Last week, Microsoft concluded the 5th edition of their annual conference, “Microsoft Ignite.” At the end of this year’s developers conference, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella turn all the heads-on consistent developer experience in multi- and hybrid cloud; along with the announcement of their new initiatives for “cloud-delivered quantum computing.” In his keynote speech in Orlando, Mr. Nadella also speaks about the role of a consistent and reliable management platform across a multi-cloud environment – including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

For instance, Microsoft introduces its Azure Arc to the world on the very first day of Ignite, ” it is a control panel designed for multi-cloud, multi-edge, and first time managed data services for edge computing,” stated Nadella.

Before the premiere of Microsoft Ignite, an 87-page document was released for the journalists that listed all the news items to expect to get released at the conference. But here are the top five announcements you should know about :

Azure Arc – Manage resource anywhere

The control panel of the Azure Arc will allow Azure to be used by organizations to manage their resources across AWS and Google Cloud. The panel will also work for Linux, Windows Servers, and Kubernetes clusters as well. Also, it will allow users to access these platforms with limited Azure data services.

It will also enable users to take limited Azure data services to these platforms. Previously, Azure Stack works only on a limited set of hardware. Although Arc doesn’t have support for all the Azure services; it will be a single platform for companies to manage their resources across a multi-cloud environment and their data centers.

Due to the complexities in hybrid environments; Arc’s control panel can be a single tool to keep companies in the Azure ecosystem.

Endpoint Manager – Modernize device management

As per the keynote speech of Mr. Nadella, Microsoft is going to merge ConfigMgr with Intune services that will allow the enterprises to manage laptops, PCs, tablets, and phones that the issue to their employees; all under the Endpoint Manager.

They are also introducing a plethora of tools and recommendations to help enterprises modernize deployment strategies. Besides, ConfigMgr users can also get a license to Intune, which will enable them to cloud-based management. Since security remains a significant concern in the BYOD world; and the management of all the devices becomes a massive challenge for the IT department. With their latest offering, you can do away with multiple tools and get a single view of deployments.

Power Virtual Agents – The no-code bot builder

One of the most exciting announcements that were made during Microsoft Ignite has to be the introduction of Power Virtual Agents – The new ‘no-code/low-code’ tools for creating chatbots.

The platform uses Azure’s machine learning abilities to let users develop chatbots by leveraging a visual interface. It will also allow users to implement the actual code. With the visual interface, anyone can build a chatbot, and creators will gain a better understanding of user needs than developers who are not involved in business groups.

Azure Synapse – Limitless Analytics

Promotes as the “limitless” analytics service, Microsoft launched Azure Synapse Analytics, a combination of big-data analytics and data warehousing. The spokesperson said, “The service can use either serverless or provisioned resources to provide a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning applications”.

However, users can run their existing data warehouse workload with Azure Synapse. It would be similar to integrating Apache Spark with SQL.

Microsoft 365 – Project Cortex

Microsoft 365 is also getting new add-ons this year. This time the company introduced Project Cortex; which is a new service in the Microsoft 365 platform that uses AI to identify all the business content into topics.

The latest addition will create a knowledge network that “improves individual productivity and organizational intelligence; assists identify experts on specific topics and surfacing knowledge through interactive experiences across Microsoft 365”.

After Microsoft Teams, the new service is coming and is now in private view. It will be available in 2020.

Read Here: Azure vs AWS: Compute services comparison (2019)

Read Here: Amazon Web Services vs Azure: The Database Battle 2019

Read Here: Amazon Web Services vs Microsoft Azure: Storage Services Comparison