An economy under recession, increasing global competition and new consumer expectations are forcing businesses to innovate their products, services, internal processes, and even business models. Emerging technologies in the areas of the cloud, big data, mobility, social networking, analytics, gesture control etc. are leading to a change in the technology landscape. Enterprises will need to change their business models, strategy, operations, processes, and interactions with consumers and the broader marketplace to take advantage of the emerging technologies. Disruptive vendors, like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google, are adopting these technologies to create innovative products and services. They are developing products and services to reach new customers in new contexts. Microsoft is bringing a fundamental change in the software industry, one that will change the way people will buy software. Instead of packaged software that connect to cloud services, it is creating a new business model where users and IT departments buy subscriptions to cloud services, and get desktop software as a part of the package. It is a new business model that is less software-plus services and more services-plus software. This will result in changing the pricing models and customer-partner relationships. This article focuses on some the emerging technologies and the offerings Microsoft is coming up in these areas.

Cloud Computing

Cloud-based solutions offer multiple benefits in terms of hardware and operating system independence, costs and scalability, and always up-to-date information over the web. This concept sits behind a centralized large-scale computing architecture. Cloud has led to new service models such Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-service (PaaS). SaaS is adopted for task-specific consumer applications, and contextual business applications. IaaS has been adopted for large-scale web applications and data analysis and processing type of applications. PaaS is not being used at the scale of the other two categories IaaS and SaaS . Security, integration, cost and privacy stand out as the major challenges towards adoption. As per Gartner, through 2013, over 60% of enterprise IT adoption of the cloud will be to redeploy current applications, virtually unchanged and through 2014, more than 80% of all enterprise cloud based initiatives will be in exploiting hybrid and private cloud techniques.

Microsoft has been one of the early adopters of cloud computing, by building mind share and technical expertise for this high potential area:

• It launched Microsoft Azure as a cloud alternative, which includes both IaaS and PaaS. On the application front,
• Microsoft introduced a cloud offering, Office 365, which includes unified communication capabilities branded as Lync Online,
• It supports cloud delivery of other Microsoft business productivity tools, including SharePoint (collaboration), Exchange (email) and desktop productivity (Office Suite, including Word, Exchange and Excel).
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM online offering has seen a significant growth in its CRM software as a service (SaaS)-related business.

Mobility

Microsoft has been a leader in the mobile segment, grown from the traditional desktop. Windows Mobile was a strong contender in the pre-iPhone days, and its Windows XP Tablet PC edition was years ahead of other tablets. However, Microsoft was slow to adapt to market changes. Apple redefined the mobile market, centering it on smartphone and media tablets with more consumer-friendly, mobile-optimized interface and targeted devices that did not try to replicate the desktop. Google took the place of Microsoft as the volume-oriented, more-open alternative for OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) with android operating system (OS). With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft generated a small, but viable, app base in smart phone usage. Microsoft has released Windows 8 and hopes to get back to a position of relevance, and strength, in mobile space. Windows 8 includes a competitive user interface (UI) for tablets and smartphones. It will provide the underpinnings of core Windows (desktops, notebooks, tablets), Windows Phone and Windows embedded systems.

By coming up with Surface and having a close partnership with Nokia for phones, Microsoft aims to take advantage of users'' demand for mobility by getting OEMs to adopt Windows as their smartphone and tablet OS to compete with Apple. Developers can create mobile apps for Microsoft Windows 8.

Social Networking

Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, are important networks and each provides a unique communication services and a collaborative social experience. They have become a new model for consumers to communicate digitally, moving from textual to a more multi-media based experience and now provide capabilities to share images, videos and slideshows across various communities. Enterprises have started putting more investment in social media for promoting their products or services and communicate with a larger set of consumers. They provide a common platform for self expression, brand interaction, social games and advertising, which is a new disruptive shift towards branding, customer service and B2B marketing consumer software services.

By market size, Facebook has reported the most registered users at 845 million, half of which are active on a monthly basis. Revenue for the social network market, mainly in gaming and advertising area will grow by 51% from $1.2 billion in 2010, to $29.1 billion in 2015. Some of the social networking sites are facing challenges as they have been blocked in certain countries like facebook and twitter being blocked in China. This has led to some local networks emerging in countries like China, Russia, South Korea, Japan, Brazil and Indonesia, which differentiate themselves by mirroring their functionality and offering to match the local language, culture, societal norms and sensitivities better.

The Social Networking group at Microsoft is focusing on the two acquisitions, Skype and Yammer to come up with new offerings in social media. They are also launching Window Phone and Xbox products which can be considered as social networking platforms, since they tightly integrate social networking services. Microsoft has also formed a partnership with Facebook to become a major player in the social networking market while it transforms its own operating systems and user interfaces into a more cohesive and consumer-friendly service.

