Microsoft Ignite 2024 on a page

Posted on By Mark Wilson

You probably noticed, but Microsoft held its Ignite conference in Chicago last week. As is normal now, there’s a “Book of News” for all the major announcements and the keynotes are available for online review. But there’s an awful lot to sort through. Luckily, CNET created a 15 minute summary of Satya Nadella’s keynote:

Major announcements from Ignite 2024

Last year, I wrote about how it was clear that Microsoft is all about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and this year is no different. The rest of this post focuses on the main announcements with a little bit of analysis from yours truly on what the implications might be.

AnnouncementWhat it meansFind out more
Investing in security, particularly around Purview.Data governance is of central importance in the age of AI. Microsoft has announced updates to prevent oversharing, risky use of AI, and misuse of protected materials. With one of the major concerns being accidental access to badly-secured information, this will be an important development, for those that make use of it.https://aka.ms/Ignite2024Security/
Zero Day QuestA new hacking event with $4m in rewards. Bound to grab headlines!https://aka.ms/ZeroDayQuest
Copilot as the UI for AIIf there’s one thing to take away from Ignite it’s that Microsoft sees Copilot as the UI for AI (it becomes the organising layer for work and how it gets done).

1. Every employee will have a Copilot that knows them and their work – enhancing productivity and saving time.
2. There will be agents to automate business processes.
3. And the IT dept has a control system to manage secure and measure the impact of Copilot.
Copilot ActionsCopilot Actions are intended to reduce the time spent on repetitive everyday tasks – they were described as “Outlook Rules for the age of AI” (but for the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem). I’m sceptical on these but willing to be convinced. Let’s see how well they work in practice.https://aka.ms/CopilotActions
Copilot AgentsIf 2023-4 were about generative AI, “agentic” computing is the term for 2025.

There will be Agents within the context of a team – teammates scoped to specific roles – e.g. a facilitator to keep meeting focus in Teams and manage follow-up/action items; a Project Management Agent in Planner – to create a plan and oversee task assignments/content creation; self-service agents to provide information – augmenting HR and IT departments to answer questions and complete tasks; and a SharePoint Agent per site – providing instant access to real-time information.

Organisations can create their own agents using Copilot Studio – and the aim is that it should be as easy to create an Agent as it is to create a document.		https://aka.ms/AgentsInM365
Copilot AnalyticsAnswering criticism about the cost of licensing Copilot, Microsoft is providing analytics to correlate usage to a business metric. Organisations will be able to tune their Copilot usage to business KPIs and show how Copilot usage is translating into business outcomes.https://aka.ms/CopilotAnalytics
Mobile Application Management on Windows 365Microsoft is clearly keen to push its “cloud PC” concept – Windows 365 – with new applications so that users can access a secure computing environment from iOS and Android devices. Having spent years working to bring clients away from expensive thin client infrastructure and back to properly managed “thick clients”, I’m not convinced about the “Cloud PC”, but maybe I’m just an old man shouting at the clouds…https://aka.ms/WindowsAppAndroid
Windows 365 LinkWindows 365 Link is a simple, secure purpose built access device (aka a thin PC). It’s admin-less and password-less with security configurations enabled by default that cannot be turned off. The aim is that users can connect directly to their cloud PC with no data left locally (available from April 2025). If you’re going to invest in this approach, then it could be a useful device – but it’s not a Microsoft version of a Mac Mini – it’s all about the cloud.https://aka.ms/Windows365Link
Windows Resiliency InitiativeDoes anyone remember “Trustworthy Computing”? Well, the Windows Resiliency Initiative is the latest attempt to make Windows more secure and reliable. It includes new features like Windows Hotpatch to apply critical updates without a restart across an entire IT estate. https://aka.ms/WinWithSecurity
Azure LocalA rebranding and expansion of Azure Stack to bring Azure Arc to the edge. Organisations can run mission critical workloads in distributed locations.https://aka.ms/AzureLocal
Azure Integrated HSMMicrosoft’s first in-house security chip hardens key management without impacting performance. This will be part of every new server deployed on Azure starting next year.https://aka.ms/AzureIntegratedHSM
Azure BoostMicrosoft’s first in-house data processing unit (DPU) is designed to accelerate data-centric workloads. It can run cloud storage workloads with 3x less power and 4x the performance.https://aka.ms/AzureBoostDPU
Preview NVIDIA Blackwall AI infrastructure on AzureBy this point, even I’m yawning, but this is a fantastically fast computing environment for optimised AI training workloads. It’s not really something that most of us will use.https://aka.ms/NDGB200v6
Azure HBv5Co-engineered with AMD, this was described as a new standard for high performance computing and cited as being up to 8 times faster than any other cloud VM.https://aka.ms/AzureHBv5

