Tag: Azure

As customers have moved their workloads to the cloud, we’ve seen a growth in the use of cloud-native architectures, particularly microservices. Microservice-based architectures help improve scalability and velocity but implementing them can pose challenges. For many Java developers, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud have helped address these challenges, providing a robust platform with well-established patterns for developing and operating microservice applications. But creating and maintaining a Spring Cloud environment requires work. Such as setting up the infrastructure for dynamic scaling, installing and managing multiple components, and wiring up the application to your logging infrastructure. 

To help make it simpler to deploy and operate Spring Cloud applications, together with Pivotal, Microsoft have created Azure Spring Cloud.

Azure Spring Cloud is jointly built, operated, and supported by both Pivotal and Microsoft. This means that you can use Azure Spring Cloud for your most demanding applications and know that both Pivotal and Microsoft are standing behind the service to ensure your success.

High productivity development

Azure Spring Cloud abstracts away the complexity of infrastructure management and Spring Cloud middleware management, so you can focus on building your business logic and let Azure take care of dynamic scaling, security patches, compliance standards, and high availability.

With a few clicks, you can provision an Azure Spring Cloud instance. After configuring a couple dependencies in your pom file, your Spring Cloud app is automatically wired up with Spring Cloud Config Server and Service Registry. Furthermore, you can deploy and scale Spring Boot applications in seconds. 

To accelerate your development experience, we provide support for the Azure Spring Cloud Maven plugin and VS Code extensions that optimize Spring development. In other words, you can use the tools that you already know and love.

Ease of monitoring

With out-of-the-box support for aggregating logs, metrics, and distributed app traces into Azure Monitor, you can easily visualize how your applications are performing, detect and diagnose issues across microservice applications and their dependencies, drill into monitoring data for troubleshooting and gain better understanding of what end-users do with your apps.

Open source innovation with Spring integrations

Azure Spring Cloud sets up the compute foundation for cloud-native Spring applications. From there, Azure Spring Cloud makes it simple to connect to data services such as Azure SQL Database, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Cosmos DB to enable enterprise grade end-user authentication and authorization using Azure Active Directory, to bind cloud streams with Service Bus or Event Hubs, and to load and manage secrets with Azure Key Vault. To help you save the effort of manually figuring out dependencies and eliminate boilerplate code, we’ve created a rich library of Spring integrations and starters for your Spring applications.

Sign up for Azure Spring Cloud

Both Pivotal and Microsoft are looking forward to hearing feedback on the new Azure Spring Cloud from our joint customers. If you’re interested in joining the private preview, please submit your contact details here. To hear more from Pivotal on today’s announcement, head over to their blog and let us know what you think.

The service will be available in public preview, for all customers, before end of the calendar year.

Machine learning enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) holds great promise in addressing many of the global cyber challenges we see today. They give our cyber defenders the ability to identify, detect, and block malware, almost instantaneously. And together they give security admins the ability to deconflict tasks, separating the signal from the noise, allowing them to prioritize the most critical tasks. It is why today, I’m pleased to announce that Azure Sentinel, a cloud-native SIEM that provides intelligent security analytics at cloud scale for enterprises of all sizes and workloads, is now generally available.

Our goal has remained the same since we first launched Microsoft Azure Sentinel in February: empower security operations teams to help enhance the security posture of our customers. Traditional Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions have not kept pace with the digital changes. I commonly hear from customers that they’re spending more time with deployment and maintenance of SIEM solutions, which leaves them unable to properly handle the volume of data or the agility of adversaries.

Recent research tells us that 70 percent of organizations continue to anchor their security analytics and operations with SIEM systems,¹ and 82 percent are committed to moving large volumes of applications and workloads to the public cloud.² Security analytics and operations technologies must lean in and help security analysts deal with the complexity, pace, and scale of their responsibilities. To accomplish this, 65 percent of organizations are leveraging new technologies for process automation/orchestration, while 51 percent are adopting security analytics tools featuring machine learning algorithms.³ This is exactly why we developed Azure Sentinel—an SIEM re-invented in the cloud to address the modern challenges of security analytics.

Learning together

When we kicked off the public preview for Azure Sentinel, we were excited to learn and gain insight into the unique ways Azure Sentinel was helping organizations and defenders on a daily basis. We worked with our partners all along the way; listening, learning, and fine-tuning as we went. With feedback from 12,000 customers and more than two petabytes of data analysis, we were able to examine and dive deep into a large, complex, and diverse set of data. All of which had one thing in common: a need to empower their defenders to be more nimble and efficient when it comes to cybersecurity.

