Tag: Azure

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Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft redefine partnership to deliver high-performance cloud computing experiences

  • Seven-year strategic agreement to help enterprise and midmarket customers accelerate digitalization
  • Enhance productivity and digitize business operations with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure as T-Systems’ preferred cloud platform in select solution areas
  • Support digital education efforts in Germany

Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft logos

BONN, Germany, REDMOND, Wash. — Dec. 9, 2020 — Deutsche Telekom Group and Microsoft Corp. announced an expansion of their partnership that will help customers of all sizes accelerate their cloud transformation initiatives.

For many companies, the cloud represents an opportunity to reduce IT costs, increase flexibility and accelerate innovation. However, to fully take advantage of cloud computing, it requires a high-performance network that can scale to meet increasing technology demands. By combining Microsoft’s cloud and AI capabilities with Telekom’s Cloud Migration Framework and telecommunications services, the companies enable customers to increase their productivity, build more agile and resilient operations, and deliver new cloud offerings faster.

“We have agreed on the framework for joint strategic growth with our long-term partner Microsoft. We are delighted,” said Adel Al-Saleh, member of the Deutsche Telekom Board of Management and CEO of T-Systems. “This partnership will enable us to enhance services for our customers. We will also be supporting each other with digitalization and network build-out.”

“The case for digital transformation has never been more urgent. We know that the next decade of economic performance for every business, whether large or small, will depend on the digital investments made today,” said Jean-Philippe Courtois, executive vice president and president, Microsoft Global Sales, Marketing and Operations. “Through this strategic partnership, which combines the power of Deutsche Telekom’s network and Microsoft’s cloud, customers will have more opportunities to become resilient, accelerate innovation and ultimately drive success.”

Trusted cloud infrastructure to accelerate business innovation

The delivery of secure and powerful software applications requires a modern IT infrastructure. To accelerate business innovation, Telekom plans to migrate the majority of its internal IT workloads to the public cloud by 2025, and Azure is a central part of that strategy. Through a companywide training program, thousands of Telekom employees will learn how to maximize the benefits of Azure.

Moving mainframe workloads to the cloud is one of the targeted areas of the partnership. Historically, mainframes were designed as scale-up servers to run high-volume online transactions and batch processing. Using cloud-based mainframes, businesses can deliver new services based on evolving customer demands without retrofitting legacy hardware. This means companies can drive scale, business continuity and energy efficiency while reducing operational and hardware costs.

Telekom will also offer its customers direct access to the Microsoft cloud through Azure ExpressRoute. By bypassing the public internet, customers will have increased agility through faster connectivity to better address regional compliance and data residency needs.

Enabling digital collaboration and streamlining business operations

To help people and businesses be more connected and productive from anywhere, Telekom will offer Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams. As part of this, the companies have started a project for German schools to reimagine traditional approaches to education, enabling remote learning through cloud-based IT infrastructure, modern devices and the cloud productivity and collaboration applications within Microsoft 365.

To leverage the benefits of cloud computing for critical business processes, such as enterprise resource planning and supply chain management, Telekom supports its customers with moving their SAP environments to Azure. SAP solutions on Azure offer enterprise-grade security, and business continuity and reduce hardware expenses, making it easier for startups and smaller organizations to get started.

Accelerating cloud initiatives: assessment, migration, service

Telekom’s enterprise customer unit T-Systems has migrated and securely managed large-scale applications and critical enterprise workloads. With Azure as a preferred cloud platform for select solution areas, T-Systems is providing these capabilities to companies across all industries so they can harness the global scale, security and latest advances without needing to manage installation and maintenance. This Cloud Migration Framework combines automated assessment, cloud migration and services management to help accelerate customers’ cloud initiatives.

Small and medium-sized businesses will benefit from these offerings as they can focus on their core competencies and don’t need to provide the resources and knowledge usually required to implement a comprehensive cloud strategy.

Telekom and Microsoft will work closely together to continue to address compliance needs and European regulatory requirements.

About Deutsche Telekom: Deutsche Telekom company profile

About T-Systems: T-Systems company profile

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

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Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, [email protected]

Deutsche Telekom AG, Corporate Communications, +49 (0) 228 181 49494, [email protected]

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Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.

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Azure Digital Twins now generally available: Create IoT solutions that model the real world

Azure Digital Twins, virtually model the physical world.

Today, organizations are showing a growing appetite for solutions that provide a deeper understanding of not just assets, but also the complex interactions across environments. This shift is driven by the need to be more agile and respond to real-time changes in the world, and it involves moving beyond tracking individual assets or devices to focusing on everything within a rich environment—from people, places, processes, and things to their very relationships.

To really understand these intricate environments, companies are creating digital replicas of their physical world also known as digital twins. With Microsoft Azure Digital Twins now generally available, this Internet of Things (IoT) platform provides the capabilities to fuse together both physical and digital worlds, allowing you to transform your business and create breakthrough customer experiences.

According to the IoT Signals report, the vast majority of companies with a digital twin strategy see it as an integral part of their IoT solution. Yet the reality is that modeling entire environments can be complicated. It involves bringing together the many elements that make up a digital twin to capture actionable insights. However, siloed data across these experiences makes it challenging to build digital twin solutions that bring those models to life, and doing so in a scalable, secure way is often time-consuming.

Azure Digital Twins now ready for enterprise-grade deployments

Azure Digital Twins is an industry-first solution. It breaks down silos within intelligent environments by fusing data from previously disparate devices and business systems. It means you can track both past and present events, simulate possibilities, and help predict future events for those environments.

With Azure Digital Twins now generally available, it offers ready-to-use building blocks that can simplify the creation of detailed, comprehensive digital models that bring solutions to life. This trusted enterprise-grade platform brings the scale, reliability, security, and broad market availability that enables customers to build production-ready solutions.
 

