fidelity simulations will enable you to tackle these challenges.

Machine teaching – a new paradigm to infuse domain knowledge to help improve learning
Our researchers have been hard at work on developing machine teaching, which infuses expert domain knowledge and harnesses human expertise to break a big problem into easier, smaller tasks. It also can give AI models important clues about how to find a solution faster, dramatically accelerating model training time. There’s still AI underneath the hood, but you as the expert provide examples, or lesson plans, to help the learning algorithms solve the task at hand. Since you are the one giving the lessons, describing the goals, desired behavior, and safety boundary conditions, the resulting AI models are also far more explainable and auditable once they are deployed. I know I wouldn’t want a “black-box” AI model running the control loop for my systems!

Borrowing a quote from Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman, “Computer Science is the science of abstraction, creating the right model for thinking about a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it.” I think of machine teaching as the abstraction we are creating, the right model for thinking about applying domain expertise to AI systems. It can help you to bridge between the model-first mindset of engineers and the code-first mindset practiced by software developers.

High-fidelity simulations – A critical path to gather experiences at scale
Similar to machine teaching, simulations offer a way to generate synthetic data that can train machine intelligence systems at scale and without taking unnecessary risks. Simulations are a safe and cost-efficient way to train AI models, if you can model the key elements like the devices, the sensors and the environment interacting with your system. That allows you to simulate all possible scenarios, including edge situations — such as when a certain sensor or actuator fails — to teach the AI how to adapt to those situations.

For example, we built an open source simulator for aerial and other robotic vehicles called Aerial Informatics and Robotics Simulation, or AirSim for short. AirSim allows the simulation of a wide variety of environments, lighting conditions, sensors and fusion of sensor data. AirSim’s ability to create near-realistic autonomy pipelines is how Team Explorer secured its win.

Most of our customers use highly specialized simulation software for their specific use cases. We’re working with leading simulation makers in the industry like MathWorks to bring these simulators to Azure. MathWorks is the leading developer of mathematical computing software, including MATLAB and Simulink, used by millions of engineers and scientists to design complex embedded and multidomain systems. These partnerships will enable you to easily produce the large volumes of synthetic data needed to quickly train AI models for your specific use case.

The possibilities are endless, and the time is now
We’re continuing to bring AI to engineers and designers that will harness their expertise and trustworthy autonomy as the foundation for accelerated innovation. Customers like Delta, Shell and Toyota are already starting to use and benefit from this approach. From industrial applications to search and rescue operations like in the DARPA challenge, the applications of this technology will be endless. We hope you will join us on this journey to start inventing the future!

Related:
Visit: Autonomous systems with Microsoft AI

Read: How autonomous systems use AI that learns from the world around it

Read: Helping first responders achieve more with autonomous systems and AirSim

Read: Machine teaching: How people’s expertise makes AI even more powerful

Learn more: Game of Drones Competition at NeurIPS 2019

The post Bringing autonomous systems to engineers: Taking a leap from the digital world of games to the real world appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Today we live in a world where every company is a software company, and technology is deeply woven throughout company workflow and individual productivity. In this world, the role of IT and developers is becoming increasingly important, and that is why we are so excited to welcome more than 26,000 IT implementers and decision makers, developers, data professionals and other people across industries to experience the latest Microsoft technology at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando, Florida.

In the next week, we’ll unveil a broad range of new tools and services to help companies and individuals put their data to work for them, help employees build expertise quickly, and allow businesses to take advantage of key Azure tools no matter what cloud provider they’re using.

It’s also a time when intelligent insights and security are paramount. AI is infused into updates and powerful new features in many of the tools you already use every day, and so is our firm commitment to security and privacy. You’ll see how our approach of investing in built-in capabilities, cloud-powered intelligence and integration is helping customers address some of the biggest security and compliance challenges they face.

Here are a few highlights from today:

• We’re announcing Azure Synapse Analytics, a new service that merges the capabilities of Azure SQL Data Warehouse with new enhancements that will help customers put their data to work much more quickly and securely by pulling together insights from all data sources, data warehouses and big data analytics systems.
• We’re launching a preview of Azure Arc, which offers Azure services and management to customers on other clouds or infrastructure, including those offered by Amazon and Google.
• We are sharing a public preview of a new robotic process automation capability in Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow) called UI flows, which lets users turn manual tasks into automated workflows by recording and playing back human-driven actions across software that does not support API automation, with point-and-click experience. With this update, Power Automate is a comprehensive, end-to-end automation platform.