Our work with RapidDeploy offers one compelling example of how Azure Sentinel is accomplishing this complex task. RapidDeploy creates cloud-based dispatch systems that help first responders act quickly to protect the public. There’s a lot at stake, and the company’s cloud-native platform must be secure against an array of serious cyberthreats. So when RapidDeploy implemented a SIEM system, it chose Azure Sentinel, one of the world’s first cloud-native SIEMs.

Microsoft recently sat down with Alex Kreilein, Chief Information Security Officer at RapidDeploy. Here’s what he shared: “We build a platform that helps save lives. It does that by reducing incident response times and improving first responder safety by increasing their situational awareness.”

Now RapidDeploy uses the complete visibility, automated responses, fast deployment, and low total cost of ownership in Azure Sentinel to help it safeguard public safety systems. “With many SIEMs, deployment can take months,” says Kreilein. “Deploying Azure Sentinel took us minutes—we just clicked the deployment button and we were done.”

Learn even more about our work with RapidDeploy by checking out the full story.

Another great example of a company finding results with Azure Sentinel is ASOS. As one of the world’s largest online fashion retailers, ASOS knows they’re a prime target for cybercrime. The company has a large security function spread across five teams and two sites—but in the past, it was difficult for ASOS to gain a comprehensive view of cyberthreat activity. Now, using Azure Sentinel, ASOS has created a bird’s-eye view of everything it needs to spot threats early, allowing it to proactively safeguard its business and its customers. And as a result, it has cut issue resolution times in half.

“There are a lot of threats out there,” says Stuart Gregg, Cyber Security Operations Lead at ASOS. “You’ve got insider threats, account compromise, threats to our website and customer data, even physical security threats. We’re constantly trying to defend ourselves and be more proactive in everything we do.”

Already using a range of Azure services, ASOS identified Azure Sentinel as a platform that could help it quickly and easily unite its data. This includes security data from Azure Security Center and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), along with data from Microsoft 365. The result is a comprehensive view of its entire threat landscape.

“We found Azure Sentinel easy to set up, and now we don’t have to move data across separate systems,” says Gregg. “We can literally click a few buttons and all our security solutions feed data into Azure Sentinel.”

Learn more about how ASOS has benefitted from Azure Sentinel.

RapidDeploy and ASOS are just two examples of how Azure Sentinel is helping businesses process data and telemetry into actionable security alerts for investigation and response. We have an active GitHub community of preview participants, partners, and even Microsoft’s own security experts who are sharing new connectors, detections, hunting queries, and automation playbooks.

With these design partners, we’ve continued our innovation in Azure Sentinel. It starts from the ability to connect to any data source, whether in Azure or on-premises or even other clouds. We continue to add new connectors to different sources and more machine learning-based detections. Azure Sentinel will also integrate with Azure Lighthouse service, which will enable service providers and enterprise customers with the ability to view Azure Sentinel instances across different tenants in Azure.

Secure your organization

Now that Azure Sentinel has moved out of public preview and is generally available, there’s never been a better time to see how it can help your business. Traditional on-premises SIEMs require a combination of infrastructure costs and software costs, all paired with annual commitments or inflexible contracts. We are removing those pain points, since Azure Sentinel is a cost-effective, cloud-native SIEM with predictable billing and flexible commitments.

Infrastructure costs are reduced since you automatically scale resources as you need, and you only pay for what you use. Or you can save up to 60 percent compared to pay-as-you-go pricing by taking advantage of capacity reservation tiers. You receive predictable monthly bills and the flexibility to change capacity tier commitments every 31 days. On top of that, bringing in data from Office 365 audit logs, Azure activity logs and alerts from Microsoft Threat Protection solutions doesn’t require any additional payments.

Please join me for the Azure Security Expert Series where we will focus on Azure Sentinel on Thursday, September 26, 2019, 10–11 AM Pacific Time. You’ll learn more about these innovations and see real use cases on how Azure Sentinel helped detect previously undiscovered threats. We’ll also discuss how Accenture and RapidDeploy are using Azure Sentinel to empower their security operations team.

Get started today with Azure Sentinel!