FabricSQL Server is coming natively to Fabric in the form of Microsoft Fabric Databases. The aim here is to simplify operational databases as Fabric already did for analytical requirements. It provides an enterprise data platform that serves all use cases, making use of open source formats in the Fabric OneLake data lake. I have to admit, it does sound very interesting, but there will undoubtedly be some nuances that I’ll leave to my data-focused colleagues.https://aka.ms/Fabric
Azure AI FoundryDescribed as a “first class application server for the AI age” – unifying all models, tooling, safety and monitoring into a single experience, integrated with development tools as a standalone SDK and a portal. 1800 models in the catalogue for model customisation and experimentation.https://aka.ms/MaaSExperimentation
https://aka.ms/CustomizationCollaborations
Azure AI Agent ServiceBuild, deploy and scale AI apps to automate business processes. Compared with Copilot Studio for a graphical approach, this provides a code-first approach for developers to create agents, grounded in data, wherever it is.https://ai.azure.com/
Other AI announcementsThere will be AI reports and other management capabilities in Foundry, including including evaluation of models.

Safety is important – with tools to build secure AI including PromptShield to detect/block manipulation of outputs and risk/safety evaluations for image content.
Quantum ComputingThis will be the buzzword that replaces AI in the coming years. Quantum is undoubtedly significant but it’s still highly experimental. Nevertheless, Microsoft is making progress in the Quantum arms race, with a the “World’s most powerful quantum computer” with 24 logical Qubits, double the previous record.https://aka.ms/AQIgniteBlog

Featured image: screenshots from the Microsoft Ignite keynote stream, under fair use for copyright purposes.

Quantum Computing 101

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

There’s been a lot of buzz around quantum computing over the last year or so and there seems little doubt that it will provide the next major step forward in computing power but it’s still largely theoretical – you can’t buy a quantum computer today. So, what does it really mean… and why should we care?

Today’s computers are binary. The transistors (tiny switches) that are contained in microchips are either off (0) or on (1) – just like a light switch. Quantum computing is based on entirely new principles. And quantum mechanics is difficult to understand – it’s counterintuitive – it’s weird. So let’s look at some of the basic concepts:

Superposition Superposition is a concept whereby, instead of a state being on or off, it’s on and off. At the same time. And it’s everything in the middle as well. Think of it as a scale from 0 to 1 and all the numbers in-between.
Qubit A quantum bit (qubit) uses superposition so that, instead of trying problems sequentially, we can compute in parallel with superposition.

More qubits are not necessarily better (although there is a qubit race taking place in the media)… the challenge is not about creating more qubits but better qubits, with better error correction.
Error correction Particles like an electron have a charge and a spin so they point in a certain direction. Noise from other electrons makes them wiggle so the information in one is leaking to others, which makes long calculations difficult. This is one of the reasons that quantum computers run at low temperatures.

Greek dancers hold their neighbour so that they move as one. One approach in quantum computing is to do the same with electrons so that only those at the end have freedom of motion – a concept called electron fractionalisation. This creates a robust building block for a qubit, one that is more like Lego (locking together) than a house of cards (loosely stacked).

Different teams of researchers are using different approaches to solve error correction problems, so not everyone’s Qubits are equal! One approach is to use topological qubits for reliable computation, storage and scaling. Just like Inca quipus (a system of knots and braids used to encode information so it couldn’t be washed away, unlike chalk marks), topological qubits can braid information and create patterns in code.
Exponential scaling Once the error correction issue is solved, then scaling is where the massive power of quantum computing can be unleashed.