Customer insights and partner solutions with Azure Digital Twins

Intelligent environments come in all shapes and sizes, and their attributes and outcomes are as varied as the industries in which they are used. As such, the possibilities for digital twins are endless—it can be used to model industries and environments that include factories, buildings, stadiums, and even entire cities. Today, we are working with customers and partners who are creating digital twins to model everything from facilities and spaces such as, smart buildings to manufactured products and the very processes within their supply chains.

One company pushing the boundaries of renewable energy production and efficiency is Korea-based Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction. Doosan worked with Microsoft and Bentley Systems to develop a digital twin of its wind farms, which allows operators to remotely monitor equipment performance and predict energy generation based on weather conditions.

“To maintain our competitive edge and increase energy efficiency, we need to optimize turbine operations through data analysis and gather feedback to develop and test advances in wind turbine development. We created solutions with Azure Digital Twins, Azure IoT Hub, and Bentley iTwin to make that possible by combining data from multiple sources into actionable insights.”—Seiyoung Jang, General Manager, Strategy and Innovation, Doosan

The solution uses Azure Digital Twins to combine real-time and historical IoT, weather, and other operational data with physics and machine learning-based models to accurately predict production output for each turbine in the farm. Based on the simulated models, Doosan can proactively adjust the pitch and performance of individual turbines, maximize energy production, and generate insights that will improve the future design of its next-generation wind turbines.

The innovation and productivity that Azure Digital Twins enables doesn’t stop there:

  • Johnson Controls is collaborating with Microsoft to digitally transform how buildings and spaces are conceived, built, and managed. At the center of this collaboration is a holistic integration between their platform, OpenBlue Digital Twin, and Azure Digital Twins. This partnership helps enable integrated building management, and the platform serves as the foundation for energy and space optimization, predictive maintenance, and remote operations.
  • Ansys, a market leader in simulation software, now offers native integration of simulation-based digital twins via Ansys Twin Builder for customers using Azure Digital Twins. This lets engineers quickly deliver real-time, physics-based simulation models for operational use. Doing so helps make it possible to efficiently integrate the simulation-based twins into a broader IoT solution.
  • Brookfield Properties, one of the world’s largest commercial office landlords, partnered with Willow to create a digital replica of their One Manhattan West (OMW) property using Willow’s Azure Digital Twins-based product. Dedicated to creating a “live, work, play” ecosystem, this lays the groundwork for a digital-first future while unlocking cost savings, energy optimizations, and value-added services today. This solution leverages premade, open source models by RealEstateCore that can be used to help accelerate development across industries.

Azure Digital Twins platform capabilities

The Azure Digital Twins platform was built to simplify and accelerate the creation of IoT connected solutions. With a comprehensive set of capabilities, companies can develop customized, connected solutions with ease. And with the ability to layer your vertical domain specialization—such as 3D or 4D visualizations, physics-based simulation, and AI—on top of Azure Digital Twins, it’s easier than ever to focus on driving results for your customers.

This also includes new developer experiences with broad language support for SDKs, Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL) modeling and validation tools, and the Azure Digital Twins explorer sample which helps visualize the graph representing your environment. Other capabilities at the core of the Azure Digital Twins platform allow you to:

  • Use an open modeling language, DTDL, to easily create custom models of intelligent environments. In addition, premade models and converter tools for vertical standards help accelerate development when getting started with use cases across industries.
  • Bring digital twins to life with a live execution environment that is scalable and secure and uses data from IoT and other sources. Using a robust event system, you can build dynamic business logic that helps keep business apps fresh and always up to date. You can also extract insights in the context of the modeled world by querying data on a wide range of conditions and relationships.
  • Break down silos using input from IoT and business systems by easily connecting assets such as IoT and Azure IoT Edge devices via Azure IoT Hub, as well as existing business systems such as ERP and CRM to Azure Digital Twins to extract relevant insights across the entire environment.
  • Output to storage and analytics by integrating Azure Digital Twins with other Azure services. This includes the ability to send data to Azure Data Lake for long-term storage or to data analytics services such as Azure Synapse Analytics to apply machine learning. Another important use case is time series data integration and historian analytics with Azure Time Series Insights.

Digital Twins Consortium: Advancing technology with open partnerships and ecosystems

Built upon open partnerships and open ecosystems, Microsoft co-founded the Digital Twins Consortium in May 2020 in collaboration with other companies. Together, we are contributing to best practices and shared digital twin models. We are committed to helping create an industry standard and bringing digital twins—including DTDL—as well as all the different vertical specializations of digital twins across industries into an open ecosystem.

There are now more than 170 members that span companies, government agencies, and academia to drive consistency in the vocabulary, architecture, security, and compatibility of digital twin technology as it’s used across industries. This means that everyone across the ecosystem can benefit from a collective pool of industry standardized models so you can accelerate your digital twin journey.

Get started with Azure Digital Twins

As Microsoft Azure partners and businesses who are already using Azure Digital Twins have shown, it offers a robust platform for building enterprise grade IoT connected solutions with the scale, compliance, security, and privacy benefits that customers can bet their business on. Learn more about Azure Digital Twins and how to get started building digital replicas of your own intelligent business environment.

Additional resources

•    Learn more about Azure Digital Twins.
•    Get started with Azure Digital Twins technical resources.
•    Watch Azure Digital Twins demo video.
•    Read Azure Digital Twins customer stories.
•    Watch the Azure Digital Twins technical deep dive video featuring the WillowTwin solution.
•    Learn how IoT and Azure Digital Twins can help connect urban environments.
•    Learn more about Microsoft and Johnson Controls digital twin collaboration.

