many needs, one platform - download center - microsoft
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Microsoft has the industry’s most comprehensive platform for turning pervasive business intelligence from vision to reality.
many needs, One platfOrm
Pervasive business intelligence would be simpler to achieve if it
only involved a single set of requirements. in fact, however, giving
users across the enterprise easy access to analysis and information
takes multiple capabilities spanning from the desktop to the data
center. Only Microsoft has the software and partnerships to satisfy
all of these needs efficiently and cost-effectively.
“Microsoft is unique in that we consider three different styles of
business intelligence and offer a platform that accommodates all
of them,” says Michael tejedor, a senior product manager at Micro-
soft who focuses on Bi.
the first of those styles, called personal Bi, “is about an individual
being able to pull data together from different
sources, analyze it, and present it, all on their
own,” tejedor says. Microsoft streamlines that
process by enabling employees to assemble
information on-demand via desktop tools they
already know how to use, such as Microsoft
excel. “they can collect all of the data they
need in a familiar environment,” tejedor said.
And since Microsoft excel comes with so-
phisticated and intuitive Bi tools such as Microsoft PowerPivot for
excel, users can study and visualize that data easily as well.
Next comes team Bi, in which individuals share the results of
their analytical work with others. “through the integration
we did between Microsoft excel, Microsoft SharePoint, and
Microsoft PowerPivot for SharePoint, employees can quickly
publish their data to an intranet site and collaborate on it with
colleagues,” tejedor says. SharePoint also includes Bi search
functionality that makes finding information simpler, social net-
working features that enable people to rank and comment on a
co-worker’s data, and workflow abilities that help users circulate
reports for review and approval. “it’s all a very tightly integrat-
ed experience,” tejedor notes. “We are also unique in that we
provide it professionals with the capabilities they need to gain
visibility into the content end users are creating and sharing to
ensure that the data and the systems are sound” he adds.
Finally, there’s organizational Bi, which encompasses all of
the work that it departments do behind the scenes to ensure
data quality and accessibility. Microsoft SQl Server simplifies
those efforts by providing a comprehensive array of built-in
services, including SQl Server Analysis Services, SQl Server
reporting Services, and SQl Server Master Data Services.
Meanwhile, tools like SQl Server Fast track Data Warehouse
and SQl Server Parallel Data Warehouse help administrators
build and manage scalable, high-performance data warehous-
es economically.
Solutions and services from Microsoft’s broad and deep pool of
partners complete the picture by layering industry- and role-spe-
cific functionality on top of Microsoft’s solid Bi foundation. “We
spend a lot of time building out our partner ecosystem to make
sure customers can always find partners who understand their
needs and can tailor a solution accordingly,” tejedor says.
And there’s even more to come, he notes. Via the Microsoft SQl
Azure database, part of Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform,
Microsoft will soon extend many of the same currently available
Bi capabilities to the internet cloud as well. “We’re placing big
bets on that,” says tejedor. Microsoft has long been committed to
providing the most comprehensive Bi platform in the industry, he
notes. Whatever the future holds, customers can expect that com-
mitment to continue.
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“It’s about an individual being able to pull data together from different sources, analyze it, and present it, all on their own.”
Memo to anyone who hates relying on the it department for ac-
cess to business intelligence: Guess what? they hate it too.
indeed, traditional business intelligence platforms are a perpetual
drain on it resources. Since employees lack the specialized skills to
access information on their own, it pros must do it for them, put-
ting added strain on already overworked technical teams. “there’s
always a backlog of requests,” said Cindi howson, founder of Bi
Scorecard, a Bi consultancy in Sparta, N.J.
Moreover, traditional Bi solutions tend to be punishingly complex.
“they require a lot of intense programming activity,” notes Patrick
Bolin, vice president of business intelligence and performance
management at Dallas, texas-based hitachi Consulting Corpora-
tion, a global technology consulting firm. “that becomes very
expensive for an it department,” he added. it can also discourage
companies from extending Bi applications with useful new fea-
tures.
end users aren’t the only ones who gain when companies provide
pervasive access to Bi tools. it organizations win big too, in the
form of lower spending and fewer reports to write.