A 4 bit classical computer has 16 configurations of 0s and 1s but can only exist in one of these states at any time. A quantum register of 4 qubits can be in all 16 states at the same time and compute on all of them at the same time!

Every n interacting qubits can handle 2n bits of information in parallel so:

  • 10 qubits = 1024 classical bits (1KiB)
  • 20 qubits = 1MB
  • 30 qubits = 1GB
  • 40 qubits = 1TB
  • etc.

This means that the computational power of a quantum computer is potentially huge.

What sort of problems need quantum computing?

We won’t be using quantum computers for general personal computing any time soon – Moore’s Law is doing just fine there – but there are a number of areas where quantum computing is better suited than classical computing approaches.

We can potentially use the massive quantum computing power to solve problems like:

  • Cryptography (making it more secure – a quantum computer could break the RSA 2048 algorithm that underpins much of today’s online commerce in around 100 seconds – so we need new models).
  • Quantum chemistry and materials science (nitrogen fixation, carbon capture, etc.).
  • Machine learning (faster training of models – quantum computing as a “co-processor” for AI).
  • and other intractable problems that are supercompute-constrained (improved medicines, etc.).

A universal programmable quantum computer

Microsoft is trying to create a universal programmable quantum computer – the whole stack – and they’re pretty advanced already. The developments include:

Quantum computing may sound like the technology of tomorrow but the tools are available to develop and test algorithms today and some sources are reporting that a quantum computing capability in Azure could be just 5 years away.

Seven technology trends to watch 2017-2020

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Just over a week ago, risual held its bi-annual summit at the risual HQ in Stafford – the whole company back in the office for a day of learning with a new format: a mini-conference called risual:NXT.

I was given the task of running the technical track – with 6 speakers presenting on a variety of topics covering all of our technical practices: Cloud Infrastructure; Dynamics; Data Platform; Unified Intelligent Communications and Messaging; Business Productivity; and DevOps – but I was also privileged to be asked to present a keynote session on technology trends. Unfortunately, my 35-40 minutes of content had to be squeezed into 22 minutes… so this blog post summarises some of the points I wanted to get across but really didn’t have the time.

1. The cloud was the future once

For all but a very small number of organisations, not using the cloud means falling behind. Customers may argue that they can’t use cloud service because of regulatory or other reasons but that’s rarely the case – even the UK Police have recently been given the green light (the blue light?) to store information in Microsoft’s UK data centres.

Don’t get me wrong – hybrid cloud is more than tactical. It will remain part of the landscape for a while to come… that’s why Microsoft now has Azure Stack to provide a means for customers to run a true private cloud that looks and works like Azure in their own datacentres.

Thankfully, there are fewer and fewer CIOs who don’t see the cloud forming part of their landscape – even if it’s just commodity services like email in Office 365. But we need to think beyond lifting and shifting virtual machines to IaaS and running email in Office 365.

Organisations need to transform their cloud operations because that’s where the benefits are – embrace the productivity tools in Office 365 (no longer just cloud versions of Exchange/Lync/SharePoint but a full collaboration stack) and look to build new solutions around advanced workloads in Azure. Microsoft is way ahead in the PaaS space – machine learning (ML), advanced analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT) – there are so many scenarios for exploiting cloud services that simply wouldn’t be possible on-premises without massive investment.

And for those who still think they can compete with the scale that Microsoft (Amazon and Google) operate at, this video might provide some food for thought…

(and for a similar video from a security perspective…)

2. Data: the fuel of the future

I hate referring to data as “the new oil”. Oil is a finite resource. Data is anything but finite! It is a fuel though…

Data is what provides an economic advantage – there are businesses without data and those with. Data is the business currency of the future. Think about it: Facebook and Google are entirely based on data that’s freely given up by users (remember, if you’re not paying for a service – you are the service). Amazon wouldn’t be where it is without data.

So, thinking about what we do with that data: the 1st wave of the Internet was about connecting computers, 2nd was about people, the 3rd is devices.