• We’re announcing Project Cortex, the first new Microsoft 365 service since the launch of Microsoft Teams, and a cornerstone of Microsoft’s vision to transform knowledge and learning for customers. This new tool is a cross between a powerful organizer of enterprise content and a digital concierge that brings people the information they need in the context of their workflow.

• We’re delivering new experiences across Microsoft 365 that put people at the center so they can do their best work. A few of my favorite new experiences that will make my life easier are:

• • Play My Emails in Outlook for iOS Cortana uses natural voice and language recognition to intelligently read new emails aloud and share scheduling changes, making it possible to catch up and act on emails even when your hands are busy with other things.
  • New voice enhance in Stream uses machine learning algorithms to detect and eliminate unwanted background noise in any video with just one click.
  • With the new Teams Chat button in Outlook it’s easy to move back-and-forth email conversations out of email into a Teams chat.
• We’re introducing the new Microsoft Edge and Microsoft Bing, enhanced with unique solutions including one that brings together the internet with your intranet via Microsoft Search in Bing, as well as powerful default privacy protection and the ability to move from web research directly into Microsoft Office applications.

If you aren’t able to join us in Orlando this week, you can watch CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote live or on demand, as well as check out all the highlights on our news page. And there are also more than 1,000 great sessions available to watch virtually.

Microsoft Ignite is the place to get a comprehensive look at the future of enterprise technology, as well as inspiration, training and connections that help attendees drive their businesses forward. It’s going to be a great week!

 

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Photo by Brian Smale

We live in an increasingly connected world. I commute to work in a connected car, one that gets over-the-air updates with new experiences. I’m connected to my work and personal life in real time with my smartphone and laptop. And I work in a connected office, one that knows how to automatically save energy and ensure security. From the moment I woke up today, I was immersed in an IoT world.

And so were you.

We are surrounded by connected devices, all of them collecting and transmitting vast amounts of information. That makes a seamless, smart and secure Internet of Things (IoT) important to us all.

This week at IoT Solutions World Congress we are announcing new capabilities that further simplify the customer journey and deliver highly secured IoT solutions. These solutions help customers embrace IoT as a core strategy to drive better business outcomes, improve safety and address social issues, such as:

• Predicting and preventing equipment failures
• Optimizing smart buildings for space utilization and energy management
• Improving patient outcomes and worker safety
• Tracking assets across a supply chain that is constantly being optimized

IDC expects that 41.6 billion devices — including smartphones, smart home assistants and appliances — will be connected to the internet by 2025[1].

At Microsoft, we are committed to providing a trusted, easy-to-use platform that allows our customers and partners to build seamless, smart and secure solutions regardless of where they are in their IoT journey.

Making IoT seamless: Delivering new IoT innovations from cloud to edge

In 2018, we  announced our commitment to invest $5 billion in IoT and intelligent edge — technology that is accelerating ubiquitous computing and bringing unparalleled opportunity for transformation across industries. Since then, we have launched more than 100 new services and features in our IoT platform designed to make IoT solutions more secure and scalable, reduce complexity, make our platform more open and create opportunities in new market areas.

Azure IoT Central, our IoT app platform, reduces the burden and costs associated with developing, managing and maintaining enterprise-grade IoT solutions. With IoT Central you can provision an IoT application in 15 seconds, customize it in an hour and go to production the same day.

And today, we are excited to announce a set of breakthrough features to help solution builders accelerate time-to-value:

• 11 new industry-focused application templates to accelerate solution builders across retail, health care, government and energy
• API support for extending IoT Central or integrating it with other solutions, including API support for device modeling, provisioning, lifecycle management, operations and data querying
• IoT Edge support, including management for edge devices and IoT Edge module deployments
• IoT plug-and-play support for rapid device development and connectivity
• The ability to save and load applications to enable application repeatability
• More data export options for continually exporting data to other Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) services
• Multitenancy support to build and manage a single application with multiple tenants, each with their own isolated data, devices, users and roles
• Custom user roles for fine-grained access control to data, actions and configurations in the system
• A new pricing model for early 2020 to provide customers and partners with predictable pricing as usage scales

A variety of partners are already using IoT Central to transform their industries. For example, C.H. Robinson, a Fortune 500 provider of multimodal transportation services and third-party logistics, is using Intel intelligent gateways and IoT tags managed by IoT Central, allowing it to quickly integrate IoT data and insights into its industry-leading Navisphere Vision product. Key retailers are using Navisphere, including Microsoft’s own supply-chain teams who are optimizing logistics and costs as we prepare to deliver Surface and Xbox products for the holidays.