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Johnson Controls and Microsoft announce global collaboration, launch integration between OpenBlue Digital Twin and Azure Digital Twins

  • Microsoft announces the general availability of Azure Digital Twins
  • Holistic integration across digital twin technologies will enable users to digitally manage physical spaces, maximize efficiency, support COVID-19 safety and pilot new solutions
  • Solution aims to encompass the entire ecosystem of building and device management technologies with digital cloud technologies
  • Collaboration will support efficient and environmentally friendly design, construction and ongoing operation of buildings and spaces through modeling, analytics and digital control mechanisms

CORK, Ireland, and REDMOND, Wash. — Dec. 8, 2020 — Johnson Controls (NYSE: JCI), the global leader for smart and sustainable buildings, and Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday announced a global collaboration to digitally transform how buildings and spaces are conceived, built and managed. Microsoft also announced the general availability of Microsoft Azure Digital Twins.Johnson Controls logo

As a key partner for Azure Digital Twins, Johnson Control’s OpenBlue Digital Twin is a comprehensive platform that will support the entire ecosystem of building and device management technologies with digital cloud technologies.

Johnson Controls is a Microsoft partner leveraging several Azure services including Active Directory Services, Azure Data Lake, Access Control and Time Series Insights.  Microsoft’s Azure Digital Twins is the newest Azure platform service integrated into Johnson Controls OpenBlue platform that aims to enable the creation of next-generation IoT connected solutions that will model the real world. Johnson Control’s platform turns the physical world into computable objects that will enable customers to create detailed digital versions of physical buildings, assets and systems.

Digital twins are digital replicas of physical entities capable of providing an in-depth analysis of data and the potential to monitor systems to mitigate risks, manage issues and utilize simulations to test future solutions. The use of digital twins plays an important role in helping technicians identify the root cause of issues accelerating problem-solving. Additionally, building managers are able to support COVID-19 safety and security protocols, while ensuring efficient use of energy and other facility resources.

Azure Digital Twins enables the creation of knowledge graphs based on digital models of entire environments, whether they are buildings, factories, farms, energy networks, railways, stadiums or entire cities. These digital models empower property managers with actionable insights that drive better products, optimize operations, reduce costs and create breakthrough customer experiences.

OpenBlue Digital Twin is a unique platform purpose-built with smart buildings and spaces in mind, enabling and unifying all aspects of an intelligent building: security, employee experience, facilities management, sustainability and more. The open platform’s open system seamlessly integrates with existing building infrastructure, regardless of brand, make or model.

“Our partnership with Microsoft is a vital ingredient in our innovation strategy, as the company shares our vision of using technology to transform the environments where people live, work, learn and play,” said Mike Ellis, vice president and chief digital and customer officer at Johnson Controls. “Digital twins are playing an increasingly important role in the design, construction and ongoing operation of healthy buildings and spaces, and can be particularly valuable when analyzing large datasets and predicting patterns and trends to tell our customers things they don’t yet know. Our OpenBlue digital platform, closely connected with Microsoft’s platform and workplace technologies, represents an unbeatable opportunity to help our customers make shared spaces safer, more agile and more sustainable.”

“We have an incredible opportunity to use advances in cloud and compute capabilities to help customers reimagine the physical world,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud + AI, Microsoft. “By integrating the power of Azure Digital Twins with JCI’s OpenBlue Digital Twin platform, our collaboration will provide customers with a digital replica and actionable insights to better meet their evolving needs.”

Among the numerous pilots currently under development is an ambitious effort at The National University of Singapore (NUS). As part of the university’s ongoing efforts to create a smart, safe and sustainable campus for students and staff, the new alliance’s complementary products and services are coming together to test the foundations of a Digital Twin-powered operations platform. The data-driven platform will enable integrated building management across the campus and serve as the foundation for energy and space optimization, predictive maintenance, and unmanned operations.

“NUS is excited to collaborate with Microsoft and Johnson Controls, in our digital transformation journey that changes the way we design and manage our buildings and infrastructure, as we move toward a carbon-neutral campus by 2030,” said Professor Yong Kwet Yew, senior vice president (Campus Infrastructure), NUS.

Working with Microsoft, Johnson Controls will address how people can return to work to maximize space while operating facilities safely, including:

  • Energy optimization. Optimizing energy usage within facilities maintenance with a goal of reducing carbon emissions to save money and support sustainability efforts.
  • Access control and safety. Addressing physical access and safety using live video analytics and spatial intelligence, combining Microsoft cloud services and Johnson Controls security access controls hardware end points.
  • Collaboration for facility managers. Integrating facility management workflows with workplace collaboration platforms such as Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams to increase productivity and collaboration across remote teams.
  • Workspace optimization. Maximizing the use of spaces by merging building and occupancy data with experiences to create actionable insights for facility managers and the occupants.

Johnson Controls OpenBlue platform — launched in July 2020 — was designed with agility, flexibility and scalability in mind, to enable buildings to become dynamic spaces. In leveraging the platform, customers will be able to manage operations more systemically, delivering buildings that have memory, intelligence and unique identity. Those wanting to read more about OpenBlue Digital Twin can visit https://www.johnsoncontrols.com/openblue/openblue-digital-twin.

About Johnson Controls

At Johnson Controls, we transform the environments where people live, work, learn and play. From optimizing building performance to improving safety and enhancing comfort, we drive the outcomes that matter most. We deliver our promise in industries such as healthcare, education, data centers and manufacturing. With a global team of 100,000 experts in more than 150 countries and over 130 years of innovation, we are the power behind our customers’ mission. Our leading portfolio of building technology and solutions includes some of the most trusted names in the industry, such as Tyco®, YORK®, Metasys®, Ruskin®, Titus®, Frick®, Penn®, Sabroe®, Simplex®, Ansul® and Grinnell®. For more information, visit www.johnsoncontrols.com or follow us @johnsoncontrols on Twitter.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

For more information, press only:

Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777

JCI Media Contacts: Phil Clement, (414) 208-5161, [email protected]; Michael Isaac, +41 52 6330374, [email protected]

JCI Investor Contacts: Antonella Franzen, (609) 720-4665, [email protected]; Ryan Edelman, (609) 720-4545, [email protected]

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.