Despite what you might read, IoT is not about connected kettles/fridges. It’s not even really about home automation with smart lightbulbs, thermostats and door locks. It’s about gathering information from billions of sensors out there. Then, we take that data and use it to make intelligent decisions and apply them in the real world. Artificial intelligence and machine learning feed on data – they are ying and yang to each other. We use data to train algorithms, then we use the algorithms to process more data.

The Microsoft Data Platform is about analytics and data driving a new wave of insights and opening up possibilities for new ways of working.

James Watt’s 18th Century steam engine led to an industrial revolution. The intelligent cloud is today’s version – moving us to the intelligence revolution.

3 Blockchain

Bitcoin is just one implementation of something known as the Blockchain. In this case as a digital currency.

But Blockchain is not just for monetary transactions – it’s more than that. It can be used for anything transactional. Blockchain is about a distributed ledger. Effectively, it allows parties to trust one another without knowing each other. The ledger is a record of every transaction, signed and tamper-proof.

The magic about Blockchain is that as the chain gets longer so does the entropy and the encryption level – effectively, the more the chain is used, the more secure it gets. That means infinite integrity.

(Read more in Jamie Skella’s “A blockchain explaination your parents could understand”.)

Blockchain is seen as strategic by Microsoft and by the UK government and it’s early days but we will see where people want to talk about integrity and data resilience with integrity. Databases – anything transactional – can be signed with blockchain.

A group of livestock farmers in Arkansas is using blockchain technology so customers can tell where their dinner comes from. They are applying blockchain technology to trace products from ‘farm to fork’ aiming to provide consumers with information about the origin and quality of the meat they buy.

Blockchain is finding new applications in the enterprise and Microsoft has announced the CoCo Framework to improve performance, confidentiality and governance characteristics of enterprise blockchain networks (read more in Simon Bisson’s article for InfoWorld). There’s also Blockchain as a service (in Azure) – and you can find more about Microsoft’s plans by reading up on “Project Bletchley”.

(BTW, Bletchley is a town in Buckinghamshire that’s now absorbed into Milton Keynes. Bletchley Park was the primary location of the UK Government’s wartime code-cracking efforts that are said to have shortened WW2 by around 2 years. Not a bad name for a cryptographic technology, hey?)

4 Into the third dimension

So we’ve had the ability to “print” in 3 dimensions for a while but now 3D is going further.Now we’re taking physical worlds into the virtual world and augmenting with information.

Microsoft doesn’t like the term augmented reality (because it’s being used for silly faces on photos) and they have coined the term mixed reality to describe taking untethered computing devices and creating a seamless overlap between physical and virtual worlds.

To make use of this we need to be able to scan and render 3D images, then move them into a virtual world. 3D is built into next Windows 10 release (the Fall Creators update, due on 17 October 2017). This will bring Paint 3D, a 3D Gallery, View 3D for our phones – so we can scan any object and import to a virtual world. With the adoption rates of new Windows 10 releases then that puts 3D on a market of millions of PCs.

This Christmas will see lots of consumer headsets in the market. Mixed reality will really take off after that. Microsoft is way ahead in the plumbing – all whilst we didn’t notice. They held their Hololens product back to be big in business (so that it wasn’t a solution without a problem). Now it can be applied to field worker scenarios, visualising things before they are built.

To give an example, recently, I had a builder quote for a loft extension at home. He described how the stairs will work and sketched a room layout – but what if I could have visualised it in a headset? Then imagine picking the paint, sofas, furniture, wallpaper, etc.

The video below shows how Ford and Microsoft have worked together to use mixed reality to shorten and improve product development:

5 The new dawn of artificial intelligence

All of the legends of AI are set by sci-fi (Metropolis, 2001 AD, Terminator). But AI is not about killing us all! Humans vs. machines? Deep Blue beating people at Chess, Jeopardy, then Google taking on Go. Heading into the economy and displacing jobs. Automation of business process/economic activity. Mass unemployment?

Let’s take a more optimistic view! It’s not about sentient/thinking machines or giving human rights to machines. That stuff is interesting but we don’t know where consciousness comes from!

AI is a toolbox of high-value tools and techniques. We can apply these to problems and appreciate the fundamental shift from programming machines to machines that learn.

