Kevin Turner: Accelerate Your Insights

KEVIN TURNER: Well, I’m privileged and humbled and honored to be here today to share some thoughts around these exciting announcements that we have for our business customers and enterprises around the world. So again it’s a real humbling honor.

It’s also exciting to hear Satya’s view and vision about ambient intelligence and ubiquitous computing. I think we’re all lined up as an organization to really harness the power and the value of that over the next few years. And today is a big step forward for us to be able to really move in that direction, and we’ve got some exciting things to share with you.

Before I start today, though, I do want to thank you and thank the customers in this room and the partners in this room for certainly making and taking the time, but also for your partnership. Many of the things and technologies and innovations that we’re going to share today have been developed with your feedback, with your input, and with you in mind, you at the center.

And all those on the webcast, again a big, big thank you, because today is a big day for us, it’s a big day for us to really put some lines in the sand and make a big impact as it relates to really business intelligence and big data and being able to bring incredible insights to your business.

So thank you for both customers and partners in the room — and certainly at any point in time my e-mail address is up there. If there’s anything I can do for you to help accelerate your insights in your data platform business, please let me know.

Now, one of the things that if you think about this idea of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, when you think about sort of the beginning and the end of that, we see four trends that are really helping anchor and enable what we’ve talked about here today. And they’re certainly cloud, mobility, social and the fourth one, which is BI and big data that we’re going to talk about at length throughout this process and throughout the session today.

And cloud, that has been our fastest growing customer acceptance business in our company’s history. And as you all know and know well, we have three distinct types of cloud in private, hybrid and public. And you’re going to see us anchor a lot around the Azure cloud today, but specifically — and Office 365. And those are very important for us from a data intelligence perspective.

In the mobility space we’ve made some big announcements of recent times, talking about cross-platform as it relates to management with the new releases of System Center that we have in the market, as well as absolutely declaring that we’re going to have the best productivity solution around mobility is important for us as well, and the intended acquisition of Nokia, pending regulatory approval. We’re making big steps and big inroads to have great management, to have great productivity, and to have and create great devices.

In the social space, particularly for enterprises, we’ve seen a big push, both inside and outside the firewall, of being able to build a platform with SharePoint that allows you to integrate your favorite social tools, whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus, whatever it may be, into the platform and being able to bring that business intelligence is a key element and a foundational point of what we’re going to talk about today from a data standpoint.

But the real trend that we see today from an announcement standpoint that Satya talked about is how is Microsoft going to embrace BI and big data with our customers and with our partners, and that’s at the heart of what I want to talk to you about and what I want to share with you.

Now, when you think about what leading-edge companies are doing in this space, there’s a couple of things that really jump out, because what’s lost in the big data conversation is there’s tremendous value in data. And everybody knows data’s valuable, but how do you really extract the deep insights to be able to do that?

And the enablers that we see certainly in the foundational pillars that we’ve built our data platform on is around the cloud, it is around reach. The ability to really connect with people regardless of where they are, the ability for customers to connect with companies, companies to connect with customers, to have great reach both inside and outside the firewall is a foundation for us.

And every company in the world, including our own, wants to do things faster. How do we accelerate the pace and accelerate insights to be able to make great business decisions? And that’s at the heart of our data platform story.

Now, the thing that I want to also share with you today is we commissioned a report from IDC to really study hundreds of companies, to really see what could be the potential value of data in organizations. And it’s really about turning that data element into currency, because your data, our data, any data is actual currency that can be used to really exploit and improve customer service, speed to market, the ability to connect more deeply with customers, and is a very, very powerful thing in the world we all live in today.

And I think when you see by the end of this day your data has tremendous value and we’ve created some great tools and a platform that allows you to really extract that value and get the most from it.

So when you think about the opportunity that we have, the IDC report that we got that studied hundreds of companies said that this was a $1.6 trillion worldwide opportunity as it relates to companies being able to grow their business. So that’s a top-line number that IDC gave us.