¹ Source: ESG Research Survey, Security Analytics and Operations: Industry Trends in the Era of Cloud Computing, September 2019
² Source: ESG Research Survey, Security Analytics and Operations: Industry Trends in the Era of Cloud Computing, September 2019
³ Source: ESG Research Survey, Security Analytics and Operations: Industry Trends in the Era of Cloud Computing, September 2019

Being on the cutting edge of technology was baked into the DNA of Indian video company Eros Now from the start.

Its parent company, Eros International Plc., was founded in 1977, the same year the VHS videocassette format was released in North America. While some in the entertainment industry were leery about the newfangled technology, Eros was all in.

“Back then, it was a scary thing,” says Eros Digital CEO Rishika Lulla Singh. “But we embraced VHS and we continued to embrace new technology.”

That approach has served the company well. Eros International Plc., a movie distribution and production company, was India’s first VHS distributor and the first Indian media company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Eros Now, its on-demand video arm, was launched in 2012 and has now attracted over 18.8 million paid subscribers and 155 million users worldwide with its more than 12,000 Bollywood films, music videos and original content including series and short episodes.

Eros Now amassed its big audience largely by premiering blockbuster films and related content such as trailers and music videos on its site even before they were on YouTube, Lulla Singh says. The company aims to differentiate itself not just as a one-stop destination for online entertainment but also as a tech innovator — and a new collaboration with Microsoft is underpinning those efforts.

Eros Now is working with Microsoft to migrate the company’s operations to the Azure cloud platform to improve video and viewing experiences for consumers worldwide. Lulla Singh says Microsoft’s ability to innovate in cloud computing and artificial intelligence, its research in voice services and discovery, and the company’s capacity for handling big data were the primary reasons Eros Now wanted to collaborate with Microsoft to develop next-generation video technology.

“We feel that Azure can help us to drive a lot of our ambitions to create the correct architecture for the video platform,” she says. “It was the sheer sophistication of the product over everything else on the market.”

The collaboration, Microsoft’s first effort in India in streaming video, signifies a move into a thriving entertainment market. Streaming video is growing rapidly in India, where the market is projected to reach $5 billion by 2023, according to a study by The Boston Consulting Group.

“India is among the fastest-growing entertainment and media markets globally, with cutting-edge innovation in content creation, distribution and data insights ,” says Anant Maheshwari, president of Microsoft India. “Our partnership with Eros Now is a significant milestone. Together, we hope to redefine the video viewing experience for consumers in India and across the globe.”

Lulla Singh has been working with teams across Microsoft and says she’s been struck by the company’s collaborative culture.

“Microsoft wants to enable other companies to be cool and to essentially realize your own ambition. The collaboration that’s come from that is incredible,” she says.

The rise in video streaming has shifted consumer expectations and the role of companies like Microsoft in the industry. Consumers are watching content on multiple devices, from smartphones to tablets, and media companies are facing increased competition to attract viewers, Maheshwari says. Those companies are looking to cloud providers for secure and scalable content delivery, he says, and for capabilities such as advanced search and smart content recommendations.

“What will differentiate video streaming services is the ability to give users exciting content to experience within the limited time and attention span they have,” he says. “AI and intelligent cloud tools will be the next drivers of the media business and will impact everything in the content value chain.”

Eros Now, Lulla Singh says, saw an opportunity to distinguish itself by creating original content that was a departure from the typical Indian television fare.

“The television landscape in India is very, very different to what happens in the U.S., where we have ‘Game of Thrones’ and a lot of sexy content,” she says. “That doesn’t really exist in the Indian television ecosystem.

“Most Indian programming is catered to more older audiences, which is actually not relevant to the new millennial audiences.”

Eros Now began developing its own original content around 2015, launching “Side Hero,” a Bollywood-inspired comedy series, last year, followed by “Smoke,” a drama about drug cartels. Last December, the company introduced “Eros Now Quickie,” a series of eight- to 10-minute episodes ranging from docudramas to comedy, and segments on food, health and travel.

Eros Now plans to continue innovating by personalizing content for customers by language, subtitles and other geographic-based preferences. Bollywood movies have been growing in popularity in regions outside India including China, Russia and Eastern Europe, Lulla Singh says. Eros Now, which currently has viewers in more than 135 countries, hopes to ride that momentum to expand into new markets and reach its goal of 50 million subscribers over the next three years.

“We just want to continue to create, continue to please our customers and grow in the process as well,” she says.