Big Data

Big data is a style of data analysis and management that deals with large data volume, coming in at various velocities and composed of a variety of data formats. They provide an innovative form of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making.
Today more than 80% of all Businesses are carried out on unstructured data which includes documents, blogs, wikis, call center logs, surveys and tweets. One of the key challenges in big data is to put all useful information into a single data warehouse. There are various hardware and software solutions emerging to address this and one of the popular solutions is Hadoop MapReduce. This is a batch solution which is combined with other information management and processing technologies to provide complex-event processing support and support for larger user populations.

Microsoft has a new initiative, known as Project Daytona, developed under its extreme computing group''s Cloud Research Engagement program. To sort and crunch data, Daytona uses a runtime version of Google''s open-license MapReduce programming model for processing large data sets. The Daytona tools deploy MapReduce on Windows Azure VM (virtual machines), which allows to subdivide the information into smaller chunks for processing and later the data is then recombined for output. This service allows pre-built research algorithms to be uploaded to Microsoft''s Azure cloud and they run across a highly distributed network of powerful computers. The Daytona Project breaks data into for parallel processing, and the cloud based environment allows the users to quickly and easily turn on and off VM''s, depending on the amount of processing power required. This will help provide greater insights as a result of large data analytics capabilities. They also have launched two Apache/Hadoop connectors for SQL Server, SMP and Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW). They offer a Hive add-in for Excel to analyze unstructured Hadoop data in Excel, as well as ODBC connectors for BI tools. They provide combined structured and unstructured analysis in SQL Server 2008R2.

Social Analytics

Social analytics is the process of collecting, measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas, which occur on social software applications used in the workplace or on the Web. Social analytics includes a number of specialized analysis techniques, such as social filtering, social network analysis, sentiment analysis and social media analytics to get feedback on consumers’ feedback on some of their products services and respond to the views, concerns and suggestions expressed. There are more than 100 social analytics vendors in the market. Each vendor provides solutions by providing analysis of all online sources of user-generated content like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, RSS feeds, and any media outlets. In future, analytics will mature from structured and simple data analysis to analysis of complex information of different types like documents, images, video etc. They are also moving to the cloud by exploiting cloud resources for high performance and grid computing.
Microsoft is launching a cloud service based called Social Analytics which helps in analyzing Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, etc. to provide insight on the trends on the social web. This is available on the SQL Azure labs. They provide a tool, Engagement Client and a RESTful OData-based API. The Engagement Client is a Silverlight based application that collects tweets about various topics and then ranks the filtered tweets based on activity, associating a positive/neutral/negative feeling towards tweets after performing language analysis, and allows the user to filter tweets based on the question/not-a-question character of the message, its importance or its notification status. It provides an API enabling developers to easily integrate relevant social web information into business applications.

Gesture

Control Gesture control is the ability to recognize and interpret movements of the human body in order to interact with and control a computer system without direct physical contact. Natural user interface is the term being used to describe these interfaces systems, reflecting no need of any intermediate devices between the user and the system. Gesture controlled system is a combination of different tools of technologies like camera, graphics, vision etc. The gestural interfaces have become quite popular in gaming applications, while its adoption for business applications is still evolving. It will take some time to do the logical mapping of intuitive and standardized gestures into meaningful commands to control business applications in areas such as home appliances, smart home, telecare, telehealth, elderly or disable care etc. Microsoft came out with the popular Microsoft Kinect gaming controller, and now released the Kinect for Windows SDK, which can lead to a wide range of potential applications in multiple areas, including business and healthcare, as well as gaming. Microsoft Kinect combines camera-based, full-body gesture and movement recognition with face and voice recognition to provide a rich interface. Microsoft is working on an alternative sensing approach using high-frequency sound waves and detecting the Doppler Effect, which works over short distances and may open up new options for desktop and handheld devices.

What will happen to Microsoft .Net?

With so much new offerings from Microsoft, one of the questions is about future of Microsoft.Net? VB.NET & C# are both important languages in the Windows 8 ecosystem. ASP.NET will become a key component of the .NET framework that will be used to build the user interfaces for various clients and build cloud applications on the server. Ability to integrate with the open source jQuery framework into ASP.NET will provide additional advantages to many devices through increasingly capable HTML5 browsers or hybrid container frameworks such as the Apache Cordova project. .NET will continue to be Microsoft’s preferred environment for a broader platform that includes Windows clients, the WinRT (Windows Runtime) application programming interface (API), and the Windows Azure environment.

Reference:

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=2124315
http://www.gartner.com/id=2135418
http://www.zdnet.com/shifting-subscriptions-microsofts-bet-the-company-strategy-for-the-future-of-software-7000001802/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2012/10/21/ballmer-microsoft-windows-8-release/1636767/

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