And I also thought it would be interesting to say, because we have a lot of our customers and partners here, what would be the value and the potential value of the people just in this room that we have assembled here today, and that number is over $5.4 billion by IDC’s estimation. So as you can all see, there’s tremendous opportunity for us to really be able to take advantage of where we’re going to take the data dividend.

The other thing that we did, which we think is important, is when you look at the construct that Satya shared earlier today around this idea of having data, analytics and people at the center is a really important element for us to be able to share with you.

So when you think about our framework for how businesses are going to harness this business value and create great insight, it’s really with these three things in mind, because data comes in many shapes and sizes and structures, both structured and unstructured data, and that’s important for us.

Analytics, applied with learning, and the reasoning to bring order and intelligence from the data is something our platform delivers today. And then when you think about people, people at the center, as Satya said, is really important for us to ask more questions, harness their creativity and continue to extract tremendous value from that.

So we’ve created a formula, a formula that we think will be very useful for our customers and our partners to be able to bring great insight across business intelligence and harnessing big data.

The formula that we’ve got for really driving this data dividend is specifically around the data dividend formula. Let me go to it here. There it is.

The data dividend formula is data plus analytics plus people at speed. This is the simple formula that we’re really going to bring out our products, solutions and services today to be able to help companies and customers, as well as our partner network, be able to go in and create tremendous value from data. Let’s talk some specifics about that.

On the data side what you’re really going to see from us to be able to realize the value from data is our data platform, and it starts first and foremost with SQL Server, and we’re going to talk about a new release and a new launch of that product.

But any type of data, both structured and unstructured, is important in our world. All sources of data within the walls and data from public data sources, both inside the firewall and outside the firewall, become more and more important for companies and customers to be able to really use and leverage.

The volumes of data, when you think about scaling from terabytes — and I was privileged to be really on the application development team that developed the largest industrialized commercial data warehouse in the world at one time, we were talking about terabytes. Today it’s about petabytes, because of the proliferation of devices and the cloud and the ability to really get at all of the data. So when you think about managing the data, we think that’s also a very interesting place for us to be.

But let me jump in on the data side, because when you think about any data, any volume, anywhere, there’s a few things that I want to pull out for this for you, because our strategy is really to process data where the data lives, in its native format. Any type of data and all sources of data, both within the firewalls and outside the firewalls, is a really important element for you to think through.

All volumes of data scaling up to petabytes again is a very important element for us, and then being able to manage all of the data requires a platform that can connect to the data anywhere, wherever the work occurs. And we’re delivering these capabilities with this new release of SQL Server and Microsoft Azure.

When you think about two elements that enterprises really want to make sure when they make an investment is it secure and can it scale. And we have some very important news to share with you today, because for the last five years in a row the least vulnerable database, according to the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, has been Microsoft SQL Server. And as you can see, two of those years, in 2013 and 2010, we had zero vulnerabilities reported.

So we’re going to continue to invest, as we have for more than 13 years, in Trustworthy Computing and having a great, safe and secure platform. We’re not declaring victory on security, we’re simply actually sharing with you the results from a vulnerability perspective of where our platform fits relative to our competition. We know that this is an important element for our customers and for our partners.

The second area is the growth in SQL Server has been unprecedented. From a revenue and a unit share growth we now have 45 percent market share, and it’s the most widely deployed database in the world. So we have scale and we’re certainly very committed to security.

And we’re not resting on our laurels, because there’s a couple of things you’re going to hear about today that I’ll tee up that I think are also very important.

Transparent data encryption capabilities are becoming even more important in multi-tenant environments like cloud. And we have a feature called the Encryption Key Management which allows you to store your encryption keys on a separate server than the one running on SQL Server, and instance that for greater security. So we’re going to continue to create incredible, safe, secure and tremendous value for you as it relates to these two elements.

The other area I would talk about is analytics. In the analytics space it’s really about a couple of new announcements that we’ve got starting with the analytics platform system. I talked about the foundational area of being SQL, but in partnership with Hortonworks we’ve also delivered a solution for non-relational data, Hortonworks HDP on Windows, on-premises and Azure HDInsight in the cloud.