Read more on our IoT Central blog about how partners are leveraging IoT Central to transform their businesses and their industries.

Making IoT smarter

Azure IoT Hub is the core of our Azure IoT platform services. It is used by IoT Central and acts as a powerful cloud gateway, enabling bidirectional communication with millions of IoT devices. We are excited to announce new features that will make IoT solutions using IoT Hub even smarter:

• Azure Event Grid on IoT Edge brings the power and flexibility of Event Grid’s pub-sub semantics and event-driven model to the edge. The same runtime in the edge and the cloud creates a portable programming model to publish between modules, edge devices or to the cloud. As with the cloud, publish your own events or connect other modules like Azure Blob Storage on IoT Edge to leverage their built-in event capabilities when new blobs are created
• IoT Hub message enrichment adds the ability to stamp messages with rich information before they are sent, simplifying downstream processing and accelerating customer insights
• IoT Hub integrates with Azure Event Grid, making it easier to send device telemetry events to Azure services. Azure Event Grid on IoT Edge is now available in Public Preview. IoT Hub message enrichment and telemetry events in Event Grid will be in general availability by the end of November.

Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping company, is using IoT Hub to move over 12 million containers a year all over the globe. “With Azure IoT Hub, we have seamless two-way communication between our IoT platform and devices,” says Siddhartha Kulkarni, digital solutions enabler, A.P. Moller – Maersk. “The ability to send commands from within Azure IoT Hub makes it a command and control system and not just a data ingestion system. Being able to set up Azure IoT Hub globally in different locations and regionalize data ingestion opens up many future options for us.” Read the Maersk customer story here.

And Danfoss, a Danish company that creates products and provides services used to cool food, heat and air condition buildings and more, is using Azure IoT Hub to build IoT solutions with reliable and secure communications between its IoT devices for refrigerators and an Azure-hosted solution backend.

Azure Maps inherits the goodness of Azure — including global scalability, robust security and data sovereignty — and provides location intelligence to IoT applications with mapping and geospatial services to drive insights and action.

For 12 consecutive years, Gartner has recognized Microsoft as a leader in analytics and business intelligence. With integration into Power BI, Azure Maps now enables Power BI users to easily perform Geospatial Analytics, enabling customers to build out Azure Maps solutions that don’t require developer resources. And to provide world-class security, protection and compliance to government customers, Azure Maps is now available on Government Cloud.

And now, in partnership with AccuWeather, Azure Maps customers can add geospatial weather intelligence into their applications to enable weather-based scenarios, such as routing, targeted marketing and operations optimization. “This is a game changer,” says Dr. Joel N. Myers, AccuWeather founder and CEO. “AccuWeather’s partnership with Microsoft gives all Azure Maps customers the ability to easily integrate authentic and highly accurate weather-based location intelligence and routing into their applications. This opens up new opportunities for organizations large and small to benefit from our superior weather data based on their unique needs.”

Azure Time Series Insights provides a turnkey, end-to-end IoT analytics solution with rich semantic modeling for contextualization of time series data, asset-based insights, and a best-in-class user experience for discovery, trending, anomaly detection and operational intelligence. It is purpose-built for IoT scale data, allowing customers to focus on their businesses without having to worry about manageability of their infrastructure, regional availability or disaster recovery. We are excited to announce the new capabilities, releasing soon:

• Multilayered storage that provides the best of both worlds: lightning-fast access to frequently used data (“warm data”) and fast access to infrequently used historical data (“cold data”)
• Flexible cold storage: Historical data is stored in the customer’s own Azure Storage account, giving them complete control of their IoT data. Data is stored in open source Apache Parquet format, enabling predictive analytics, machine learning, and other custom computations using familiar technologies including Spark, Databricks and Jupyter
• Rich analytics: Rich query APIs and user experience supported interpolation, new scalar and aggregate functions, categorical variables, scatter plots and time shifting between time series signals for in-depth analysis
• Enterprise-grade scale: Scale and performance improvements at all layers, including ingestion, storage, query and metadata/model
• Extensibility and integration: New Time Series Insights Power BI connector allows customers to take queries from Time Series Insights into Power BI to get a unified view in a single pane of glass

Through our Express Logic acquisition, Azure RTOS (real-time operating system) continues to enable new intelligent capabilities. It unlocks access to billions of new connected endpoints and grows the number of devices that can seamlessly connect to Azure. Renesas is a top MCU (MicroController Unit) manufacturer who shares our vision of making IoT development as easy and seamless as possible and we are excited to announce that Azure RTOS will be broadly available across Renesas’s products including the Synergy and RA MCU families. It is already integrated into the Renesas Synergy Software Package and will be integrated out-of-box with the Renesas RA Flexible Software Package).