By empowering users to collect and analyze decision-making in-
formation without it assistance, pervasive Bi frees up resources for
more strategic efforts. One of Bolin’s clients, for example, had 15
percent of its it group working on report-writing until it deployed
a self-serve business intelligence solution. “Putting the ability to do
that sort of work in the hands of businesspeople allowed them to
focus funding and people on more complex issues like master data
management and creating visually compelling dashboards,” Bolin
says. “As a result, the it department’s value proposition within the
organization has increased significantly.”
Basing pervasive Bi environments on Microsoft technologies offers
further it benefits unavailable on other platforms. Microsoft Bi so-
lutions utilize products that most companies already own, such as
Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQl Server, and Microsoft SharePoint,
which helps conserve both budget and labor. “the it department
doesn’t have to conduct an additional set of rollouts,” Bolin ob-
serves. Nor does it have to master a whole new set of complicated
programming skills, since Microsoft Bi systems leverage familiar
development languages.
Meanwhile, adding new functionality is easy with Microsoft Bi
technologies, because they’re flexibly architected, seamlessly
integrated, and equipped with powerful built-in software such as
Microsoft excel Services, which simplifies using, sharing, and secur-
ing Microsoft excel workbooks throughout the enterprise.
Administering and securing Microsoft-based Bi solutions is simple
too, thanks to tools that help it staff track and review thousands of
users, to determine what content is being used, which reports are
being accessed, and more. “that gives it the oversight and infor-
mation it needs to manage the entire environment,” says Michael
tejedor, a senior product manager in Microsoft’s business platform
division.
it all adds up to a compelling set of advantages: With Microsoft Bi
technologies, it departments can both operate more efficiently
and serve users more effectively. “you get the agility the business
needs and the control that it needs,” tejedor says. “that’s what
makes us unique.”
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BI That’s a Big Win for ITPervasive Bi solutions based on Microsoft technologies help overworked and under-budgeted it departments dramatically increase efficiency.
Aspiring to give employees easy access to decision-making infor-
mation is nothing new for PetroCard inc. Actually doing so, how-
ever, is another story.
A Kent, Wash.-based distributor of industrial fuel and lubrica-
tion products, PetroCard has long believed in putting informa-
tion directly in the hands of front-line staff. But the company’s
accounting and other back-end applications made realizing that
goal difficult. Desperate to compensate, employees used a variety
of improvised analytical tools to get the data they required. the
result, perhaps predictably, was reporting chaos. “two different
systems would come up with two different numbers,” recalls Steve
tolton, PetroCard’s CeO.
that all changed, though, when PetroCard deployed a new Micro-
soft Business intelligence (Bi) solution. today,
marketers can easily see what customers are
buying, product managers can view profits
for an entire product family or an individual
truckload, and accounting professionals can
drill into the specifics of any purchase order
or invoice on-demand. “We’re finding billing
problems immediately, instead of letting them
sit for a week or two,” tolton says.
Stories like PetroCard’s are becoming increasingly common. Once
the exclusive province of analysts and senior decision-makers,
business intelligence is slowly but surely making inroads through-
out the enterprise. As a result, companies that are eager to in-
crease agility and heighten efficiency are now empowering em-
ployees of every description to find, interpret, and apply actionable
insights on their own. Along the way, many of those companies
are discovering what PetroCard already knows: Microsoft Business
intelligence solutions are uniquely equipped to bring the promise
of “pervasive Bi” to life.
Substantial Impact
Of course, from at least one perspective, business intelligence is
already about as pervasive as technology gets. “Bi at some level
or another is used by pretty much every company,” notes Shawn
rogers, vice president of research for business intelligence and
data warehousing at Boulder, Colo.-based analyst firm enterprise
Management Associates inc. the problem is that too few people
at those companies actually use the software. indeed, only about
28 percent of corporate employees who potentially could use Bi
systems actually do, according to analysts at Gartner inc., of Stam-
ford, Conn.
the unfortunate upshot is that many organizations are missing out
on the powerful benefits that come from giving front-line workers
easy access to intuitive Bi tools. For example, 56 percent of com-
panies that already have pervasive Bi capabilities say they enjoy
faster decision-making as a result, according to survey results from
it analyst firm Aberdeen Group inc., of Boston, Mass.