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Announcing Azure Government Top Secret regions

Today, we are announcing the expansion of our mission-critical cloud for US Government with new capabilities in Azure Government, the expansion of Azure Government Secret, and the announcement of a new cloud to serve customers with Top Secret classified data—Azure Government Top Secret.

Announcing Azure Government Top Secret

We have recently completed the buildout of new Azure Government Top Secret regions, and we are working with the US Government on accreditation. As part of our ongoing commitment to commercial parity as driven by government mission requirements, Azure Government Top Secret regions are designed to provide the same capabilities as Azure (commercial), Azure Government, and Azure Government Secret, enabling a continuum of compute from mission cloud to tactical edge.

(Options for US Gov Compliance): How Azure meets full spectrum of data classification needs.

The broad range of services will meet the demand for greater agility in the classified space, including the need to gain deeper insights from data sourced from any location as well as the need to enable the rapid expansion of remote work. Additionally, mission owners will benefit from greater choice in modernizing legacy systems, with a secure cloud platform that works on open standards and open frameworks with tools that work across a wide range of skill levels, from business analysts to developers to data scientists.

Azure Government Secret new functionality

Azure Government Secret continues to help mission owners unlock new insights, enable secure innovation, achieve greater agility, and further the mission. Customers including those in the US DoD, law enforcement, and other agencies are using Azure Government Secret today. Azure Government Secret is authorized by both Department of Defense Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 503.

“Microsoft is focused on mission enablement. Missions are enabled with workloads. Workloads live within enclaves that house varied levels of data. Microsoft is enabling seamless, secure, cost-contained agility across mission workloads at scale.

The consistency between Azure (commercial), Azure Government, and Azure Government Secret is also starting to change the game as software development may happen from anywhere, while the code itself can be promoted to enclaves with higher classification levels. There it can interact with data of higher classification levels. At the end of the day, this means doing more for the mission at a lower overall cost.” —Carroll Moon, CTO of CloudFit Software. 

Today, we are announcing several new services in Azure Government Secret; for application developers, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Azure Container Instances help you deploy and manage containerized applications more easily. Intelligent security analytics services Azure Sentinel and Azure Security Center are also now available in Azure Government Secret, enabling unified security across your digital estate and integrated, proactive threat management. Together with Azure Monitor, these services help you collect, analyze, and act on telemetry data from your Azure and on-premises environments.

Azure Government Availability Zones, Windows Virtual Desktop availability, and expanded compliance

Events over the past year have highlighted the importance of securely maintaining critical government operations. We have designed and built our cloud platforms for high availability and resilience, and today, we are announcing Availability Zones in Azure Government, providing high availability for your most demanding mission-critical applications and data. Availability Zones are tolerant to datacenter failures through redundancy and logical isolation of services, assuring that critical customer services and workloads are available, anytime, and anywhere.

In addition to responding to unprecedented events, government agencies are rapidly responding to today’s imperative of remote work, and we’ve seen high demand for solutions that allow teams to work from anywhere while keeping relevant data within a securely managed environment. We recently announced the availability of Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) in Azure Government with FedRAMP High accreditation, enabling agencies to adopt WVD for mission-critical workloads and empowering more secure and productive work-from-anywhere scenarios.

As new services are brought into each of our government-only cloud regions, we are working with our accreditors to ensure these services are authorized at the right level for your workloads. We now offer 137 Azure Government services at FedRAMP High and 97 services at Department of Defense Impact Level 5 (IL5) across all Azure Government regions.1 Visit our documentation page for a full list of services by audit scope.

Total flexibility at the tactical edge

Today, we are announcing updates to our tactical edge portfolio for US Government customers. Together, these new first-party edge devices help you to do more for the mission, whether that is pre-processing data for low latency response times, bringing AI and machine learning (ML) to the far edge, or harnessing satellite data more rapidly to enable decision-making in disconnected environments.

(Tactical edge devices): Image capturing tactical edge portfolio for US Government customers.

Modular Datacenter generally available at Impact Level 5 and 6 with high availability options

The recently announced Azure Modular Datacenter (MDC) provides datacenter scale compute and storage resources for areas in which adverse conditions, disrupted network availability, and limited access to specialized infrastructure would typically prohibit cloud computing. The MDC can run separate security enclaves, allowing mission users to operate workloads across multiple data classifications at the same time in a single unit, and like the other ruggedized devices, can operate in fully connected, occasionally connected, or fully disconnected scenarios. The MDC allows government customers to deploy a single piece of critical infrastructure to meet the needs of a wide variety of mission workloads at various levels of classification, all in a self-contained footprint that reduces logistics overhead.

Today we are announcing:

  • The network high availability (HA) module for the MDC that provides network resiliency through multiple satellite communication partners in different orbits. Network resiliency is delivered via SATCOM links through our continuously growing ecosystem of SATCOM partners like SpaceX and SES, for continuity of operations (COOP) during fiber failover.
  • The high availability power module, which adds resiliency where customers need it, providing an on-demand way to add additional power stability resources in a form factor that is as transportable as the MDC. For deployments with intermittent or unreliable power, transitioning between multiple power sources will keep MDC workloads up and running.

Azure Stack Hub Ruggedized

Azure Stack Hub Ruggedized from Microsoft is an Azure Hardware and Software solution that brings a cloud-consistent approach to operating environments while addressing limited or no network connectivity, harsh conditions requiring military specifications, and high security requirements with optional connectivity to any Azure cloud. Azure Stack Hub Ruggedized is now generally available for customers in Azure Government and Azure Government Secret.