Top image: A sampling of Eros Now’s original content, which began premiering in 2018. (Images courtesy of Eros Now)

Animated character recognition, multilingual speech transcription and more now available

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. The media industry exemplifies this mission. We live in an age where more content is being created and consumed in more ways and on more devices than ever. At IBC 2019, we’re delighted to share the latest innovations we’ve been working on and how they can help transform your media workflows. Read on to learn more, or join our product teams and partners at Hall 1 Booth C27 at the RAI in Amsterdam from September 13th to 17th.

Video Indexer adds support for animation and multilingual content

We made our award winning Azure Media Services Video Indexer generally available at IBC last year, and this year it’s getting even better. Video Indexer automatically extracts insights and metadata such as spoken words, faces, emotions, topics and brands from media files, without you needing to be a machine learning expert. Our latest announcements include previews for two highly requested and differentiated capabilities for animated character recognition and multilingual speech transcription, as well as several additions to existing models available today in Video Indexer.

Animated character recognition

Animated content or cartoons are one of the most popular content types, but standard AI vision models built for human faces do not work well with them, especially if the content has characters without human features. In this new preview solution, Video Indexer joins forces with Microsoft’s Azure Custom Vision service to provide a new set of models that automatically detect and group animated characters and allow customers to then tag and recognize them easily via integrated custom vision models. These models are integrated into a single pipeline, which allows anyone to use the service without any previous machine learning skills. The results are available through the no-code Video Indexer portal or the REST API for easy integration into your own applications.

We built these animated character models in collaboration with select customers who contributed real animated content for training and testing. The value of the new functionality is well articulated by Andy Gutteridge, Senior Director, Studio & Post-Production Technology at Viacom International Media Networks, which was one of the data contributors: “The addition of reliable AI-based animated detection will enable us to discover and catalogue character metadata from our content library quickly and efficiently. Most importantly, it will give our creative teams the power to find the content they want instantly, minimize time spent on media management and allow them to focus on the creative.”

To get started with animated character recognition, please visit our documentation page.

Multilingual identification and transcription

Some media assets like news, current affairs, and interviews contain audio with speakers using different languages. Most existing speech-to-text capabilities require the audio recognition language to be specified in advance, which is an obstacle to transcribing multilingual videos. Our new automatic spoken language identification for multiple content feature leverages machine learning technology to identify the different languages used in a media asset. Once detected, each language segment undergoes an automatic transcription process in the language identified, and all segments are integrated back together into one transcription file consisting of multiple languages.

The resulting transcription is available both as part of Video Indexer JSON output and as closed-caption files. The output transcript is also integrated with Azure Search, allowing you to immediately search across videos for the different language segments. Furthermore, the multi-language transcription is available as part of the Video Indexer portal experience so you can view the transcript and identified language by time, or jump to the specific places in the video for each language and see the multi-language transcription as captions as a video is played. You can also translate the output back-and-forth into 54 different languages via the portal and API.

Read more about the new multilingual option and how to use it in Video Indexer in our documentation.

Additional updated and improved models

We are also adding new and improving existing models within Video Indexer, including:

Extraction of people and locations entities

We’ve extended our current brand detection capabilities to also incorporate well-known names and locations, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or Big Ben in London. When these appear in the generated transcript or on-screen via optical character recognition (OCR), a specific insight is created. With this new capability, you can review and search by all people, locations and brands that appeared in the video, along with their timeframes, description, and a link to our Bing search engine for more information.

 

Editorial shot detection model

This new feature adds a set of “tags” in the metadata attached to an individual shot in the insights JSON to represent its editorial type (such as wide shot, medium shot, close up, extreme close up, two shot, multiple people, outdoor and indoor, etc.). These shot-type characteristics come in handy when editing videos into clips and trailers as well as when searching for a specific style of shots for artistic purposes.

Explore and read more about editorial shot type detection in Video Indexer.

Expanded granularity of IPTC mapping

Our topic inferencing model determines the topic of videos based on transcription, optical character recognition (OCR), and detected celebrities even if the topic is not explicitly stated. We map these inferred topics to four different taxonomies: Wikipedia, Bing, IPTC, and IAB. With this enhancement, we now include level-2 IPTC taxonomy.

Tanking advantage of these enhancements is as easy as re-indexing your current Video Indexer library.

