Microsoft's new cloud tools to empower developers and enterprises

Microsoft has announced a powerful set of new tools and innovations to empower developers and creators solve some of the toughest challenges that businesses and communities are facing today. The company welcomed the developer community from around the world at its all-digital – Microsoft Build Conference taking place from May 25-27 to share latest innovations and impart new skills.

“Developers have been at the heart of empowering organisations to remain resilient and agile over the past year. We’re seeing their impact already as economies begin to recover and reimagine their way forward,” said Ihsan Anabtawi, Chief Operating and Marketing Officer Microsoft UAE.

“From low-code developers to data scientists, to security engineers to startups and students, and more – we want to make it easier for these innovators to go from idea, to code, to cloud. The announcements we bring at Build today are a step in that direction to accelerate these efforts. I am excited to see how developers and organisations in the UAE will make most of our innovations to reshape the future.”

Some of the key updates shared at Build are new enhancements to Azure AI to empower developers to reduce time to value in modernising common business processes. These include:

•Azure Bot Service that now enables developers to add speech and telephony capabilities.

•Azure Metrics Advisor that organisations can use to monitor the performance of their growth engines, from sales to manufacturing operations.

•Azure Video Analyser that helps creators quickly build AI-powered video analytics which can be used for workplace safety, in-store experiences, digital asset management, content monetization and more.

Microsoft also announced new capabilities to its Azure Cognitive Services that include:

•Document translation which helps enterprises translate complex documents into one or more languages.

•Text analytics for health that enables developers to process and extract insights from unstructured medical data such as doctors’ notes, medical journals, electronic health records, clinical trial protocols and more.

Two new machine learning capabilities were also announced at Build to empower enterprises accelerate deployment of AI models. These include:

•Azure Machine Learning managed endpoints – a new capability that helps developers and data scientists build and deploy machine learning models rapidly.

•And PyTorch Enterprise on Microsoft Azure, which gives Microsoft Premier and Unified Support for Enterprise customers additional benefits, such as prioritised requests, hands-on support and solutions for hotfixes, bugs and security patches.

To meet the growing demand of its trusted cloud services as well as empower its developer ecosystem, Microsoft launched two cloud regions in the UAE in 2019 to serve the Middle East region. These datacenters are bringing the power of the Microsoft intelligent cloud to organisations across all industries the with enterprise-grade performance, reduced latency, security, data residency, and the broadest compliance. Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure comprises of more than 60 regions, more than any other cloud provider in the world.

— business@khaleejtimes.com