Azure Stack Edge Pro R and Mini R

The Azure Stack Edge appliances Azure Stack Edge Pro R and Azure Stack Edge Mini R enable you to run applications and leverage hardware-accelerated AI and ML solutions to analyze, transform, and filter data at the edge, right where data is created and collected. You can then aggregate data in Azure for further analytics, with common app logic across both. The appliances also act as a cloud storage gateway, enabling eyes-off data transfers to Azure while retaining local access to files. Azure Stack Edge Pro R and Mini R are generally available for customers in Azure Government and Azure Government Secret.

Learn more

Designed and built for your mission requirements, these rugged edge devices enable scenarios from disaster response to modern fleet management to perimeter security and dangerous object detection. US Government customers and their partners2 can use Azure commercial, Azure Government, and Azure Government Secret to advance their missions, depending on their compliance requirements. Providing a broad range of commercial innovation for government across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS and the most comprehensive compliance, these cloud platforms are designed to help you modernize mission systems and stay in the lead, today and tomorrow.

1Read the Isolation guidelines for Impact Level 5 workloads.

2Azure Government is available to US federal, state, local, or tribal government entities and their solution providers with eligibility review. Azure Government Secret is available with US Government approval to agencies working with US Government data classified at the Secret level.

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Companies who migrated to Azure before the pandemic find the cloud was a silver lining

In challenging times, innovative companies don’t panic, they pivot.

So when the coronavirus traveled the globe, disrupting everything from grocery shopping to tax preparation, resilient companies around the world responded with ingenious solutions that ensured the safety of their employees, met the needs of their customers and kept their IT operations humming.

For some, it meant quickly enabling employees to work from home instead of at the office, while others rushed to re-engineer their supply chains, so their customers could continue to buy the products they needed to stay safe and healthy. Their solutions were custom but the step that allowed them to react so rapidly was common: They had migrated their operations to Microsoft Azure.

Even before COVID-19, companies were hungry to enable secure remote work, achieve operational efficiency, address IT budget constraints and accelerate innovation, and migrating to the cloud was the critical first step to unlocking those accomplishments.

“Azure has always helped our diverse customers adapt to new ways of doing business,” says Jeremy Winter, director, Azure management and migration.

“While some are moving beyond crisis mode and others look to the cloud to stay resilient, we’re seeing an acceleration in business’ cloud migrations. We’ve spent a lot of time with customers who are both considering and executing migrations and understand the challenges they are facing. We also recognize that our customers are counting on us more than ever to recover and ultimately transform.”

Here’s how a handful of those Microsoft customers discovered during the health crisis that the cloud didn’t just have a silver lining – it was the silver lining.

A technician from Actavo arrives at a customer's home.
Actavo’s field technicians visit more than a half-million homes every year. (Photo courtesy of Actavo)

Actavo

Dublin, Ireland-based Actavo is a multi-disciplinary, global engineering services business that designs, builds and maintains the vital infrastructure we rely on every day.

Among their many services, they design, construct and maintain networks for the telecommunications and utilities industries; design, construct and install modular buildings; provide scaffold and rope access solutions along with the installation of insulation and removal of asbestos in the industrial sector; and provide hundreds of in-home technicians to companies who provide residential services like gas boiler repair, satellite installation or broadband internet installation to a half-million homes every year.

With so many essential industries relying on their round-the-clock support, even before the pandemic Actavo sought to increase operational efficiency and improve agility by migrating to Azure.

“Moving to the cloud gave us the versatility to be able to scale up and scale down in any country where we needed to operate, but it also gave us the robustness from a disaster recovery perspective,” says Willie Ryan, global Environmental Health and Safety and IT director.

A novel coronavirus may not have been the disaster that Actavo had in mind, but when it arrived, the decision to migrate to the cloud proved even more valuable. With the new, versatile infrastructure in place, Actavo was able to quickly pivot to remote work for its employees, ensuring that they could continue to support their clients around the world.

“We’ve got a very solid platform, and that was quite evident as we came through COVID and the pandemic, in terms of, we moved from an on-prem operation to everybody working from home, seamlessly, quickly, easily, without any major headaches,” Ryan says.

“Within the space of a week we were able to tick a box that said, ‘If lockdown comes, we’re ready to go.’ The lockdown announcement came at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. We actually had everybody that needed to be working at home, working at home on Monday morning.”

Silvan Schriber, head of corporate development for Additiv
Silvan Schriber, Additiv head of corporate development. (Photo courtesy of Additiv)

Additiv

Additiv partners with the world’s leading financial institutions to help them digitalize their wealth management activities. Their ability to advocate for change and innovation in an industry that is highly regulated is dependent on building trust with their clients by adhering to the highest standards of security and compliance.

So when the company moved its enterprise software offering for its clients to the cloud, they worked with Microsoft to ensure a seamless transition that would strictly adhere to regulations across multiple locations – a prerequisite for a global company that is headquartered in Switzerland and has offices and clients on three continents.

Now, Additiv can offer its clients innovative, flexible software-as-a-service solutions that can scale easily and that adapt to their specific needs, no matter where they’re located. “Digital collaboration means breaking down these virtual borders, and Azure allowed us to integrate better so that our clients can provide a holistic solution to their customers out of the cloud,” says Silvan Schriber, head of corporate development.

“The benefits of Azure for Additiv are 100 percent trust that the solutions adhere in each location to regulations,” he adds. “So it helps us in centrally managing our solutions and placing them in each country of our clients, with virtually the click of a button.”

That consistency and efficiency will be critical as Additiv’s financial services customers increasingly embrace digital strategies and omni-channel distribution to reimagine their businesses post-pandemic.