New live streaming functionality

We are also introducing two new live-streaming capabilities in preview to Azure Media Services.

Live transcription supercharges your live events with AI

Using Azure Media Services to stream a live event, you can now get an output stream that includes an automatically generated text track in addition to the video and audio content. This text track is created using AI-based live transcription of the audio of the contribution feed. Custom methods are applied before and after speech-to-text conversion in order to improve the end-user experience. The text track is packaged into IMSC1, TTML, or WebVTT, depending on whether you are delivering in DASH, HLS CMAF, or HLS TS.

Live linear encoding for 24/7 over-the-top (OTT) channels

Using our v3 APIs, you can create, manage, and stream live channels for OTT services and take advantage of all the other features of Azure Media Services like live to video on demand (VOD), packaging, and digital rights management (DRM).

To try these preview features, please visit the Azure Media Services Community page.

New packaging features

Support for audio description tracks

Broadcast content frequently has an audio track that contains verbal explanations of on-screen action in addition to the normal program audio. This makes programming more accessible for vision-impaired viewers, especially if the content is highly visual. The new audio description feature enables a customer to annotate one of the audio tracks to be the audio description (AD) track, which in turn can be used by players to make the AD track discoverable by viewers.

ID3 metadata insertion

In order to signal the insertion of advertisements or custom metadata events on a client player, broadcasters often make use of timed metadata embedded within the video. In addition to SCTE-35 signaling modes, we now also support ID3v2 or other custom schemas defined by an application developer for use by the client application.

Microsoft Azure partners demonstrate end-to-end solutions

Bitmovin is debuting its Bitmovin Video Encoding and Bitmovin Video Player on Microsoft Azure. Customers can now use these encoding and player solutions on Azure and leverage advanced functionality such as 3-pass encoding, AV1/VVC codec support, multi-language closed captions, and pre-integrated video analytics for QoS, ad, and video tracking.

Evergent is showing its User Lifecycle Management Platform on Azure. As a leading provider of revenue and customer lifecycle management solutions, Evergent leverages Azure AI to enable premium entertainment service providers to improve customer acquisition and retention by generating targeted packages and offers at critical points in the customer lifecycle.

Haivision will showcase its intelligent media routing cloud service, SRT Hub, that helps customers transform end-to-end workflows starting with ingest using Azure Data Box Edge and media workflow transformation using Hublets from Avid, Telestream, Wowza and Cinegy, and Make.tv.

SES has developed a suite of broadcast-grade media services on Azure for its satellite connectivity and managed media services customers. SES will show solutions for fully managed playout services, including master playout, localized playout and ad detection and replacement, and 24×7 high-quality multichannel live encoding on Azure.

SyncWords is making its caption automation technology and user-friendly cloud-based tools available on Azure. These offerings will make it easier for media organizations to add automated closed captioning and foreign language subtitling capabilities to their real-time and offline video processing workflows on Azure.
 
Global design and technology services company Tata Elxsi has integrated TEPlay, its OTT platform SaaS, with Azure Media Services to deliver OTT content from the cloud. Tata Elxsi has also brought FalconEye, its quality of experience (QoE) monitoring solution that focuses on actionable metrics and analytics, to Microsoft Azure.

Verizon Media is making its streaming platform available in beta on Azure. Verizon Media Platform is an enterprise-grade managed OTT solution including DRM, ad insertion, one-to-one personalized sessions, dynamic content replacement, and video delivery. The integration brings simplified workflows, global support and scale, and access to a range of unique capabilities available on Azure.

Many of our partners will also be presenting in the theater at our booth, so make sure you stop by to catch them!

Short distance, big impact

We are proud to support the 4K 4Charity Fun Run as a gold sponsor. This is a running and walking event held at various media industry events since 2014, and it raises awareness and financial support for non-profits focused on increased diversity and inclusion. Register and come join us on Saturday, September 14th, at 7:30am at the Amstelpark in Amsterdam.

Don’t miss out

There’s a lot more going on at the Microsoft booth this IBC. To learn more, read about how the community of our customers and partners are innovating on Azure in media and entertainment, or better yet come and join us in Hall 1 Booth C27. If you won’t be there, we’re sorry we’ll miss you, but you can try Video Indexer and Azure Media Services for yourself by following the links.

