Microsoft’s largest technical conference started today with 23,000 attendees. This is Microsoft’s annual technology conference called Ignite, a combination of many of individual events of the past including Management Summit, the Exchange, SharePoint and TechEd conferences.

Everywhere I see around in downtown Atlanta’s Philips Arena there are lots and lots of people. More than conference this looks like a mela or festival. Even though there was long lines due to security scans to enter the building there was smooth flow of people, great arrangements.

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In the keynote session it was exciting to see on stage together, two CEOs of Indian origin who are heading two of the large companies in the world – @Microsoft Satya Nadella & @Adobe Shantanu Narayan. Adobe announced they are going to be running their entire cloud services on top of Microsoft Azure cloud. A big win for Microsoft!
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Scott Guthrie talked about companies like BMW, Rolls Royce, Tyco who are leveraging Azure services in new ways. We saw demos of:

  • Azure monitor service that provide integrated monitor for both onprem & cloud servers, equally well for both Linux and Windows workloads;
  • The possibilities with Log search to see patterns hitherto unseen from the large volume of log files that each of our servers produce every second;
  • Azure monitoring dashboard that gives unified view of all important metrics we gave;
  • Azure security alerts that highlight intrusions and even provide solutions for them right in place by a new feature called security incidents.

General Availability announced of Windows Server 2016, System Center 2016 & commercial support license of Docker engine with every Windows Server.

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I heard a concise definition for DevOps being used on stage – Devops is a combination of Tools, People & Process.

Yusuf Mehdi shared Statistics that by 2020:

  • 50% of the USA workforce will be millennials;
  • 43% are going to be freelancers;
  • 5 billion smart connected devices shipped annually;
  • 400 million monthly active devices of Windows 10;
  • 70 million monthly active users of Office 365;
  • 1 billion logins per day protected by Azure Active Directory.

He showed demo of Microsoft Ink converting and solving formulas in Microsoft OneNote; Delve Analytics showing time you spent in meetings, emails and the time the readers spent on those emails. Lastly he announced a new feature called Windows Defender Application Guard that makes Microsoft Edge the most secure browser by isolating critical information using hardware security.


Yesterday I attended a hands-on workshop on Power BI as part of pre-conference programs. The venue for this year’s Ignite is Georgia World Congress Center, a massive spread of floor space across 3 huge buildings. Walking from Hall C where lunch is served to Hall B for the session I attended and then few times back & forth I had burned over 1600 calories. Looking forward to an interesting week of learning and meeting people.

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Read my next post on updates that happened during rest of the week of Microsoft Ignite 2016.

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