Microsoft’s Inspire event was this week, the annual partner event. Here are some highlights.
Kicking off the event, Satya Nadella urged partners to go beyond “talking about digital transformation to delivering on the digital imperative for every organization.” He described that imperative as infusing digital technology into all business processes: “It’s what will make the difference between organizations that thrive and those that get left behind.”
Microsoft launched Viva Engage, which is a Facebook-like app inside Teams. The goal is social networking at work. Viva Engage builds on some of the strengths of Yammer, promoting digital communities, conversations, and self-expression in the workplace. While Yammer often feels like an extension of SharePoint and Office, Viva Engage looks like a Facebook replica. It includes a storylines section, which is effectively your Facebook news feed, featuring conversational posts, videos, images, and more. It looks and feels just like Facebook, and it’s clearly designed to feel similar, so employees will use it to share news or even personal interests.
Microsoft also announced it’s entering call centers with the Digital Contact Center Platform. This combines capabilities across Dynamics 365, Teams, Power Platform, and Azure, along with the recent acquisition of Nuance. Blending productivity, collaboration, and customer-service technologies, along with AI, Microsoft is delivering a more fully fledged product than its existing Dynamics 365 Customer Service product.
Microsoft also added benefits for ISVs in its Success Program, which helps publish to Microsoft’s commercial marketplace, and launched a dedicated Azure Space Partner Community. They also launched Cloud for Sovereignty, designed for the government sector. This part of a larger focus on industries. The company has six planned industry-specific cloud offerings — Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, Nonprofit, and Sustainability — each in different stages of completion.
Why do we care?
While tactically, there are offerings to care about here, it’s the language shift that I noted. I’ve never liked digital transformation as a phrase and prefer digital imperative a bit more. Organizations have to move into the digital world. Despite many resisting or holding onto legacy tech for far too long, it’s not an option.
Microsoft remains the 800-pound gorilla of partnerships and gets disproportionate coverage as a result. Their moves matter – and you can see their lean into digital work. They see the opportunity that I do.