With each passing year, more and more developers are building cloud-native applications. As developers build more complex applications they are looking to innovators like Microsoft Azure and HashiCorp to reduce the complexity of building and operating these applications. HashiCorp and Azure have worked together on a myriad of innovations. Examples of this innovation include tools that connect cloud-native applications to legacy infrastructure and tools that secure and automate the continuous deployment of customer applications and infrastructure. Azure is deeply committed to being the best platform for open source software developers like HashiCorp to deliver their tools to their customers in an easy-to use, integrated way. Azure innovation like the managed applications platform that power HashiCorp’s Consul Service on Azure are great examples of this commitment to collaboration and a vibrant open source startup ecosystem. We’re also committed to the development of open standards that help these ecosystems move forward and we’re thrilled to have been able to collaborate with HashiCorp on both the CNAB (Cloud Native Application Bundle) and SMI (Service Mesh Interface) specifications.

Last year at HashiConf 2018, I had the opportunity to share how we had started to integrate Terraform and Packer into the Azure platform. I’m incredibly excited to get the opportunity to return this year to share how these integrations are progressing and to share a new collaboration on cloud native networking. With this new work we now have collaborations that help customers connect and operate their applications on Azure using HashiCorp technology.

Connect — HashiCorp Consul Service on Azure

After containers and Kubernetes, one of the most important innovations in microservices has been the development of the concept of a service mesh. Earlier this year we partnered with HashiCorp and others to announce the release of Service Mesh Interface, a collaborative, implementation agnostic API for the configuration and deployment of service mesh technology. We collaborated with HashiCorp to produce a control rules implementation of the traffic access control (TAC) using Consul Connect. Today we’re excited that Azure customers can take advantage of HashiCorp Consul Services on Azure powered by the Azure Managed Applications platform. HashiCorp Consul provides a solution to simplify and secure service networking and with this new managed offering, our joint customers can focus on the value of Consul while confident that the experts at HashiCorp are taking care of the management of the service. Reducing complexity for customers and enabling them to focus on cloud native innovation.

Provision — HashiCorp Terraform on Azure

HashiCorp Terraform is a great tool for doing declarative deployment to Azure. We’re seeing great momentum with adoption of HashiCorp Terraform on Azure as the number of customers has doubled since the beginning of the year – customers are using Terraform to automate Azure infrastructure deployment and operation in a variety of scenarios. 

The momentum is fantastic on the contribution front as well with nearly 180 unique contributors to the Terraform provider for Azure Resource Manager. The involvement from the community with our increased 3-week cadence of releases (currently at version 1.32) ensures more coverage of Azure services by Terraform. Additionally, after customer and community feedback regarding the need for additional Terraform modules for Azure, we’ve been working hard at adding high quality modules and now have doubled the number of Azure modules in the terraform registry, bringing it to over 120 modules. 

We believe all these additional integrations enable customers to manage infrastructure as code more easily and simplify managing their cloud environments. Learn more about Terraform on Azure.

Microsoft and HashiCorp are working together to provide integrated support for Terraform on Azure. Customers using Terraform on Microsoft’s Azure cloud are mutual customers, and both companies are united to provide troubleshooting and support services. This joint entitlement process provides collaborative support across companies and platforms while delivering a seamless customer experience. Customers using Terraform Provider for Azure can file support tickets to Microsoft support. Customers using Terraform on Azure support can file support tickets to Microsoft or HashiCorp.

Deploy — Collaborating on Cloud Native Application Bundles specification

One of the critical problems solved by containers is the hermetic packaging of a binary into a package that is easy to share and deploy around the world. But a cloud-native application is more than a binary, and this is what led to the co-development, with HashiCorp and others, of the Coud Native Application Bundle (CNAB) specification. CNABs  allow you to package images alongside configuration tools like Terraform and other artifacts to allow a user to seamlessly deploy an application from a single package. I’ve been excited to see the community work together to build the specification to a 1.0 release that shows CNAB is ready for all of the world’s deployment needs. Congratulations to the team on the work and the fantastic partnership.

If you want to learn more about the ways in which Azure and HashiCorp collaborate to make cloud-native development easier, please check out the links below:

Staying connected to access and ingest data in today’s highly distributed application environments is paramount for any enterprise. Many businesses need to operate in and across highly unpredictable and challenging conditions. For example, energy, farming, mining, and shipping often need to operate in remote, rural, or other isolated locations with poor network connectivity.