Making IoT more secure, from cloud to edge

Enabling a future of intelligent and secure computing at the edge for organizations, enterprises and consumers will require advances in computer architecture down to the chip level, with security built in from the beginning. Microsoft is taking a holistic approach to securing the intelligent edge and IoT from the silicon to the cloud in a way that gives customers flexibility and control.

Azure Sphere is quickly becoming the solution of choice for customers across industries — including Starbucks, Gojo and Leoni — as they look to securely connect existing mission-critical equipment and develop net-new devices and equipment with security built in. Today we are excited to announce the upcoming general availability of Azure Sphere in February 2020. Read more about the upcoming Azure Sphere general availability on the Microsoft Security blog.

Our mission is to set a new standard for IoT security that makes it easier to securely connect existing equipment and create new devices with built-in security. In April 2018, we introduced Azure Sphere as an end-to-end solution that includes an Azure Sphere-certified chip, the Azure Sphere Operating System and the Azure Sphere Security Service. The solution is designed to make it easy for manufacturers to create innately secure devices and keep those devices up-to-date over time with over a decade of security and OS updates delivered directly to each device by Microsoft.

Since we first introduced Azure Sphere, we’ve made tremendous progress delivering on our ambitious product vision, investing in partnerships and capabilities that help us serve customers wherever they are in their IoT journey. This includes our partnerships with silicon leaders to enable heterogeneity at the edge; our longstanding partnership with MediaTek, and our recent partnership announcements with NXP and Qualcomm, which will introduce the first cellular-enabled Azure Sphere-certified chip.

Discover how to unlock your own IoT opportunities

We have a number of ways to learn more, no matter what your goals are and where you are on your IoT journey.

• Come see us at IoT Solutions World Congress 2019 in Barcelona, Oct. 29–31, 2019. We will be bringing IoT solutions to life in our booth (#D411), across various industries and scenarios:
  • IoT at Home, featuring ABB & EnOcean
  • IoT on My Commute, featuring Dover Oil & Accenture
  • IoT in the Office, featuring Bosch & Edge
  • IoT in Store, featuring Codit & Cognizant
  • IoT for a Drink, featuring Celli Group
  • IoT in the Factory, featuring Softing & PTC
• You can also catch my keynote on Tuesday, Oct. 29, Unlocking the Next Frontier of the Internet of Things.
  • Join us at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando, Nov. 4–8, 2019.
  • Visit us online to learn how to make great things happen with Microsoft Azure IoT.

IoT has already revolutionized our lives by transforming everyday devices into an incredible connected universe. The question now is, are you ready for what’s next?

[1] Worldwide Global DataSphere IoT Device and Data Forecast, 2019–2023, Doc # US45066919, May 2019

 

I have been talking a lot this year about democratizing digital. It is about empowering everyone to have a digital experience and enabling everyone to participate in the digital economy. This trend is large-scale, with broad business and social impact. This was clear earlier this month at the Microsoft Government Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C. There, I met with federal agency and department leaders to discuss how cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) are delivering new levels of innovation and impacting entire markets and industries.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) offers one of the best examples of the power of data and AI to transform agricultural productivity through the FarmBeats initiative. By using data from sensors, drones, satellites and tractors, farmers hope to reduce costs, increase yields and grow crops that are more sustainable. The USDA is piloting FarmBeats at its largest research facility — a 7,000-acre farm in Beltsville, Maryland, with plans to expand the technology to more than 200 farms in the national research network, ranging from small family farms to large commercial operations.

Another example of government innovation is taking place within the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) Office of Aviation Services. The DOI is increasing the speed, accuracy and scalability of data captured from over 500 million acres of land from its unmanned aviation systems — more commonly known as drones. By leveraging Power BI and PowerApps, employees can build tools and custom applications to quickly gain insights from data captured during critical missions (like natural disaster relief).

Health care is one of the most important areas of focus as we talk about democratizing digital. To support this, we have announced three important partnerships, each aimed at solving pressing challenges facing doctors, researchers and patients. Yesterday we announced our seven-year partnership with Humana to develop predictive solutions for personalized and secure patient support. Using the Microsoft Azure cloud, Azure AI and Microsoft 365, Humana will also be able to equip home health care workers with real-time access to information and voice technology to better understand key factors that influence patient health.

