Recent News

The CIO community in Indian is bullish about Microsoft’s shift to user-based licensing model. Microsoft recently announced that it will switch from device-based licensing to user-based licensing for Windows and Office software. In an era of mobility and cloud computing, the usage of multiple devices is becoming commonplace. And with this change in licensing model, Microsoft has answered the long-cherished wish of its enterprise customers. Vishal Tripathi, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner, said, “It will bring more flexibility for the enterprises and rein in their management cost. Microsoft will also witness a higher adoption and it will be able to reduce the compliance issues.”

Virtual Machines are transient in nature, which makes their security a little difficult as compared to typical servers. During Microsoft’s TechEd Europe event, the company has recently released a new anti-malware solution tool to secure Virtual Machine services offered by Azure. This tool is based on Microsoft Security Essentials, System Center Endpoint Protection and Forefront Endpoint Protection. The new tool is called as Microsoft Anti-malware for Azure Cloud Services and Virtual Machines.

Few golden geese in technol¬ogy have survived as long as Office has for Microsoft. The suite of applications that includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint, first released in 1990, generated nearly a third of Microsoft’s revenue during its last fiscal year—about $26 billion of $87 billion in total. But in a sign of the seismic changes underway in the tech industry, Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, said that it would give away a comprehensive mobile edition of Office. The free software for iPads, iPhones and Android tablets will do most of the essential things people normally do with the computer versions of the product.

With control for the cloud market is heating up India, Microsoft, which offers public cloud services under the Azure brand, says competing on price can no more be the strategy for cloud. Jason Zander, Corporate VP, Microsoft Azure said, “We don’t want to compete just on price. We are therefore building a suite of higher-value data services on top of Azure.” The higher value services being offered by Microsoft are mostly focused around managing Big Data and making sense of it through analytics.

Microsoft is hosting TechEd, its largest annual technology conference on November 5-6 at The Lalit Ashok, Bangalore. TechEd is Microsoft’s premier technology conference and is expected to bring together over 2000 developers, technology enthusiasts and IT professionals, providing them with opportunities to learn about and explore productivity and endless possibilities in the cloud. TechEd will be addressed by speakers and experts from Microsoft, its partners and leading research, consulting and academic institutions.

To leverage the pervasive presence of Microsoft-powered terminals across small enterprises, payments solution provider Ezetap said its credit card reader devices will now be compatible with Windows platform. This move will allow Ezetap, which was until now focused largely on retail, to tap into the enterprise sector as well. Vineet Durani, Director of the Windows Phone business group at Microsoft said, “Payments will open up new segments that we haven’t thought of before.”

Microsoft announced the real-time speech translator feature for Skype back in May, and said the new feature should arrive on its IM service before the end of the 2014. In keeping with that timeline, the company recently released a preview version of Skype translator for Windows 8.1 devices. If you happen to own a Windows 8.1 powered PC or tablet, Skype Translator Preview is clearly something you should be interested in checking out.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform has received three new big data services, as a part of the move to make Azure a champion in big data services and the Internet of Things (IoT) sector. The services include Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Event Hubs and Azure Data Factory. The first two have been launched to help customers in processing data from devices and sensors in IoT and the third one is all about information production to arrange and manage diverse data in hybrid cloud environments.

Microsoft Corp is teaming up with online storage service Dropbox Inc. The two companies still compete for business users, with Dropbox seeking to expand into corporate environments and Microsoft pushing more people to adopt its OneDrive storage service. Now, Office users will be able to access Dropbox from mobile applications and edit files in Dropbox, according to Kirk Koenigsbauer, a Microsoft Office vice-president.

Recently announcing its decision to set up local data centers, Microsoft India is growing its cloud revenues in triple digits in the country, in line with the growth being registered by the company globally. The move is expected to cement the company’s stronghold in this space further, said Karan Bajwa, Microsoft India’s Managing Director, who added that the volume of transactions is higher in the small and medium businesses segment since they don’t have legacy systems to migrate to the cloud.