With APS, as we affectionately call our Application Platform System, you can now connect to big data on-premises, big data in the cloud, and now big data on the appliance with a Hadoop region.

Now, with the PolyBase in our Application Platform System we make analyzing all of your forms of data very, very easy for you.

And so when you think about this opportunity with analytics I think it’s a really important thing for you to think through, because we’re very committed to this for the long term. With this Analytics Platform System we’re going to really work hard to give you the analytics platform and tools that you need to harness the power of your data.

So you’re going to hear, and Quentin’s going to come out and take you through some very specific details, but we’re very proud to be able to offer these capabilities around analytics across our three distinct types of clouds that we have, which are private, hybrid and public.

The other part about analytics that I’ll touch on around the Analytics Platform System is the ability to really go deeply as it relates to the appliance area. And we’ve got great partners with HP and Dell that are helping us make the appliance, but the ability to scale out up to petabytes of data, have that in-memory column store for 100x speed improvement, dedicated regions for Hadoop, as well as joining relational and non-relational data with our PolyBase is very, very exciting and compelling, and we think it’s market-leading as it relates to what’s available in the marketplace.

The second area on analytics I’d touch on has to do with the Microsoft Azure HDInsight. Now, the HDInsight is our managed Hadoop-based service that brings 100 percent Apache Hadoop solution to the cloud. And it actually allows you to quickly create a Hadoop cluster scaled to fit your demand, leading to cost savings only possible and available through the cloud.

Now, with HDInsight you can seamlessly store and process data of all types using Azure store, and it’s integrated with System Center and Active Directory, which helps bring you enterprise security and manageability with Hadoop. And so you can really use this to analyze Hadoop data with the Microsoft business intelligence tools, thanks to the integration with Excel and our Power BI application.

The third area I’d talk about is really people at the center, because as mentioned earlier, Excel is now the most ubiquitous business intelligence tool in the world, with over a billion people using it, which is very exciting for us, and it only continues to get better. And making our Office product, including Excel, as Satya said, more data aware is a very important element in our business intelligence strategy.

Now, the new capabilities in Excel include the ability to easily discover and explore and connect and transform data from new data sources. That’s really important for us, because we want to easily merge internal and external data, and manage billions of rows across data in Excel. We also have some incredible visualization technology, which Eron showed just before I came on, and again we’re going to continue to make that even richer as we go forward.

And with the adoption of Power BI and the capabilities we’ve got using Office 365 we believe that end users can better collaborate and share insights, and the users can share datasets, report insights and build off one another’s insights with various BI sites and capability that we have built-in.

So the ability to really make insights more accessible with natural language search, inspiring more curiosity within your workforce, is something that we aim and aspire to have with our BI and big data story and our data platform.

And as a service delivered on Office 365 we’re going to continue to reduce the friction for you around the deployment and adoption of these tools. But by enabling people with insights anywhere for you and your company we’re providing you with the tools you need to increase the value of your data dividend.

The other part of this has to do with speed. And today, with the technology and innovation breakthroughs that the team has been able to accomplish, we have some incredible announcements around the speed for our in-memory computing that we’re going to deliver in SQL 2014.

Now, when you think about this opportunity, we see it across the — we aspire and aim to have the best price performance database and data platform in the world.

But let’s talk about what we’re actually building from an in-memory perspective, because in-memory gives us a lot of capabilities, because it gives you the ability to work with billions of rows in Excel, it gives you the ability to scale to large-scale analytics and do it in a very simplistic fashion. It also gives you the ability to have over 100x query performance for faster operational reporting and data warehousing. And the lastly I would tell you we’ve seen a 30x improvement as it relates for transaction processing through OLTP, very exciting for us.

So how are we delivering these technologies, which is also unique? You can use your existing skills on our platform, and you gain the full benefits of the SQL Server capabilities.

The other thing that I would tell you is to take advantage of in-memory on the Microsoft platform you do not have to rewrite your applications and you don’t need an expensive specialty piece of hardware. We’re actually building it and embedding it into the product.