“The pace of change pre-pandemic was rapid, but there’s no reason to think these trends won’t accelerate post-pandemic,” the company writes in a report published earlier this year. “… the companies that are faring best are those that are either digitally native or have invested the most in digital.”

An Albertsons storefront.
Azure migration helps Albertsons Companies deliver a better shopping experience. (Photo courtesy of Albertsons Companies)

Albertsons Companies

Long before this past spring, people were changing the way they shop for groceries, and Albertsons Companies – one of the largest food and drug retailers in the United States with some 2,200 stores operating under banners including Albertsons, Safeway and Vons – was evolving along with them.

“I believe that every customer – from millennials to baby boomers – is transforming how they shop,” says Ramiya Iyer, senior vice president of Data, Digital & Merchandising at Albertsons Companies. “The retail industry is undergoing its own transformational journey to meet customers where they are and be relevant to them. It’s imperative that we do that to succeed and grow as a business.”

To stay competitive and give customers the modern, convenient shopping experience they had come to expect, Albertsons migrated from an aging on-premises server farm to Microsoft Azure.

The move allowed them to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive services, and empowered an environment where developers can innovate and efficiently test new ideas, propelling Albertsons to introduce apps that make shopping faster and more convenient.

“With Azure, we can bring new ideas to market faster and deliver releases on shorter time cycles,” says Param Deivreddy, vice president, IT architecture. “We think Azure also encourages exploration and innovation, because you don’t have to spend a huge amount on infrastructure to quickly test a new idea.”

The company’s easy-to-use apps offer the kinds of personalized and streamlined experiences digitally savvy shoppers demand, allowing them to create shopping lists, easily find the products they want, skip long check-out lines, even save time at the fuel pump by claiming rewards, activating the pump and paying for gas with a tap of the phone.

“Grocery shopping shouldn’t be a chore,” says Iyer. “We want to provide our customers with a totally frictionless experience that lets them enjoy the food they’re putting on the table with a minimum of fuss and stress.”

An H&R Block storefront.
Cloud computing allows H&R Block to ramp up during tax season and enables employees to serve customers from home. (Photo courtesy of H&R Block)

H&R Block

Few things in life are certain, but as the adage goes, taxes are one of them. Even during a health crisis, Americans are responsible for filing their annual return, and millions of them lean on Kansas City, Missouri-based H&R Block to navigate the process.

To streamline its operations and improve its ability to ramp up during tax season, H&R Block migrated its computing workload to Microsoft Azure, a move that would, “help the company better process millions of tax returns annually while allowing the firm to build financial software products with greater speed, quality and security,” writes CIO’s Clinton Boulton in a recent interview  on cloud migration with H&R Block CIO Alan Lowden.

“It’s what we need to do to enable our strategic vision of putting customers at the center,” Lowden tells CIO. “We have to give them a convenient experience of serving them any way they want to be served.”

So this past tax season, H&R Block was able to spring into action to support their customers while protecting the safety of their employees and the communities they serve. To keep their workforce safe during their busiest season – which was even longer this year to give taxpayers more time to file – they shifted to a work-from-home model that allowed 80,000 tax professionals to serve customers virtually.

That quick pivot wouldn’t have been possible if the company hadn’t migrated to Azure. Because they didn’t need to buy new hardware, or set up or configure additional infrastructure, they were able to make the critical change to remote workstations in less than two weeks. The company’s tax pros were able to provide the expertise their customers needed, and the even more critical refunds they were counting on.

When the demands of tax season return to normal, H&R Block will continue to inspire confidence in their customers through a seamless experience – wherever they like, however they like.

“Now we can present tax tips and offerings to our clients that are most relevant to them,” says Aditya Thadani, vice president of architecture and information management at H&R Block. “Migrating our platforms to Azure has really allowed us to serve our clients better.”

Top photo by Halfpoint Images/Getty Images.

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UNICEF and Microsoft launch improved, scalable technology to protect vulnerable children and women amid rise in domestic and gender-based violence due to COVID-19

Primero, an innovative online and offline application, empowers social workers to help more children

Four men departing a building

NEW YORK — Dec. 1, 2020 — UNICEF and Microsoft Corp. launched a new version of Primero called Primero X — an open source case management web application that helps social service providers coordinate critical support to vulnerable children. Key interventions include providing access to lifesaving services, such as family reunification and tracing, while still adhering to physical distancing and movement restrictions due to COVID-19. The launch of Primero X comes amid an increase in the rates of domestic and gender-based violence linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Millions of children are now more vulnerable to violence, abuse and neglect due to the socioeconomic consequences of the intensifying pandemic. There are 1.8 billion children in the 104 countries where violence prevention and response services have been disrupted due to COVID-19.[1] Schools are shuttered, parents and caregivers are losing jobs, and families are under increasing financial strain.

Over the past 12 months, UNICEF and Microsoft have been working together to enhance Primero to allow governments and other partners to deploy the application more quickly in humanitarian crises; support usage in offline and online settings from any device; improve the quality and consistency of care to vulnerable groups; and protect the privacy of at-risk children. The new version of Primero is currently being piloted in Ghana, with expected release to dozens of other countries through 2022. UNICEF aims to have Primero X live in 60 countries and territories by 2025.

UNICEF and partners are urging governments and protection authorities to adopt innovative technologies, like Primero X, to ensure that vulnerable women and children can be protected even under the most challenging of circumstances. Primero X supports multiple modules and can adapt to a broad range of protection programming, including unaccompanied and separated children, psychosocial support, children in alternative care, and gender-based violence in emergencies. Additionally, UNICEF has been advocating for social service workers to be recognized as “essential workers.”