Moreover, employees at companies with self-serve Bi tools tend to
make not just quicker decisions but better ones. “Business users
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Insights for EveryoneMicrosoft Business intelligence helps companies empower their people
with self-serve access to analysis and information.
Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions are uniquely equipped to bring the promise of “pervasive BI” to life.
know what they’re looking for and any time they have to go to it
to get that request fulfilled, something is lost in the translation,”
notes Cindi howson, founder of Bi Scorecard, a Bi advisory firm
based in Sparta, N.J. employees equipped to analyze data on their
own get exactly the information they need when and where they
need it, so they can make smarter, more informed decisions.
the cumulative impact of those better decisions can be substan-
tial, too. Competing effectively in today’s economy is often a mat-
ter of small wins, observes Patrick Bolin, vice president of business
intelligence and performance management at hitachi Consulting
Corporation, a global technology consulting firm headquartered in
Dallas, texas. Organizations that empower knowledge workers to
analyze and act on information are better able to fine-tune pricing,
inventory, and production in ways that add up to faster growth and
higher profits. “it’s a significant differentiating capability,” Bolin
says.
Furthermore, pervasive business intelligence aids it departments
as much as it does line workers. “there’s a huge backlog in most
it groups now,” rogers observes. Deploying self-serve Bi tools en-
ables technicians and database administrators to spend less time
on report writing and more time addressing strategic objectives. “it
puts it in a spot where they’re actually serv-
ing the business needs of their company in a
faster, smarter way,” rogers says.
And a less expensive way too, adds Bolin,
since building reports is costly, time-consum-
ing work. “it departments that have been able
to put the power of creating business intel-
ligence applications in the hands of their users
can clearly service the needs of the business at a much lower cost,”
he notes.
Unique Advantages
All of which raises the question: Given the many advantages pervasive
Bi delivers, why aren’t more companies taking advantage of it? experts
cite a range of factors. For one, traditional Bi products tend to be highly
complex. “they require end users to master a whole new set of skills,”
observes Michael tejedor, a senior product manager and Bi specialist at
Microsoft. they also tend to be unwieldy, he adds, noting that deploying
and customizing some Bi systems can take as much as 12 to 18 months.
“the pace of business is just fundamentally quicker than most Bi tools
out there have been able to accommodate,” tejedor says.
Worse yet, business intelligence applications have historically been
prohibitively expensive, notes Jeff hoffman, vice president and head
of the application solutions group at SWC technology Partners inc., a
solution provider and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Oak Brook,
ill. the result, he observes, is that companies often try to save money
by limiting the number of user licenses they purchase.
the Microsoft Bi platform can help companies overcome such ob-
stacles in ways other platforms can’t. For starters, it’s easy to use,
since it relies heavily on Microsoft excel and other members of the
Microsoft Office family that most employees have been running for
years. “it’s a familiar environment for people,” Bolin says. this not
only reduces training costs, but dramatically boosts adoption rates
as well. “People are much more likely to take advantage of Bi tools
if there’s a relatively flat learning curve involved,” tejedor observes.
in the back office, Microsoft Bi solutions use equally familiar tools
like Microsoft SQl Server and Microsoft SharePoint. “everybody
owns these tools already,” hoffman notes. this makes rolling out
enterprisewide Bi solutions more affordable and less time-consum-
ing. Skilled technical resources are more readily available for Mi-
crosoft Bi technologies too. “it’s a whole lot easier to find capable
SQl Server database people than for one of the other databases,”
says PetroCard’s tolton.
Microsoft’s Bi platform also provides all of the capabilities an
organization requires to build and manage a robust pervasive Bi
environment. “it’s one-stop shopping for the information worker,”
Bolin says. For example, Microsoft excel and PowerPivot for ex-
cel 2010 provide a wide array of self-service analytics tools that
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“People are much more likely to take advantage of BI tools if there’s no learning curve involved.”
enable ordinary end-users to pull large data sets from multiple
sources—including databases other than Microsoft SQl Server—
and then study them for insights and patterns using familiar tools.
then, using Microsoft SharePoint and PowerPivot for SharePoint
2010, they can share their insights with others via team intranet
sites, wikis, workflows, and blogs. Users can also create personal-
ized dashboards that provide a snapshot of vital facts and figures
from across the enterprise.
