The following blog post was written by Jason Hardy.

This weekend, I will make my annual pilgrimage to Microsoft Ignite in Orlando Florida to see what words of wisdom Satya will share. I always enjoy hearing him speak as he shares his ideas on where technology is headed and how it will transform the enterprise - and our lives. He thinks big and as the leader of Microsoft has the influence to drive the world in the direction of his thinking. His keynote is always a great start to a week that is jam packed with sessions on every imaginable topic.

As a marketer of cloud services, I tend to spend a lot of time in Azure specific sessions. And, while I don’t have the influence or vision of Satya, I wanted to pass along what I think are some hot topics you should seek to learn more about at Ignite.

First up is Azure Stack.  It’s been just over a year since Microsoft officially launched Azure Stack and we have seen a great deal of interest from companies looking to leverage the platform. Azure Stack delivers a true hybrid cloud experience giving the enterprise a consistent Azure development platform across Azure public and on-premises cloud as well as extending to the intelligent edge. This consistent approach provides customers with great efficiencies to build, run and innovate with a focus on addressing the business needs and then deciding on the right destination for the solution.  Hybrid solutions are also driving customers to evolve from managing their IT to managing outcomes by working with GSI like Avanade to help craft and manage these Hybrid Azure Environments to support customers business agility and digital transformation efforts.
 
Next is Azure DevOps. Whether you are thinking public, private or hybrid cloud your strategy will require a significant effort and investment in application development and modernization. The key to doing this successfully is having a software engineering platform that brings together people, processes and technology in a manner that helps to automate software delivery and provide continuous value to users with increasing velocity. Azure DevOps can help simplify, speed and improve your cloud development. Azure DevOps brings together the five key capabilities that organizations need to employ to be successful in this space. From team collaboration to continuous integration and automated testing, all the way to deployment and monitoring, Azure DevOps allows teams to implement these capabilities in a secure and scalable way. Understanding how to harness the power of this modern engineering platform is critical to unleash the value of your investments in this space.

Finally, I want to talk about SAP on Azure.  While this is not an “Azure service” it’s something that anyone with an SAP instance should be thinking about. Earlier this year, Microsoft published a point of view entitled “Microsoft Azure and Accenture: Your best choice to modernize SAP” in which they  describe why this is the most effective and efficient way to migrate your SAP system to the cloud. At the core of a successful migration of SAP to Azure is identifying SAP and Azure expertise that can be leveraged to configure and secure Azure, complete the SAP migration and then provide application migration and modernization services to ensure that your existing applications can successfully interact with your new SAP instance. In addition, the Azure Platform can then be leveraged to extend the SAP landscape through Cloud Transformation, Data & Analytics, Integration Platform, AI/ML as well as 2-tier ERP/CRM approaches.

While these are just a few of the many Azure related services, there are over 100, they represent some of the core components upon which you can build a long-term cloud and application strategy. If you want to have an in-depth one on one conversation about these topics, stop by Avanade booth #1000 (right inside the main entrance to Ignite) and talk to our subject matter experts.

If you miss us at Ignite, click over to learn more about Cloud on our website.