Monthly Archives September 2016

The miracle of the five loaves and two fish

Well, who’d have thought things would be so quickly heading into the world of AI!  Twitter’s acquisition of Magic Pony in 2015 was just the beginning of Silicon Valley’s hunger to buy anything in the machine learning space.  More fish and loaves are needed, as we have a disturbing famine of Computer Scientists, especially with knowledge of the ML and the AI space.

Microsoft are moving around some 5,000 computer scientists and engineers to focus on the company’s AI product efforts. This will accelerate the delivery of new capabilities to customers across agents, apps, services and infrastructure.  This will be their new direction, and new faith.  We just need to keep down the costs of feeding and watering them!

Its a cool move and if they get it right they will build the most powerfu...

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Is Microsoft Winning the Cloud Services Race?

You should go and grab a copy of the Cloud and Infrastructure Review 2016.  Its  well put together report on the state of the market and will help you in leading dialogue with clients when your trying to reinforce their cloud first strategy.

There are some very revealing confirmations within it, although you need to do a deep read of it as it has some excellent stats and business considerations in it.

“Fifty-two per cent of respondents told us that their cloud strategies were part of a wider digital transformation strategy”.  Most businesses don’t approach implementation like that, its all bottom up and revolves around discussions about VMs, storage volume etc, even if the intent is to be top down.  Make sure your conversations are about business change and enablers.

“SaaS was still ...

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Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and the Brexit problem

While we knew this was coming along, the actual formal release of Microsoft Azure and Office 365 hosting in UK only data centers can be seen as a game changer in light of future Brexit strategy for most organizations with a UK presence or European presence who want to use Azure or Office 365 at scale and as devolved Cloud services in a Hybrid or dedicated Cloud strategy.

Coupled with the recent General Data Protection Regulation which activated in May 2016 and will apply to all business from May 2018;  Alongside this the Privacy Shield replaces Safe Harbour complicates the matter and will force many businesses to reconsider their hosting strategies.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/09/07/microsoft-azure-and-office-365-now-available-from-united-kingdom-datacenters/#sm...

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