4 MegaTrends in Technology & Business

Today, we are seeing four megatrends in the industry: Mobility, Cloud, Social, and Big Data. They are driving what we are doing at Microsoft, and we believe they are driving what our customers and partners are doing as well.

These are the megatrends that keep us all  moving forward, that impact how we evolve our IT organizations, our businesses, and more importantly, that impact how we engage with our customers and our employees, and how they engage with us.

Mobility

We are moving from a world of dealing with hundreds of millions of PCs, to billions of mobile computing devices. The power in all of our pockets is much greater than the laptops we hauled around 2 or 3 years ago. The productivity concerns on those devices, the management, and security all dramatically change the complexity of how we enable our users and how we enable our customers around the world.

Mobility has changed the landscape of how we think about our customers and their experiences, our product lines, everything we’re doing at Microsoft around our family of devices. It’s also impacting how all companies around the globe are developing and delivering products and services.

Cloud

For at least a decade people have been saying the cloud is coming. For the last 2 or 3 years, we can say with confidence – the cloud is here. In the cloud, the services you provide are always on, 24×7. The threats to your data are severe at all times. For Microsoft, our cloud business has really taken off, and Office 365 has become the fastest growing product Microsoft has ever brought to market. The cloud continues to be a big focus for how we are empowering our customers and partners to do more with the experiences they value most.

Social

Social is also driving almost every project we do today. Let’s think about the new modern workforce, and the way millenial’s think about operating together. They don’t think about hierarchical boundaries, and how they like to collaborate. They think about social networks and how they like to bring their ideas to fruition inside of companies. The need to leverage the power of social inside the enterprise is driving businesses today.  Incorporating that in an integrated strategy that can be deployed through a family of devices, that can have power of the back end, and analytics to understand what your customers are saying about your products, what your employees are saying about your services. That’s critical.

Big Data

We all know that the volume of data being produced and consumed around the globe is exploding. What’s driving this explosion? Video, social, mapping technologies, online and on- demand movies, mobile internet connected devices, and most of our daily transactions are all examples of services driving the data explosion.

Trillions of pieces of information are being collected, stored, shared, and analyzed daily with increasing speed. SINTEF research published in 2013, says 90% of all the data in the world has been generated in the last two years.  According to IDC, “the digital universe will grow to 40 zettabytes (i.e. 40 trillion terabytes) globally by 2020.”!

If it feels like we are drowning in data, it’s because we are.

With this data explosion, we are all asking critical questions:

• How do we use this data to drive our business?
• How do we analyze the data to better understand the needs of our customers?
• How do we use the data to make better business decisions?
• How do we use the data to as a competitive advantage?

Big data and analytics are driving up the capacity needs of our data centers as well as empowering our user community like never before. The idea is not just to empower the few, but empower the masses.