Microsoft recently announced a wave of new enterprise products and services to help companies seize the opportunities of cloud computing and overcome today’s top IT challenges.
New Windows Server, System Center, Visual Studio, Windows Azure, Windows Intune, SQL Server, and Dynamics solutions will accelerate cloud benefits for customers. Complementing many services, these new offerings deliver on Microsoft’s enterprise cloud strategy.
Hybrid infrastructure and modern applications
To help customers build IT infrastructure that delivers continuous services and applications across clouds, Microsoft has released Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2. Together, these new products empower companies to create datacenters without boundaries using Hyper-V for high-scale virtualization; high-performance storage at dramatically lower costs; built-in, software-defined networking; and hybrid business continuity.
The new Windows Azure Pack runs on top of Windows Server and System Center, enabling enterprises and service providers to deliver self-service infrastructure and platforms from their datacenters.
Building on these hybrid cloud platforms, customers can use Visual Studio 2013 and the new .NET 4.5.1, to create modern applications for devices and services. As software development becomes pervasive within every company, the new Visual Studio 2013 Modern Lifecycle Management solution helps enable development teams, businesspeople and IT managers to build and deliver better applications, faster.
Data platform and insights
Microsoft will release SQL Server 2014. The new version offers industry-leading in-memory technologies at no additional cost, giving customers 10 times to 30 times performance improvements without application rewrites or new hardware. SQL Server 2014 also works with Windows Azure to give customers built-in cloud backup and disaster recovery.
Microsoft has released Windows Azure HDInsight Service, an Apache Hadoop-based service that works with SQL Server and widely used business intelligence tools, such as Microsoft Excel and Power BI for Office 365. With Power BI, people can combine private and public data in the cloud for rich visualizations and fast insights.
Software as a service business solutions
The next major version of the company’s CRM solution, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will be available soon, helping make customer interactions more personal via contextual information for deeper insights than the previous version, delivered on a variety of devices.