“Social workers offer a lifeline to vulnerable children, especially during times of crisis and upheaval,” said UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Charlotte Petri Gornitzka. “COVID-19 is undermining the ability of these essential workers to do their jobs at the same time as needs are increasing. The partnership between UNICEF and Microsoft will help strengthen the Primero platform and scale it up to benefit millions of children and young people, both now and in the future.” Primero is an example of how UNICEF partners with business — based on a shared-value approach, where producing social value and addressing challenges also makes business sense.

“We firmly believe technology can be a force for good in these challenging times, and our partnership with UNICEF to support vulnerable children and women is even more critical during COVID-19,” said Microsoft Global Head of Tech for Social Impact Justin Spelhaug. “Primero is improving the quality and consistency of care for social workers so they can focus on those who need it most.”

Primero X is offered as a digital public good, providing social service organizations with program expertise and operational support from a diverse global community of experienced child protection and gender-based violence specialists. It also protects client confidentiality and is aligned with Responsible Data for Children, ensuring children’s privacy when accessing services facilitated by the system.

New features of Primero X will help social service providers reach children with vital protection and support as communities around the world continue to grapple with the socioeconomic consequences of the pandemic. These features include:

  • Microsoft technical infrastructure and design
  • Online and offline use from any smart device without interruption
  • Full-feature web application available on smartphones, resized to fit the screen
  • Intuitive workflows and embedded help
  • Enhanced security including two-factor identification
  • Delivery via the Microsoft Azure cloud service

Primero has thus far been rolled out in 29 countries and territories including Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Myanmar, Nigeria, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Somaliland, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Uganda and Yemen.

More information about Primero can be found at www.primero.org, www.cpims.org and www.gbvims.com.

More information about COVID-19 and guidance on how to protect children and families can be found at www.unicef.org/coronavirus.

About UNICEF

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. Across more than 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, to build a better world for everyone. Follow UNICEF on Twitter and Facebook.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

For more information, press only:

Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, [email protected]

Christopher Tidey, UNICEF New York, +1 (917) 340-3017, [email protected]

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.

[1] https://www.unicef.org/reports/protecting-children-from-violence-covid-19-disruptions-in-prevention-and-response-services-2020

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Attend Dec. 3 online event to explore how data and analytics will impact your business

Planning strategic data and analytics initiatives is now critical for helping your organization build the agility and resilience needed to successfully navigate the future. Join us on December 3, 2020, from 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC-8), for the Shape Your Future with Azure Data and Analytics digital event to explore how data and analytics impact the future of your business—and see how to use Azure to change the way you make strategic business decisions.

Register for the event to:

  • Hear Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella provide insight into the power of data and analytics and discuss new Azure innovations.
  • Learn from Amy Hood, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President, and Julia White, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure, about how Microsoft used data and analytics to transform its own finance organization.
  • Attend a CEO roundtable with Judson Althoff, Microsoft Executive Vice President of Worldwide Commercial Business, and other executives from some of the world’s most successful companies as they talk about how they are using data and analytics to recover, strengthen, and innovate in the face of uncertainty.
  • Dive deep into the latest Azure data and analytics announcements with Rohan Kumar, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure Data and see new demos illustrating the native integration of Azure Synapse Analytics, the new Azure data governance service, Azure Machine Learning, and Microsoft Power BI.
  • Ask questions and get answers in real-time from Microsoft engineers during a live Q&A.

Shape your future with Azure Data and Analytics. Attend the digital event December 3, 2020.

By the end of the event, you’ll have a better understanding of how to develop a strategic view of your analytics initiatives and a solid foundation for creating a strategic, unified framework for using data and analytics to gain insights, make decisions, and improve business outcomes. We hope to see you there.

Register now button that opens registratoin page in a new window.

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Azure Hybrid Benefit now generally available for Linux

Coinciding with this week’s Kubecon and Open Azure Day virtual events, today we’re announcing the general availability of Azure Hybrid Benefit functionality for Linux customers, allowing you to bring both your on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) subscriptions to Azure.

During the preview period, over 1,500 Linux virtual machines have already been migrated to Azure using the new Azure Hybrid Benefit capabilities, helping to significantly reduce the costs of running enterprise Linux workloads in Azure.

While previous Bring-Your-Own-Subscription cloud migration options available to Red Hat and SUSE customers allowed them to use their pre-existing RHEL and SLES subscriptions in the cloud, Azure Hybrid Benefit improves upon this with several capabilities that are unique to Azure and makes enterprise Linux cloud migration even easier than before:

  • Applies to all Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server pay-as-you-go images available in the Azure Marketplace or Azure Portal. You don’t need to provide your own image.
  • Save time with seamless post-deployment conversions—there’s no need for production redeployment. You can simply convert the pay-as-you-go images you used during your proof of concept testing to bring-your-own-subscription billing.

Azure Hybrid Benefit allows for seamless subscription conversion of RHEL and SLES images with no need for downtime or redeployment.

  • Lower your ongoing operational costs with automatic image maintenance, updates, and patches—Microsoft maintains the converted RHEL and SLES images for you.
  • Enjoy the convenience of unified user interface integration with the Azure CLI, providing the same UI as other Azure virtual machines, as well as scalable batch conversions.
  • Get co-located technical support from Azure, Red Hat, and SUSE with just one ticket.
  • Combine with recently announced Red Hat and SUSE support for Azure shared disks to lift-and-shift failover clusters and parallel file systems—like Global File System.
  • Fully compatible with Azure Arc, providing end-to-end hybrid cloud operations management for your Windows, RHEL, and SLES servers in one solution.

“We’re pleased to have worked closely with Microsoft to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Azure Hybrid Benefit,” said Gunnar Hellekson, senior director, Product Management, Red Hat Enterprise Linux at Red Hat. “Giving customers more, and easier, choices as to where and how they run the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform and the foundation for our hybrid cloud portfolio is especially beneficial today, as organizations evolve digital transformation initiatives in response to dynamic global conditions.”