We also announced last week a partnership with health care solutions provider Nuance to transform the doctor-patient experience through the delivery of ambient clinical intelligence technologies (ACI). By using speech-recognition technology and advanced conversational AI with Azure, doctors will have more time to focus on meaningful conversations with their patients. Once a patient gives consent to the ACI system, the clinical documentation writes itself — all while meeting the security and privacy requirements of this regulated industry.

Novartis will bring Microsoft AI capabilities together with its deep expertise in life sciences to address specific challenges that make the process of discovering, developing and delivering new medicines so costly and time-consuming. Today, it typically takes 10 years and more than $2 billion to develop and bring to market a new prescription drug. Because streamlining this process could save so many lives, our goal is to empower Novartis associates at each step of drug development to use AI to unlock the insights hidden in vast amounts of data, even if they are not data scientists by training.

I am excited to see the cloud revolutionizing the media and entertainment industry, empowering creators to tell stories more collaboratively. Studios and broadcasters around the world are looking to the cloud to unlock new, more efficient ways to create, produce and distribute content. We are working with The Walt Disney Studios, as a StudioLAB innovation partner, to pilot new ways to use the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to accelerate innovation in the production and postproduction process — or from “scene to screen.” Technicolor is moving Pulse, its cutting-edge data asset management platform, to Azure to empower content creators to quickly and easily organize and access their work from anywhere in the world. Plus, in India, we are collaborating with Eros Now to build a next-generation platform on Azure, strengthening the company’s position as a leading provider of online video streaming entertainment for viewers around the world.

Seeing the industry momentum above reinforces the fact that every company can be a technology company, and everyone can benefit from a digital experience to become more agile, efficient and data-driven. Ste. Michelle Wine Estates is creating a holistic consumer experience by reimagining the shopping journey with Dynamics 365 Commerce, bridging physical and digital channels. The leading Australian snack food business Majans is using Dynamics 365 AI-driven insights to create a digital feedback loop for production and distribution on a global scale, bringing the company closer to its factory of the future.

To keep inspiring innovation, we continue to expand and deepen our relationships with many companies — including other technology providers. We are working with Oracle to streamline workflows that enable customers to use AI-powered voice within Microsoft Teams to access Oracle Cloud Applications. Two days ago, we announced an extensive go-to-market partnership with SAP to continue powering business transformation for enterprise customers, making it easier to migrate to the cloud. This exciting milestone is another step toward helping our customers reduce complexities and minimize cost while leveraging best-in-class technologies.  Further, we are building upon our long-standing partnership with Samsung to combine our intelligent experiences with Samsung’s devices to help people be more productive on any device, anywhere.

Across all these examples, I am amazed by the scale and impact of our customers’ digital ambitions — from government to health care to media and beyond. I look forward to seeing our customers’ innovations solve even more business, industry and societal challenges around the world.

Hoje, juntamente com o Taguspark assinalámos o início das obras da futura sede e da melhor experiência para trabalhar em Portugal. O novo edifício resulta num investimento na ordem dos 12 milhões e marca também a nova fase de desenvolvimento do Taguspark.

I’m excited to announce that Microsoft has acquired Mover, a leading provider of cloud file migration, including admin-led and self-service offerings. As customer demand to move content to the cloud continues to grow, Mover will help make it easier than ever for customers to migrate files to Microsoft 365.

Our goal is to help customers move to the cloud with confidence. Today, we offer several options to support cloud file migrations, including FastTrack and offerings from trusted Microsoft partners, as well as the SharePoint Migration Tool for migrating content from on-premises SharePoint sites and file shares to Microsoft 365. Mover will enhance these offerings with proven tools, plus more self-service options over time.

Today, Mover supports migration from over a dozen cloud service providers – including Box, Dropbox, Egnyte, and Google Drive – into OneDrive and SharePoint, enabling seamless file collaboration across Microsoft 365 apps and services, including the Office apps and Microsoft Teams. The Mover team also brings deep expertise and migration technology, which advances Microsoft’s commitment to providing organizations of all sizes with the right tools, people and partners to successfully migrate to the Microsoft Cloud.

Together with Mover, we’ll continue to provide customers with fast and reliable migrations to the cloud, with best practices and security and more connectors to more source systems, ultimately making the move into Microsoft 365 as seamless and cost effective as possible.

