Recent News

As Google and Microsoft battle for enterprise cloud customers, each company’s natural strengths (and weaknesses) become more apparent. Microsoft, for example, is winning over large enterprises that already have massive workforces on Office 365. The pendulum started to slowly swing back in Microsoft’s favor after it released Office 365 in 2013 and finally embraced the cloud, according to TJ Keitt, a Senior Analyst with Forrester Research. Keitt also says Microsoft is on the winning end of the recent shift.

Microsoft has revealed features that have been added to the new Microsoft Band, including music controls, activity reminders and an improved Exercise Tile. With the new music controls, users can put away their phones and turn directly to the Band to pause, play, skip forward and back, and adjust volume. With the activity notifications, users can set the time intervals and the days they want to receive reminders or even set time when no reminders will be sent. The Exercise Tile lets users choose from popular options such as yoga or weightlifting when tracking their exercises, and summaries and observations from Microsoft Health or the Web Dashboard are now grouped by exercise type.

New Q3 data from Synergy Research Group shows that HPE, Cisco and Microsoft continue to lead in the three main data center infrastructure market segments — enterprise data center hardware, service provider data center hardware and data center software respectively. Cisco continues to lead in service provider hardware and Data center software is totally dominated by Microsoft.

Microsoft and Red hat have come a step closer on the emerging platform of cloud. Red Hat has added support for Microsoft’s Azure cloud to its latest release of CloudForms hybrid cloud management. With the support of Azure Microsoft shops will be able to manage Azure Workloads and resources from within cloudform.

Microsoft India plans to sign a 4G data-bundling pact with India’s No 1 carrier Bharti AirtelBSE -0.70 % to encourage the latter’s customers to buy the recently launched Lumia 4G smartphones. “Microsoft India is keen to partner with Bharti Airtel for a 4G data-bundling pact, wherein their customers may be able to double their data packs for free on purchasing our Windows 10 Lumia 4G devices such as the 950, 950 XL and the soon-to-launched Lumia 550,” said Ajey Mehta, Country Head, Mobile Devices, Microsoft India.

Story telling is an art and now with Sway you have a chance to bring this art alive. A digital storytelling app on Office 2016, Sway makes it quick and easy to create and share interactive reports, presentations, personal stories, and more for work, school and home. Tell your story with interactive content, bring your presentations to life with interesting multimedia content, add videos, tweets, vines, GIFs and interactive charts to your presentation without any effort. The most robust, dynamic storytelling tool, Sway is for the cloud-first, mobile-first world that is extremely user-friendly and interactive.

Microsoft Ventures said it will soon take start ups, which are part of its accelerator programme, to the US to connect them with investors and potential customers. “This year, we will really push on to bring companies to the US, especially in San Francisco and New York. The important criteria is picking the start ups when they are ready to sell to its core global customers,” Scott Coleman, General Manager, Microsoft Ventures, said.

Uber’s product team has now upgraded its smartphone only experience into an all-round Window Universal app. The cool bit to note here is that you can now actually call for an Uber ride from your desktop. Microsoft has commented that users will just need to register with their mobile number (like always) on the desktop app and you can book a ride directly from your desktop without the need to touch your Windows 10 powered smartphone.

Think Next 2015 – a forum that brought thought leaders in technology driving transformation via innovation together under one roof – concluded. The forum not only saw the participation of more than 800 delegates from leading corporates, investors, thought leaders and delegates from Microsoft who partnered to push the collaborative innovation agenda for the ecosystem, but also witnessed the graduation of Microsoft Ventures’ winter batch 2015.