Future Decoded is quickly becoming Microsoft’s annual event for presenting vision, providing inspiration and showcasing technology. This year we truly heard Satya Nadella speak with unfettered passion.
The technology is a mix of products that will be available in the future and those that are available now that have the ability to take people and organisations into their future.
Satya Nadella re-iterated Microsoft’s strategic vision in his keynote; the emphasis remains on empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. That this hasn’t changed since last year’s Future Decoded reflects the commitment, this is no gimmick. Microsoft’s aspiration is to drive individuals and enable teams. How? With the “Mobile-first, Cloud-first” tactic.
Delivery of the tactic is a combination of investment in architecture and focus on software that aids productivity. The announcement of further investment in the Europe West data centre with expansion of a UK data centre (currently Europe West is Eire and the Netherlands) underlined the “Cloud-first” delivery. With regards to productivity, Nadella demonstrated the tools he uses to optimize the scarcest commodities, human attention and time.
Demonstrations of the solutions, some even by Nadella himself, provided proof that there are no boundaries to how Microsoft thinks about productivity.
Last year I was disappointed with Nadella’s keynote; with the wounds of the misunderstanding at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing still fresh it was clear that Microsoft had decided to be over cautious and what resulted was a very scripted performance. This year I was inspired, it was great to see Nadella’s enthusiasm, as described by Forbes Magazine in May 2014, Nadella is “Guided by an engineer’s interest in what the world will look like in three to five years.” Future Decoded is the platform for exploring that world.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV was the first of Microsoft’s ERP solutions to truly embrace “cloud-first, mobile-first”.
