MS Tech Summit Birmingham

This week Conner and I had the pleasure of attending Microsoft’s annual Tech Summit at The NEC in Birmingham. With cloud services becoming increasingly important at Method4 and throughout the industry, it was a great opportunity to explore the new services being offered in Microsoft Azure.

The summit kicked off with a keynote from Stella Chernyak, Senior Director of Office 365, with an overview of Microsoft 365, which integrates the best feature of Windows 10, Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security. The emphasis being on its ability to take advantage of the cloud’s security and intelligence features.

The key messages we took from the talks on day one of the summit were the use of Artificial Intelligence to better serve our customers, best practices for continual deployment and integration, enabling IT and developer productivity, improvements to Microsoft Teams and security advantages in the Cloud.

On day two we attended the Azure Red Shirt Dev Tour, a five-hour event for developers hosted by Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise. Scott provided a technical overview of most of Azure’s services with plenty of live demos and interactive coding. We were exposed to the latest offerings from Azure including Function Apps: standalone code snippets that can be triggered by over 100+ connectors from Microsoft’s own products, 3rd part vendors and even custom event triggers. What sets them aside from previous services is the lack of infrastructure required to run them, driving costs down while increasing productivity and speed of development. I can really see how this technology will streamline even complex business requirements.

Both days proved to be a great opportunity to talk other developers to discuss how they utilise cloud services on Azure and to apply best practises by talking with Microsoft’s own experts, both of which we’re excited to take back to Method4!