Ai is not about programming logical steps – we can’t do that when we’re recognising images, speech, etc. Instead, our inspiration is biology, neural networks, etc. – using maths to train complex layers of neural networks led to deep learning.

Image recognition was “magic” a few years ago but now it’s part of everyday life. Nvidia’s shares are growing massively due to GPU requirements for deep learning and autonomous vehicles. And Microsoft is democratising AI (in its own applications – with an intelligent cloud, intelligent agents and bots).

NVIDIA Corporation stock price growth fuelled by demand for GPUs

So, about those bots…

A bot is a web app and a conversational user interface. We use them because natural language processing (NLP) and AI are here today. And because messaging apps rule the world. With bots, we can use Human language as a new user interface; bots are the new apps – our digital assistants.

We can employ bots in several scenarios today – including customer service and productivity – and this video is just one example, with Microsoft Cortana built into a consumer product:

The device is similar to Amazon’s popular Echo smart speaker and a skills kit is used to teach Cortana about an app; Ask “skillname to do something”. The beauty of Cortana is that it’s cross-platform so the skill can show up wherever Cortana does. More recently, Amazon and Microsoft have announced Cortana-Alexa integration (meanwhile Siri continues to frustrate…)

AI is about augmentation, not replacement. It’s true that bots may replace humans for many jobs – but new jobs will emerge. And it’s already here. It’s mainstream. We use recommendations for playlists, music, etc. We’re recognising people, emotions, etc. in images. We already use AI every day…

6 From silicon to cells

Every cell has a “programme” – DNA. And researchers have found that they can write code in DNA and control proteins/chemical processes. They can compile code to DNA and execute, creating molecular circuits. Literally programming biology.

This is absolutely amazing. Back when I was an MVP, I got the chance to see Microsoft Research talk about this in Cambridge. It blew my mind. That was in 2010. Now it’s getting closer to reality and Microsoft and the University of Washington have successfully used DNA for storage:

The benefits of DNA are that it’s very dense and it lasts for thousands of years so can always be read. And we’re just storing 0s and 1s – that’s much simpler than what DNA stores in nature.

7 Quantum computing

With massive data storage… the next step is faster computing – that’s where Quantum computing comes in.

I’m a geek and this one is tough to understand… so here’s another video:

https://youtu.be/doNNClTTYwE

Quantum computing is starting to gain momentum. Dominated by maths (quantum mechanics), it requires thinking in equations, not translating into physical things in your head. It has concepts like superposition (multiple states at the same time) and entanglement. Instead of gates being turned on/off it’s about controlling particles with nanotechnology.

A classical 2 bit on-off takes 2 clock cycles. One quantum bit (a Qubit) has multiple states at the same time. It can be used to solve difficult problems (the RSA 2048 challenge problem would take a billion years on a supercomputer but just 100 seconds on a 250-bit quantum computer). This can be applied to encryption and security, health and pharma, energy, biotech, environment, materials and engineering, AI and ML.

There’s a race for quantum computing hardware taking place and China sees this as a massively strategic direction. Meanwhile, the UK is already an academic centre of excellence – now looking to bring quantum computing to market. We’ll have usable devices in 2-3 years (where “usable” means that they won’t be cracking encryption, but will have initial applications in chemistry and biology).

Microsoft Research is leading a consortium called Station Q and, later this year, Microsoft will release a new quantum computing programming language, along with a quantum computing simulator. With these, developers will be able to both develop and debug quantum programs implementing quantum algorithms.

Predicting the future?

Amazon, Google and Microsoft each invest over $12bn p.a. on R&D. As demonstrated in the video above, their datacentres are not something that many organisations can afford to build but they will drive down the cost of computing. That drives down the cost for the rest of us to rent cloud services, which means more data, more AI – and the cycle continues.

I’ve shared 7 “technology bets” (and there are others, like the use of Graphene) that I haven’t covered – my list is very much influenced by my work with Microsoft technologies and services. We can’t always predict the future but all of these are real… the only bet is how big they are. Some are mainstream, some are up and coming – and some will literally change the world.

Credit: Thanks to Rob Fraser at Microsoft for the initial inspiration – and to Alun Rogers (@AlunRogers) for helping place some of these themes into context.