We are excited to welcome Mover to Microsoft and encourage you to get started on your migration today at Mover.io. Learn more here about how to use and adopt Microsoft 365 with Microsoft FastTrack.  Stay tuned for updates at Ignite 2019 (November 4-8, 2019), where we plan to share more details about Mover integration and new capabilities to make it easier to plan, analyze, and move your content into Microsoft 365.

Our partnership with SAP is built on a shared commitment to deliver the best cloud experience for customers.

From working together to create a trusted path to digital transformation in the cloud, to simplifying and accelerating cloud journeys through a shared commitment under the Project Embrace program, the SAP and Microsoft partnership continues to power business transformation for enterprise customers.

Today’s announcement marks another exciting milestone in our longstanding partnership. Through a new, unique and differentiated agreement that builds upon and strengthens the Embrace program, Microsoft Azure is now SAP’s preferred cloud partner to move on-premise SAP ERP and S/4HANA customers to the cloud.

The new go-to-market agreement ensures our customers can choose a cloud migration strategy to SAP S/4HANA on Azure that reduces complexities, minimizes cost, and leverages the best-in-class technologies and expertise of both companies. Our customers want our two companies to come together to enable their business outcomes and drive digital transformation, and this agreement is an important step in that direction.

With our renewed commitment to the Embrace program, we will offer our customers a powerful combination of unified reference architectures, industry-specific best practices, implementation services and support all packaged up in a holistic bundle that makes it easy to migrate to the cloud.

The SAP and Microsoft partnership has spanned more than 25 years, and with our dedication to working together to bring the power of the cloud to an expanded base of customers, we are excited to see what the future holds.

Estudantes, recém-licenciados, profissionais e programadores experientes tiveram a oportunidade de melhorar o seu conhecimento em linguagens como HTML, IONIC ou ANGULAR, mas também conhecer melhor algumas tendências como a metodologias ágeis, search engine optimization ou user experience.

Today, I’m proud to announce the second Female Founders Competition, a global contest to identify and fund top women entrepreneurs who are leading enterprise tech startups. This year, Microsoft’s venture fund, M12, is partnering with Mayfield and Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company founded by Melinda Gates, to help create a more equitable playing field for innovative female founders.

It’s well-documented that women-led companies deliver higher returns over time than those founded by men, yet female founders—particularly of enterprise tech startups—continue to receive significantly less access to capital. In fact, last year companies founded solely by women received only 2.3% of the total capital invested in venture-backed startups. While we’re seeing some pockets of progress, we as a VC community can do much more to support and financially back innovation and ideas from women-led companies. But where do we start?

Last year, M12 and our partners set out to expand the path to funding for women entrepreneurs by upending the traditional formula for sourcing potential investments. Through our first Female Founders Competition, we set the standard VC networks aside and made an open call for the talent to come to us. It worked. We received hundreds of applications and awarded a total of $4 million to two innovative women entrepreneurs: Greta Cutulenco, CEO and co-founder of Acerta; and Julie Dorsey, founder and chief scientist of Mental Canvas. In the time since, I’ve been inspired by how the winners leveraged these investments as springboards to expand their companies and grow their industry footprints.

For me, it’s a deeply personal issue – I share more on the subject in this Evoke essay. I’ve worked with startups for much of my career. I’ve seen the obstacles that female founders face just to get a seat at the table. And women like Greta and Julie remind me every day of the incredible opportunity that these underrepresented founders represent – not just for investors, but for all of us who believe in the power of technology. That’s why I’m proud to share our commitment to helping continue this progress by casting an even wider net.

As part of this year’s competition, we’re expanding our geographic reach, adding a new award category and increasing our combined investment with Mayfield and Pivotal Ventures from $4M to $6M. This enables us to award funds to four female-founded companies: two $2M awards for B2B enterprise technology and two additional $1M awards for women-led companies in deeptech, which is another critically underfunded area of opportunity. We’re also extending eligibility beyond the United States, Europe, and Israel by accepting applications from India.

I encourage you to watch this video where Pivotal Ventures’ Melinda Gates, Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha and I discuss why we’re so passionate about this issue and this competition. I hope you will be inspired, as we are, to find new ways to help create a more equal seat at the table for women founders.

Submissions are open now through December 15, 2019. Female-founded teams building enterprise SaaS or deeptech solutions are encouraged to apply at www.FemaleFoundersComp.com.

We can’t wait to see who we find and fund.