And only Microsoft is delivering built-in, in-memory across the entire data platform. It’s a big competitive advantage for us that will bring our customers, you and our partners tremendous value in the marketplace.

The other thing I’d tell you when you think about the opportunity that we have is this 30x performance that we are getting with our Online Transaction Processing gives us the ability to dramatically improve speed at which you’re able to find, use, share and access data.

And when you look across our entire data platform, when you start across the ability to have what SQL Server does for us, it gives us the price performance that we need that’s market leading, it gives us incredible compression metrics so that you can actually reduce your storage costs, it gives us latency improvements, and it gives us the 30x OLTP transaction processing speed. That is an incredible value-add that we’re bringing to our marketplace with our customers and our partners.

And I think if you think about the opportunity to see that customers now will not only be able to scale up what they’ve got in a relational world but also in the unstructured world, we think that will really unlock future business scenarios that maybe haven’t even been thought about today. The ability for employees to ask any question is something that we think is absolutely driving to a competitive advantage.

So when you think about this opportunity of data, analytics, people and speed, you can do one of these elements and obtain incremental improvement, and good and solid improvement. If you do all of these elements, we actually see it as a game-changer. The ability for you to really change the game, getting into predictive analytics, getting into the ability to unlock and let your employees use self-service business intelligence tools that they’ve grown up with, to be able to ask any question, both inside and outside the firewall, from a data standpoint, the power of that to transform a business we think has never been greater than it is today.

And one of the good customers that we’ve worked with came to us and said, “Hey, look, we don’t have small data requirements.” In fact, they actually have — one of their database tables has over a quintillion rows in that particular database. So we’re not talking about terabytes and petabytes, we’re talking about an unbelievable amount of data. In fact, this particular customer, NASDAQ, actually accumulates more structured data in one day than most companies have in totality. So the ability to really work with them and create across a quintillion rows give them something that they’ve never had before is something we’ve done with SQL Server 2014, and it’s very, very impactful and we think that it’s going to only continue to get more and more pervasive.

So we’ve got this technology deployed in a mission-critical world, and we’re very excited about that, because we’ve had a heck of a year on our consumer and enterprise group at Microsoft from an innovation perspective. Just like NASDAQ, it’s great to see customers transforming their businesses and realizing data dividends, because when you think about the opportunity we have to be able to come back with incredible innovation around Power BI for Office 365, SQL Server 2014, Microsoft Azure, it’s an incredible year of innovation that we’ve been able to have and one that we’re going to continue to do that.

Excel being the most widely deployed BI tool on the planet, SQL Server being the most widely deployed database in the enterprise world with double-digit growth, and the ability to now have over a million databases stored on Azure give us an incredibly strong platform on which to build and talk to you about from an innovation perspective.

And when you think about what Satya teed up about driving for ambient intelligence and how over the next few years the ability to have intelligence just like the air around us and how powerful that can be, we really want to work closely with our customers and our partners to help you take your data, take it and turn it into information, the information becomes insights, and then more importantly the insights drive strategic decisions. That’s really at the heart of where the Microsoft data platform strategy is today, and we’re very excited and humbled to be able to bring these great products and services and solutions to the marketplace for you. This is not a road map discussion or a road map presentation for you today, it is actually what we’re delivering in the marketplace with customers and with our valued partner network.

Now, when you think about some of the opportunities that we’ve got, Quentin Clark’s going to come out and he’s going to walk you through some very detailed aspects of our platform in more detail.

But before Quentin does that, I would like to share a story of Warner Bros., one of our very good customers, and what they’ve been able to do by integrating data and providing a rich, immersive experience. And Warner Bros. is increasing their data dividend, and you will see that in a moment.

And so as I exit, let me also end where I began, which is thank you very much for your time, thank you for your attendance, and certainly and more importantly thank you for your partnership. We look forward to working closely with you and we’re ready to get started with you to help you maximize your data dividend across your platform.

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