Cutting-edge features and services to build upon $20 billion milestone in global annual cloud run rate as growth in Thailand continues at pace
Bangkok, November 7, 2017 – Microsoft Thailand today highlighted the latest advances from the cutting-edge Azure cloud platform and the critical role that the cloud plays in a successful digital transformation process in its first-ever Azure Summit event. Held at the Conrad Hotel Bangkok with 13 partners and more than 300 customer representatives in attendance, the Summit provided participants with in-depth insights into the transformative power that Azure brings to businesses on both strategic and execution levels.
The inaugural Azure Summit represents another step forward for Microsoft in the cloud following the recent first-quarter global earnings announcement, in which the company announced that it had surpassed the goal of achieving $20 billion (662 billion baht) in commercial cloud annualized revenue run rate ahead of the original schedule in 2018. Across major industries — from finance and energy sector to retail and professional sports — organizations are turning to Microsoft to help them transform their customers’ experiences, employee productivity, operations and products. In fact, 96 percent of Fortune 500 companies have at least one Microsoft cloud offering, and 90 percent have at least two.
In addition to Microsoft’s vision for the cloud, event attendees were able to learn from the experiences of senior executives from Thailand’s leading organizations as well as the expertise of authorized Microsoft cloud partners in sessions that cover the intricacies of a flexible and effective cloud implementation for a wide range of business use cases.
“Microsoft’s vision for the cloud is unique in that we also look beyond the cloud. To deliver an experience that makes a difference, we have brought to life an intelligent edge that works in tandem with Azure, our intelligent cloud platform,” said Chris Weber, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Business, Microsoft. “Our goal for Azure is to enable customer success by improving IT and developer productivity, providing a consistent and versatile hybrid cloud experience, unlocking AI solutions, and ensuring trust through security and privacy. Customers all over the world – from Carlsberg’s IoT-driven “beer as a service” model to Microsoft’s own sales and CRM teams – have taken full advantage of newfound benefits and capabilities made possible by Azure.”
Thailand’s visions for a secure and scalable digital transformation revealed
With public cloud investment in Thailand on the rise and on the way to a market value of over 7.7 billion baht for 2017, businesses in the country are well aware of the impact of the cloud in enabling transformative change. Earlier this year, a Microsoft Asia survey showed that 82% of Thai business leaders saw the cloud as a vital factor behind success in their strategies for the digital economy.
Joining Weber and Microsoft in sharing their visions of digital transformation in the cloud were the Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA) and Advanced Info Service – two of the leading organizations in Thailand’s business landscape – and Microsoft cloud partner and consulting firm Frontis. Executives from the three companies engaged in a lively session on stage as they shared the stories of their journey to the cloud with Microsoft Azure, touching on cutting-edge innovations such as a smart power grid to a full range of digital lifestyle services – both of which cater to the differing needs of millions of customers nationwide.
Tatiana Marushevskaya, Marketing & Operations Director, Microsoft (Thailand) Limited, added, “With Azure, we have created not only the most intelligent and adaptable cloud platform but also the most trusted. In fact, Azure is the world’s first cloud platform to offer full compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ahead of its enforcement in May 2018. This further cements Azure’s status as the platform offering the most comprehensive compliance coverage for businesses worldwide and the best path to the cloud for organizations operating on the international landscape.”
Taking hybrid cloud to the next level with Azure Stack – complete with free trial for developers
As the only cloud platform striving to deliver a consistent experience from identity to data, platform, and security and management, Azure is founded on the understanding that a distributed hybrid cloud is the model of choice for businesses, and that a truly effective hybrid cloud setup must address an organization’s entire environment instead of just the infrastructure.
Businesses looking to achieve consistent development across cloud and on-premises can take advantage of Azure Stack, which is now available through partners such as Dell EMC, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Dimension Data. With Azure Stack, organizations can build and deploy apps using the exact same APIs, tools and experiences they would have in the Azure cloud, resulting in new use cases that fit well within all regulatory frameworks.
“The consistency enabled by Azure Stack removes a layer of complexity from the hybrid cloud, which means that your business can invest with confidence in both cloud and on-premises environments. Thanks to shared tools and approaches across both environments, developers can do more at a faster pace or even create solutions that bridge either connectivity or regulatory gaps to bring the power of the cloud to new use cases and geographical locations,” added Weber.
In addition to integrated, multi-server systems and fully-managed services from Microsoft partners, Azure Stack is also available as a free, single-server deployment option through the Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) for application prototyping purposes.
Advancing the enterprise cloud with intelligent new service offerings
Businesses interested in seeing a glimpse of the possibilities offered by Microsoft Azure can now take advantage of a best-in-industry trial offer with an Azure free account, which grants 12 months of free access to compute, storage, database, and networking services along with more than 25 additional services that are permanently offered free of charge. Also included is $200 in Azure credits, which allow customers to try any Azure product for 30 days.
Customers deciding to get on board with Azure can do so with minimal fuss thanks to Azure Database Migration Service and SQL DB Managed Instance, which makes migration from on-premises to the cloud a simple task with next to no downtime.
Azure Database Migration Service and SQL DB Managed Instance offer the ability to easily lift and shift their on-premises SQL Server databases to an Azure SQL database with near-zero downtime and lower cost.
Furthermore, customers can enhance the efficiency of their investments in the cloud with Azure Cost Management – a free solution that helps organizations to manage and optimize cloud spend on Azure as well as other cloud platforms. Reserved Virtual Machine Instances, a new offering set to become available later this year, allows customers to save up to 72% in expenses when reserving virtual machines in advance over a period of one or three years. Updates for Azure Monitor, meanwhile, now provide full end-to-end monitoring that covers infrastructure and applications in a single view.
Azure Functions, a serverless computing solution that eliminates all infrastructure concerns for developers to freely innovate, is now capable of harnessing the power of Azure Cosmos DB, a database service built for globally-distributed applications. Developers can quickly and easily create serverless applications to handle rich data on a planet-scale deployment with minimal latency.
Last but not least, Azure’s vision of the intelligent cloud continues to grow with new capabilities added to Azure Machine Learning, which now allows developers and data scientists to develop, experiment, and deploy AI models on any type of data, on any scale, and either within Azure or on-premises.
For more information on Microsoft’s enterprise solutions, visit https://enterprise.microsoft.com/en-apac/.