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.
