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All the Announcements to Follow at WPC 2014
Microsoft is preparing WPC 2014 attendees for what to expect at next week's event.
Rod Trent
July 9, 2014
3 Min Read
Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) kicks off next week in Washington, DC. Today, the company has given us preview tidbits of Cloud-based discussions it will be providing at the event. The following represent just an overview of for which Microsoft will be spending time filling in the blanks next week.
The company is bringing three distinct themes to WPC, all cloud-based. Microsoft will cover new cloud services, Azure innovation and investment, and productivity empowerment, all of which are targeted toward partner attendees.
New cloud services
Microsoft Azure StorSimple is the company's hybrid cloud storage solution with intent to cut into the cost and inefficiency ever-growing data. Available August 1 and infused with Azure services, Microsoft will unveil the 8000 series appliances, allowing system integration partners to help customers deploy the solution for all types of storage.
The Azure Machine Learning service preview that was announced in June, will be available to partners and customers on Monday, July 14.
Microsoft is expanding the preview of the Microsoft Azure government cloud and the will fill in the missing pieces around the announcement that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will join Office 365 and Azure with a new government cloud offering of what Microsoft calls its "all-up government cloud initiative."
Azure innovation and investment
On Monday Microsoft is bringing new IaaS functionality to the Azure Portal, allowing users to more easily manage virtual machines. In addition, it will provide single-click SharePoint deployment for the management of multiple virtual machines within the Portal.
A new preview called Azure Event Hubs, will launch. Azure Event Hubs is a new service that can broker millions of events per second, allowing partners and customers to pull in, process and analyze data from a nearly infinite number of cloud-connected smart devices.
In addition to providing new functionality and services, Microsoft is continuing its dedicated investments to increased network and datacenter capacity for U.S. partners and customers. Next week two new Azure regions will be brought online in Virginia and Iowa.
Empowering productivity
Today, Microsoft has announced new changes to Office 365 for small and midsized businesses and will detail those for the partner crowd next week.
Microsoft today has officially renamed its Codename Oslo product to Delve. And, while many have already voiced that 'Delve' is pretty lame, the company will detail what that means at WPC. Announced earlier this year, Delve is a new way to search and discover content across Office 365 based on personalized insights derived from machine learning.
This covers most of content that will be discussed at WPC 2014 next week, but I'm sure there will be many more that Microsoft has held back to ensure attendees get something extra special. And, I'm sure they will be all about the Cloud. I can't remember a recent Microsoft event where the Cloud wasn't treated like royalty.
And, who knows? With reports coming in this week that Microsoft is pulling Surface Pro 2's from stock at Microsoft Stores, should WPC 2014 attendees bring extra money for one of Microsoft's now-famous device blowouts? Probably not.
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