In the News

The European Union is set to extend some security rules currently only applicable to telecom operators to web services such as WhatsApp, Skype and Apple Inc’s FaceTime, according to a draft proposal seen by Reuters. The European Commission, the EU executive, will unveil a proposed reform of its 15-year-old telecom rules next week in which it will extend some provisions to web companies offering calls and messages over the Internet, so-called “over the top players.”

Akshaya Patra, a non-profit organization, has recently launched a mobile app that enables users to have a 360-degree view of the foundation. In an interaction with Dataquest, Vijay Kumar, IT Head, The Akshaya Patra Foundation, talks about how IT helps the NGO. “Akshaya Patra is using Microsoft Dynamics, AX2009 as ERP for all the aforementioned processes with the aid of Central Servers at Bengaluru. We are also using Microsoft 365 cloud platform for all our mailing activities. More than 1000 email ids are managed by us,” he said.

The article is about the comparison between the latest models of Xbox and PlayStation. The Xbox One S is the best value for money on the market. Not only does it have the 4K and HDR of the PS4 Pro, it also supports Blu-ray, and is smaller than Sony’s premium console.

Microsoft Asia Data Culture Study polled 940 C-Suite executives from medium-to-large companies across 13 Asian markets, including India. About 88% of business leaders in Asia agree that it is important for their businesses to be data-driven for agility. However, 57% believe they still do not have a full digital strategy in place. In comparison, 68% in India believe they have a full digital strategy in place today. About 90% of respondents in India feel that data culture should be driven top down with a formalized role in the leadership team to drive successful adoption of data strategy.

Microsoft’s continuing official partnership with NFL means we’re getting even more out of Xbox’s NFL app this season than before. The NFL app is a smartly crafted hub for all things football. We’ve seen terrific preseason coverage, highlights and clips so far, but the app will kick into high gear week 1 when all of its best functions come alive.

Months after pleasing developers with the codes of its software packages, Microsoft has now started open sourcing its Bing Search. “BitFunnel is a library for high-performance full-text search over a chunk of the internet, spread across thousands of machines. It is based on a probabilistic algorithm that identifies and ranks documents according to queries involving keywords, phrases and mathematical expressions,” explains Michael Hopcroft, Founding Member of BitFunnel at Microsoft.

In a landmark ruling that is bound to have far reaching consequences on the operations of several multi-national companies, a US Court of Appeals recently held that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) cannot compel Microsoft to disclose customer emails and communications, stored by the company on servers situated outside the US. The emails and communications in question are stored on Microsoft’s servers in Ireland, and contained evidence relating to an ongoing drug and money laundering case in New York.

Hereafter Microsoft will be known as overall leader in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market stepping aside Salesforce by a tiny margin. In Q2, Microsoft had a 15 percent share of worldwide enterprise SaaS revenues and Salesforce 14 percent. Like a lot of large companies, Microsoft was late to the cloud services market several years ago, but it has apparently caught up to the leaders and surpassed them. “We are, of course, thrilled and honored that Microsoft Azure named a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for the third year in a row”, said Necip Ozyucel, Cloud and Enterprise Business Solutions lead, Microsoft Gulf.

Microsoft India’s outgoing chairman Bhaskar Pramanik has called upon the government to take a judicious call in favor of supporting alternative means of connectivity such as White Space. In an interview with ET, Pramanik said that the government has to decide whether they want to impact the lives of the next billion Indians who can come online through this cheap and alternative technology that uses unutilized frequencies.

According to a Microsoft study, Domestic Companies lead their Asian peers in digital strategy. The Microsoft Asia survey, Asia Data Culture Study 2016, says 68 percent of domestic businesses already have a digital strategy in place as against 57 percent elsewhere in Asia who still do not have a full digital strategy. Also, as much as 74 percent of domestic companies have invested in training to enhance their employees’ data skills.