Plus, Microsoft helps it departments provide self-serve Bi capabili-
ties without compromising control over access, security, and data
quality. the PowerPivot Management Dashboard within Microsoft
SharePoint 2010, for instance, lets it personnel track what kinds
of content employees are creating, where they’re getting the data
from, and who is sharing data with whom. they can also spot
trends, such as which reports and data sources are most heavily
used, and re-direct resources and support accordingly.
Critical First Steps
As many companies already have most of the tools they’ll need,
implementing Microsoft Bi solutions is a relatively straightforward
process. Still, there are steps no organization should neglect.
the first, experts say, is requirements-gather-
ing. it’s recommended that companies study
their current reporting and analysis capabili-
ties and then establish a vision for how they’d
like to enhance them, making sure to include
representatives from across the organization.
“it is very good at what they do, but under-
standing the needs of the business takes close
communication with users and managers from
elsewhere in the company,” tejedor says.
Next, companies should conduct a pilot project. that will increase
the long-term odds of success by exposing any flaws in the perva-
sive Bi plans before they execute them companywide, while also
generating excitement and support for even bigger solutions. in
addition, Bolin says, organizations should invest some effort in vet-
ting, and if necessary improving, data quality. “if the data that your
users are accessing through Bi tools is not reliable, then you’ll lose
credibility instantly,” he observes.
At PetroCard, in any event, pervasive Bi has been such a hit that
the company continues to expand its analysis and reporting capa-
bilities. Next up is a dashboard that will collect key performance
indicators from multiple data sources and display them in graphi-
cal, intuitive formats. “it will give us a way to identify problems
and perhaps fix them immediately rather than waiting until later,”
tolton says. it’s just another example of the agility that can result
when insights are available everywhere there are decisions to
make.
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“If the data that your users are accessing through BI tools is not reliable, then you’ll lose credibility instantly.”
Could the age of self-service Bi (business intelligence) finally be
near? And, if so, are organizations ready?
For years, Bi vendors have promised a way for managers to easily
build their own reports from scratch, without the help of it staff.
Now, with the release of Microsoft Office 2010, managers are find-
ing they can do these tasks using a powerful new excel feature,
called PowerPivot. And, by its ease of availability if nothing else,
this feature is promising to shake up the field of Bi.
“it will spread like wildfire. As organizations upgrade to Office
2010, excel users will adopt PowerPivot, whether the [it staff] likes
it or not,” said Gartner analyst rita Sallam.
And thus far Bi professionals seem ambivalent about PowerPivot.
At a packed PowerPivot birds-of-a-feather session at the Microsoft
teched conference last June, many admitted that the feature is
powerful, even as they worried about the repercussions of its use
within their own offices.
“Some of our concerns [are around] letting users loose, the size of
the files that they want to share and the kind of data they want to
share,” one attendee said.
As the name implies, PowerPivot is a Pivottable on steroids. With
PowerPivot, you can pull into excel large amounts of data from
multiple database tables, databases or other sources of data, and
sort and filter them almost instantly. Data can be reorganized
around one column or compared against columns from another
data source. you can divide the data by time, geographic origin
or some other parameter. Since it runs Microsoft’s business intelli-
gence software on the back end, it can do much of what a full-
fledged Bi application can do.
And PowerPivot can work blazingly fast too. Architecturally speak-
ing, it replicates the technology found in many in-memory data-
bases, allowing users to sort millions of rows of data within a few
seconds.
the best part about PowerPivot is that it is free, or at least it is a
free feature of Microsoft Office 2010 (though to really enjoy its full
power, an organization should also run Microsoft’s SQl Server on
the back end). this means that all the power excel users in your
organizations will start playing with it sooner or later.
But a potential danger lurks in this ease of use, said Andrew Brust,
the chief technology officer for Microsoft integrator tallan. (Brust
also moderated the PowerPivot teched session.) Promiscuous
use of PowerPivot may only aggravate a problem that has already
become an issue for many data-centric organizations over the past
decade, one that came about in large part due to the managerial
popularity of excel.
Organizations have spent considerable money and effort establish-
ing data warehouses, cleansing their data in order to have what is
commonly known as “one version of the truth.” the problem with
most Bi shops, however, is that they can only produce a fraction of
the reports needed by managers, said rob Collie, chief technology
officer for the Bi consulting and service firm PivotStream. So many
users studied up on excel and learned how to produce ad-hoc
reports on their own, often colloquially called spreadmarts.
