Microsoft Inspire 2022: Key Announcements

Inspire is Microsoft’s annual event for Microsoft partners. It’s a conference where Microsoft announces key product and service updates that allow partners to provide a best-in-class experience for their customers. This year’s conference was focused on the opportunities Microsoft Cloud provides customers to build powerful solutions to grow their business.

This year Microsoft made some truly exciting announcements that we’ve broken down into six key categories:

1. Increased Azure funding for customers through AMMP
2. Microsoft cloud for industry
3. Further growth opportunities for ISVs
4. Azure product enhancements
5. Hybrid work innovations
6. Streamlining of cloud security

Increased funding for customers through the Azure Migration and Modernisation Programme (AMMP)

Microsoft has made further investments and updates to its ‘Azure Migration and Modernisation Programme’ (AMMP) to help drive scale and velocity of migrations with richer incentives. These include, for must-win Windows Server and SQL Server migrations, a new partner nomination experience with more agile and simplified approvals and payouts and updated best practice guidance through the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and the Well Architected Framework (WAF) for Azure.

Microsoft cloud for industry

Microsoft has six industry-specific cloud offerings – Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, Non-profit and Sustainability. Leveraging technologies across Azure, Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, industry clouds allow customers to integrate specific tools that align to their use cases.

Further growth opportunities for ISVs

To help unlock opportunities for Independent Software Providers (ISVs), Microsoft has launched a series of new benefits with the ISV Success Program, helping ISVs innovate rapidly, build well architected applications, publish them to the Azure Marketplace and grow their sales. Software providers can take advantage of this new programme to build across the Microsoft Cloud and get access to cloud sandboxes, developer tooling, technical and business resources and a dedicated community. The programme is currently in preview and will be available later in 2022.

Azure product enhancements

New Azure Confidential Computing capabilities, now generally available, allows the transition to Azure workloads that handle sensitive data with additional levels of protection.

Azure Centre for SAP solutions, now in preview, is an end-to-end solution to deploy and manage SAP workloads on Azure, enabling customers and partners to create and run an SAP system as a unified workload, and providing a more seamless foundation for innovation on the Microsoft Cloud.

Azure Stack HCI, now in public preview, delivers ​​more customer value and partner opportunity with new features by delivering increased value on investment, shortened time to value and improved support experience for Azure Stack HCI.

A new Azure Arc Boost Programme, in partnership with Intel, will drive the deployment of Azure Arc and Azure Stack HCI in customer hybrid environments through the Systems Integrator partner ecosystem.

Announcing the Azure Space Partner Community – an ecosystem of space partners with exclusive access to technical support and scaling solutions.

Hybrid Work innovations

Enabling hybrid work with Teams: Over the past year, more than 450 new Teams capabilities were introduced to enable people to work synchronously and asynchronously, in-person and remote. At Inspire, more exciting new features were introduced to enhance the hybrid work experience, including:

• Excel Live
• Video Clip
• Teams Connect Shared Channels
• Collaborative Annotations

Windows 11 and Windows 365: Hybrid work runs on Windows. Windows 11 is the operating system designed for hybrid work – productive, secure and easy to manage – and Windows 365 allows people to work from anywhere. Launched at Inspire 2021, Microsoft continues to push the envelope with these recently announced features:

• Citrix HDX Plus for Windows 365
• Windows 365 Government
• Point-in-Time Restore for Windows 365 Business
• Microsoft Dev Box

Bringing collaborative experiences into the flow of work: Microsoft technology helps organisations drive the next level of productivity with collaborative applications that bring business processes directly into the flow of work. A new customer service solution demonstrates how this vision will be brought to life. The Microsoft Digital Contact Centre Platform is an open, extensible, and collaborative contact centre solution that addresses the needs of a modern contact centre. It equips service teams with the modern digital tools to engage customers through a variety of voice, video and other digital engagement channels—powered by Dynamics 365, Teams, Microsoft Power Platform, Azure, and the newest member of the Microsoft family, Nuance.

Creating the digital employee experience for every role and function: When work is increasingly happening anywhere, anytime, the employee experience needs to be digital first. Last year Microsoft Viva was introduced, which brings together communication, communities, knowledge, learning, goals and insights right in the flow of Teams.

• Viva Goals, which will be generally available on 1^st August, is a goal setting and management solution that aligns teams to your organisation’s strategic priorities to drive results.
• There’s a new feature in Microsoft Viva: Viva Engage. Personal expression is such an important part of life outside of work; Viva Engage brings it into the workplace with social capabilities that build community and spark engagement, right in the flow of work.
• Viva Sales also launched last month and introduced the first of a new dimension of Viva tailored to meet role-specific needs.

Streamlining of cloud security

Microsoft Defender for IoT enhancements: With new native integration with Microsoft 365 Defender and complete coverage across IoT, Enterprise IoT, and OT devices, Defender for IoT can now secure all endpoint types, correlate incidents across the entire kill chain, and provide faster detection and response for attacks that previously may have been left undiscovered.

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty: Create a customised environment in Azure designed to meet compliance needs, processes that provide assurances of operational transparency and investments in technical architectures that leverage Microsoft Cloud services for security, encryption, confidential computing and hybrid cloud deployment.

Want more information?

To get more information about these updates visit Microsoft’s Inspire 2022 page to watch recordings of the sessions. Alternatively, if you have any questions about how you’re able to leverage the above technologies or any other Microsoft technologies, get in touch with one of our experts here.