With the cloud now the de facto and primary target for the bulk of application and infrastructure migrations, access from remote and rural locations becomes even more important. The path to realizing the value of the cloud starts with a hybrid environment access resources with dedicated and private connectivity.

Network performance for these hybrid scenarios from rural and remote sites becomes increasingly critical. With globally connected organizations, the explosive number of connected devices and data in the Cloud, as well as emerging areas such as autonomous driving and traditional remote locations such as cruise ships are directly affected by connectivity performance.  Other examples requiring highly available, fast, and predictable network service include managing supply chain systems from remote farms or transferring data to optimize equipment maintenance in aerospace.

Today, I want to share the progress we have made to help customers address and solve these issues. Satellite connectivity addresses challenges of operating in remote locations.

Microsoft cloud services can be accessed with Azure ExpressRoute using satellite connectivity. With commercial satellite constellations becoming widely available, new solutions architectures offer improved and affordable performance to access Microsoft.

Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, with one of the largest networking ecosystems in the public Cloud now includes satellite connectivity partners bringing new options and coverage.

 SES will provide dedicated, private network connectivity from any vessel, airplane, enterprise, energy or government site in the world to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform via its unique multi-orbit satellite systems. As an ExpressRoute partner, SES will provide global reach and fibre-like high-performance to Azure customers via its complete portfolio of Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites, Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) O3b constellation, global gateway network, and core terrestrial network infrastructure around the world.

 Intelsat’s customers are the global telecommunications service providers and multinational enterprises that rely on our services to power businesses and communities wherever their needs take them. Now they have a powerful new tool in their solutions toolkit. With the ability to rapidly expand the reach of cloud-based enterprises, accelerate customer adoption of cloud services, and deliver additional resiliency to existing cloud-connected networks, the benefits of cloud services are no longer limited to only a subset of users and geographies. Intelsat is excited to bring our global reach and reliability to this partnership with Microsoft, providing the connectivity that is essential to delivering on the expectations and promises of the cloud.

Viasat, a provider of high-speed, high-quality satellite broadband solutions to businesses and commercial entities around the world, is introducing Direct Cloud Connect service to give customers expanded options for accessing enterprise-grade cloud services. Azure ExpressRoute will be the first cloud service offered to enable customers to optimize their network infrastructure and cloud investments through a secure, dedicated network connection to Azure’s intelligent cloud services.

Microsoft wants to help accelerate scenarios by optimizing the connectivity through Microsoft’s global network, one of the largest and most innovative in the world.

ExpressRoute for satellites directly connects our partners’ ground stations to our global network using a dedicated private link. But what does it more specifically mean to our customers?

• Using satellite connectivity with ExpressRoute provides dedicated and highly available, private access directly to Azure and Azure Government clouds.
• ExpressRoute provides predictable latency through well-connected ground stations, and, as always, maintains all traffic privately on our network – no traversing of the Internet.
• Customers and partners can harness Microsoft’s global network to rapidly deliver data to where it’s needed or augment routing to best optimize for their specific need.
• Satellite and a wide selection of service providers will enable rich solution portfolios for cloud and hybrid networking solutions centered around Azure networking services.
• With some of the world’s leading broadband satellite providers as partners, customers can select the best solution based on their needs. Each of the partners brings different strengths, for example, choices between Geostationary (GEO), Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and in the future Low Earth Orbit(LEO) satellites, geographical presence, pricing, technology differentiation, bandwidth, and others.
• ExpressRoute over satellite creates new channels and reach for satellite broadband providers, through a growing base of enterprises, organizations and public sector customers.

With this addition to the ExpressRoute partner ecosystem, Azure customers in industries like aviation, oil and gas, government, peacekeeping, and remote manufacturing can deploy new use cases and projects that increase the value of their cloud investments and strategy.

As always, we are very interested in your feedback and suggestions as we continue to enhance our networking services, so I encourage you to share your experiences and suggestions with us.

You can follow these links to learn more about our partners Intelsat, SES, and Viasat, and learn more about Azure ExpressRoute from our website and our detailed documentation.

As cloud growth continues to unlock opportunities for our customers, cloud migration is increasingly important for business’s digital strategy. Today, I am pleased to announce that Microsoft has acquired Movere, an innovative technology provider in the cloud migration space.

We’re committed to providing our customers with a comprehensive experience for migrating existing applications and infrastructure to Azure, which include the right tools, processes, and programs. As part of that ongoing investment, we’re excited to welcome the leadership, talent, technology, and deep expertise Movere has built in enabling customers’ journey to the cloud over the last 11 years.