“there are a lot of people who are doing Bi, but they just are not
calling it that. they are doing a lot of their work in excel and are
not using mainstream Bi technologies,” Brust said. “And they are
doing it totally off-road, so it doesn’t know about it.”
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How Microsoft PowerPivot will disrupt BIMicrosoft PowerPivot is equipping an army of excel users with business intelligence chops
thanks to their creativity, the reports they create often use out-of-
date or incorrect data. the resulting reports can be passed around
the office and taken as gospel.
Worse, because they are in excel, the reports being passed around
often contain closely held company business practices, in the form
of cell calculations, Collie noted.
Now, PowerPivot, with its ability to easily make reports of even
greater depth, will only further muddy the waters of organizational
insight, many fear. “Business users can combine data in a way that
may not be compliant with corporate data sources or metrics,”
Gartner’s Sallam said.
Nonetheless, if the organization puts a few rules and technologies
in place, PowerPivot could actually diminish the proliferation of
such spreadmarts.
One tip: Managers can publish their PowerPivot reports to a Share-
Point repository, where they can be viewed by others, suggested
herain Oberoi, Microsoft director of product management for the
company’s SQl Server Business Group. there, the reports can be
automatically updated as data changes -- eliminating the problem
of out-of-date reports floating around. the
SharePoint reports also do not contain the
calculations used to generate the numbers.
this approach also allows the it staff to keep
track of what reports are the most popular,
Oberoi said. the staff can then polish these
reports and turn them into official, company-
wide summaries.
Another good habit the it staff should get into as PowerPivot gets
deployed: Maintain a repository of sanctioned data sources and
metrics, Sallam advised. in this way, organizations can allow the
data mashups, as long as the source data itself has been vetted
and cleansed.
to some extent, PowerPivot may have Bi professionals worried
because it may put them out of a job. this probably won’t happen
though.
even though PowerPivot offers some Bi capabilities, it should
never replace a full-fledged Bi platform, analysts say. even as an
ad-hoc reporting mechanism, PowerPivot doesn’t have as wide
a range of features as other standalone, self-service Bi offerings,
such as tibco Spotfire, Sallam notes. PowerPivot should be strictly
used for informal reporting needs, she advises. For formal report-
ing, organizations insistent on staying with the Microsoft stack
should use the company’s SQl Server reporting Services and SQl
Server Analysis Services.
Also keep in mind that PowerPivot may not rectify most data qual-
ity issues, such as deduplication or data lineage issues. Nor does it
work easily with advanced modeling issues, such as dealing with
nonconforming dimensions, slowly changing dimensions or mul-
tiple hierarchies, noted James Dixon, the chief technologist for Bi
software provider Pentaho.
“you need to make sure you have 100 percent agreement on the
keys in the different datasets, and you need to be very careful how
the join is done, otherwise the resulting data is meaningless. this is
particularly hard with datasets that have differing levels of granu-
larity,” he said, adding that these problems are solved using etl
(extract, transform and load) tools.
“these tools are not out of reach for a seasoned excel user to un-
derstand, but factoring in the data quality has to be done — even
the flashiest analysis of bad data is going to lead you to make
wrong decisions,” Dixon said.
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Even though PowerPivot offers some BI capabilities, it should never replace a full-fledged BI platform
hOW MiCrOSOFt POWerPiVOt Will DiSrUPt Bi
An overwhelming majority of it leaders handle their business intel-
ligence (Bi) in-house now, but a recent CiO survey suggests that
will change in the next three years.
the survey, conducted in May among 335 it leaders whose orga-
nizations use Bi and analytics tools, found that one in five respon-
dents (23 percent) expect cloud or software as a service to be
their main Bi solution within three years. that’s up from the current
7 percent.
Steve Pike, CiO of the wireless networking provider enfora, says
he recently moved customer service and support to a cloud-based
solution. “it is pretty simple to do and the platform is very agile.
you can set up quick wins and get information out.”
Despite the potential of cloud, in-house solutions are still domi-
nant. Presently, 93 percent of respondents use on-premise Bi tools,
and 77 percent expect to continue with in-house solutions dur-
ing the next one to three years. heather hartman, director of iS
technical services at Care New england health
System, said her company is among those
sticking with in-house solutions. “the number
of disparate systems we have makes it difficult
to [use] the cloud.”
Jason lichtenthal, vice president of iS at PUre
insurance, thinks there’s some risk in investing
in cloud platforms now, but thinks his com-
pany will adopt them in the future. “it is a fledgling industry. they
are still working out the kinks,” he says. “the more success stories
they have, the more trust we have in them. it’s just a matter of time
before cloud is the way to go.”
Nearly two-thirds of respondents (65 percent) credit the use of Bi
and analytics with directly driving a business-process change in
the past year, but only 13 percent say those initiatives were closely
aligned with their organizations’ business-process management
tools. (See “ Analyzing the Future.”) Spending on Bi and analytics
is on the upswing, with 57 percent of respondents anticipating a
bigger investment in the next year.
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BI Moves to the Cloud
“The more success stories they have, the more trust we have in them. It’s just a matter of time before cloud is the way to go.”
Despite the unrelenting hype around cloud computing, it’s just one
aspect of several that will shape the next generation of enterprise
it, according to Barry Briggs, CtO of Microsoft (MSFt) it.
increased government regulation, the complexities introduced by glo-
balization and explosive growth in data are major issues, Briggs said
at the Massachusetts institute of technology on Monday evening.
Microsoft recently completed a project that encapsulates those three
factors -- a master customer database, containing records for 100
million corporate customers and some 2 billion identities, Briggs said.
“that’s a big deal.”
Outside factors like legal compliance spanning many countries
globally make such efforts even more complex. in an effort to keep
in line with the rules, Microsoft has a chief privacy officer for every
line of its business, Briggs said. “We’re fanatical about the privacy
of our customers.”
Globalization and Microsoft’s drive for new business is affecting
it’s role in the supply chain as well. Some emerging countries gain
25 percent or 30 percent of their overall revenue from import du-
ties, he said. “you better get the paperwork right.”
Moreover, those new markets mean Microsoft’s it strategy has to
change, Briggs said. “What is the profile of our next billion customers? if
they’re in emerging and developing countries ... they probably won’t buy
in the traditional way. that has significant implications for how we build
our systems.”
Meanwhile, Briggs has a substantial workload running Microsoft’s
sprawling internal systems. the company has some 228,000 Share-
Point sites in its corporate intranet, according to Briggs.
“SharePoint is in our DNA. We use it for everything,” he said. the
company has made it easy for employees to spin up a SharePoint
site as needed. “it takes for minimum case, not any more than five
minutes. We’ve made it a utility.”
Microsoft.com will be running entirely on SharePoint in the near
future, “just to prove out the scale,” he added.
Beyond giving employees broad access to collaboration tools like Share-
Point, it also wants to enable self-service, well-governed Bi (business
intelligence) through tools like the recently unveiled PowerPivot.
today, “we see a lot of people doing ad-hoc Bi,” Briggs said. “So
and so knows so and so who knows a connection string to that da-
tabase. ‘let’s pull it out and run some reports, and maybe change
that data and then write it back, corrupting the [main data store].”
“We’re empowering our end-users to do the sorts of analyses they
should be able to do,” Briggs added. internally, PowerPivot is re-
ferred to as Microsoft’s “safe needle program for Bi,” he said.
Briggs also discussed Microsoft’s cloud-computing strategy,
including its Azure utility computing and development platform,
which competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services.
Concerns about security in the cloud persist heavily among the people
Briggs speaks to, he said. it’s less of a technical hurdle than “a psycho-
logical thing,” he said. “Where’s my data? Who controls my data?”
Microsoft has been forced to mold its Azure strategy in response
to customer concerns. “We have a separate instance of Azure spe-
cifically for the U.S. government,” Briggs said.
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✦ MANy NeeDS, ONe PlAtFOrM Syndicated IDG Content
Microsoft CTO Discusses IT’s Future Apart From the CloudDespite the unrelenting hype around cloud computing, it’s just one aspect of several that will shape the next generation of enterprise it, according to Barry Briggs, CtO of Microsoft it.