Movere’s innovative discovery and assessment capabilities will complement Azure Migrate and our integrated partner solutions, making migration an easier process for our customers. We believe that successful cloud migrations enable business transformation, and this acquisition underscores our investments to make that happen.

Together, Azure Migrate, Movere, and our ecosystem of independent software vendor (ISV) partners’ solutions provide choice and a comprehensive set of capabilities from discovery, assessment, to migration and optimization. We aim to streamline our customers’ journey to the cloud, enabling them to bring innovation and transformation with the power of Azure. You can read thoughts from Movere founders in their blog.

Data extraction from printed forms is by now a tried and true technology. Form Recognizer extracts key value pairs, tables and text from documents such as W2 tax statements, oil and gas drilling well reports, completion reports, invoices, and purchase orders. However, real-world businesses often rely on a variety of documents for their day-to-day needs that are not always cleanly printed.

We are excited to announce the addition of handwritten and mixed-mode (printed and handwritten) support. Starting now, handling handwritten and mixed-mode forms is the new norm.

Extracting data from handwritten and mixed-mode content with Form Recognizer

Entire data sets that were inaccessible in the past due to the limitations of extraction technology now become available. The handwritten and mixed-mode capability of Form Recognizer is available in preview and enables you to extract structured data out of handwritten text filled in forms such as:

• Medical forms: New patient information, doctor notes.
• Financial forms: Account opening forms, credit card applications.
• Insurance: Claim forms, liability forms.
• Manufacturing forms: Packaging slips, testing forms, quality forms.
• And more.

By using our vast experience in optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learning for form analysis, our experts created a state-of-the-art solution that goes beyond printed forms. The OCR technology behind the service supports both handwritten and printed. Expanding the scope of Form Recognizer allows you to tap into previously uncharted territories, by making new sources of data available to you. You may extract valuable business information from newly available data, keeping you ahead of your competition.

Whether you are using Form Recognizer for the first time or already integrated it into your organization, you will now have an opportunity to create new business applications:

• Expand your available data set: If you are only extracting data from machine printed forms, expand your total data set to mixed-mode forms and historic handwritten forms.
• Create one application for a mix of documents: If you use a mix of handwritten and printed forms, you can create one application that applies across all your data.
• Avoid manual digitization of handwritten forms: Original forms may be fed to Form Recognizer without any pre-processing, extracting the same key-value pairs and table data you would get from a machine-printed form to reduce costs, errors, and time.

Our customer: Avanade

Avanade values people as their most important asset. They are always on the lookout for talented and passionate professionals to grow their organization. One way they find these people is by attending external events, which may include university career fairs, trade shows, or technical conferences to name a few. 

During these events they often take the details of those interested in finding out more about Avanade, as well as their permission to contact them at a later date. Normally this is completed with a digital form using a set of tablets. But when the stand is particularly busy, they use a short paper form that attendees can fill in with their handwritten details. Unfortunately, these forms needed to be manually entered into the marketing database, requiring a considerable amount of time and resources. With the volume of potential new contacts at these events, multiplied by the number of events Avanade attends, this task can be daunting.

Azure Form Recognizer’s new handwritten support simplifies the process, giving Avanade peace of mind knowing no contact is lost and the information is there for them immediately.

In addition, Avanade integrated Form Recognizer as a skill within their cognitive search solution, enabling them to quickly use the service in their existing platform and follow-up with new leads, while their competitors may be spending time digitizing their handwritten forms.

“Azure Form Recognizer takes a vast amount of effort out of the process, changing the task from data entry to data validation. By integrating Form Recognizer with Azure Search, we are also immediately able to use the service in our existing platforms. If we need to find and check a form for any reason, for example to check for a valid signature there, we can simply search by any of the fields like name or job title and jump straight to that form. In our initial tests, using Form Recognizer has reduced the time taken to digitize the forms and double check the entries by 35 percent, a number we only expect to get better as we work to optimize our tools to work hand in hand with the service, and add in more automation.” – Fergus Kidd, Emerging Technology Engineer, Avanade

Getting started

To learn more about Form Recognizer and the rest of the Azure AI ecosystem, please visit our website and read the documentation.

Get started by contacting us.

For additional questions please reach out to us at formrecog_contact@microsoft.com