“Azure Hybrid Benefit for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server will give our joint customers improved flexibility and ease of use when running SUSE Linux on Azure,” said Rachel Cassidy, SVP Global Channel & Cloud at SUSE. “Whether used with mission-critical workloads like SAP on SUSE Linux, or high-performance computing, Azure Hybrid Benefit for SUSE Linux will help customers simplify, modernize and accelerate their infrastructure and make running SUSE Linux on Azure more cost-effective than ever.”

To see a demonstration of Azure Hybrid Benefit and how it works for Red Hat and SUSE, check out this video:

Clickable link to the video for a demo on Azure Hybrid Benefit. This link will open in a new page.

Learn more about Azure Hybrid Benefit. For additional information about how Azure Hybrid Benefit applies for Linux, you can read more here.

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Announcing ASP.NET Core in .NET 5

Daniel Roth

Daniel

November 10th, 2020

.NET 5 is now released! .NET 5 is the next version of .NET Core and the future of the .NET platform. With .NET 5 you have everything you need to build rich, interactive front end web UI and powerful backend services.

ASP.NET Core in .NET 5 is loaded with lots of great new features and improvements. Here’s a sampling:

For a full list of everything that’s new in ASP.NET Core in this release, check out the ASP.NET Core in .NET 5 release notes. See also the .NET 5 release notes for additional details and known issues.

Get started

To get started with ASP.NET Core in .NET 5, install the .NET 5 SDK. .NET 5 is also included with the latest updates to Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac, so if you’ve already updated your IDE, then you should be good to go.

Visual Studio 2019 16.8 or later is required to use .NET 5 from Visual Studio. .NET 5 is also supported with Visual Studio for Mac. To use .NET 5 with Visual Studio Code, install the latest version of the C# extension.

Upgrade an existing project

To upgrade an existing ASP.NET Core app from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5:

To upgrade an existing ASP.NET Core app from .NET 5 RC2 to .NET 5:

  • Update all Microsoft.AspNetCore.*, Microsoft.Extensions.*, and System.* package references to 5.0.0.

That’s it! You should be all set to enjoy the benefits of .NET 5.

See also the full list of breaking changes in ASP.NET Core for .NET 5.

Performance improvements

With every .NET release a special effort is made to improve all aspects of the performance in ASP.NET Core applications. ASP.NET Core in .NET 5 is the fastest .NET web framework we’ve ever shipped!

.NET 5 contains great performance improvements in the runtime and libraries and for the gRPC components. These improvements, when applied to ASP.NET Core, result in some significant wins in throughput (RPS) and latency. The performance results below are taken from the TechEmpower benchmarks for ASP.NET Core with .NET Core 3.1 and from the latest results for ASP.NET Core with .NET 5.

Troughput (max, in RPS)

Scenario 3.1 5.0 Change
Plaintext Platform 8,593 11,690 +36.0%
Json Platform 872 1,261 +44.6%
Fortunes Platform 344 423 +23.0%
Plaintext 3,993 4,420 +12.4%
Json 743 912 +22.6%
Fortunes 223 259 +16.2%

Latency (mean, in ms)

Scenario 3.1 5.0 Change
Plaintext Platform 1.52 0.82 -46.3%
Json Platform 1.24 0.41 -66.7%
Fortunes Platform 1.57 1.26 -19.7
Plaintext 0.87 0.83 -4.2%
Json 1.52 1.20 -21.1%
Fortunes 1.11 0.87 -21.6

The “platform” tests represent highly optimized benchmark implementations, while the non-platform tests use more typical framework components.

The TechEmpower performance composite score, an index based on all of the TechEmpower benchmarks aggregated together, increased from 5,659 to 6,626 with .NET 5, which represents a 17% increase.

Deploy .NET 5 Web Apps to Azure App Service Today

The ASP.NET and Azure App Service teams have worked tirelessly together throughout the .NET 5 timeline to make sure ASP.NET developers have access to the latest bits of the .NET 5 runtime on day zero. This means that, as soon as you can download .NET 5 and get started building apps with it, you can deploy those .NET 5 apps to App Service using Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, and you’ll have full support for deploying .NET 5 apps to App Service using GitHub Actions.

This day-zero availability of .NET 5 on App Service will be made possible by their new Early Access Runtime feature, which will enable not only .NET 5 apps, but every subsequent release of .NET from now on. This means no more waiting for the platform to support the runtime – it’ll “just be there” as soon as the runtime is available. You can learn more about the Azure App Service Early Access Runtime technology on the App Service team’s blog.

Whilst Early Access will give you a supported path to deploying your .NET 5 apps to Azure App Service immediately, there are some slight nuances to how Early Access works with which you can familiarize yourself on the App Service Early Access .NET page.

Join us for the .NET 5 release at .NET Conf 2020

Come celebrate with us and learn all about the .NET 5 release at .NET Conf 2020, a FREE, three day virtual developer event co-organized by the .NET community and Microsoft. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the conference, and it will be better than ever with over 80 live sessions from speakers in the community and from the Microsoft product teams. The conference starts today and goes from November 10-12. We hope you can join us!

Thank you!

Thank you to everyone in the community who helped make this release of .NET 5 possible! This release represents the culmination of many GitHub issues, pull requests, design feedback comments and documentation updates contributed by many members of the .NET community. We couldn’t have made it to this point without you!

We hope you enjoy this release of ASP.NET Core in .NET 5. We are eager to hear about your experiences with this latest release. Let us know what you think on GitHub by filing new issues and by commenting on or expressing your support (👍) for existing ones.

Thanks again for trying out ASP.NET Core!

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Cooler Screens collaborates with Microsoft to deliver immersive digital experiences in retail

Editor’s note – Oct. 28, 2020 – The press release below was updated to clarify Cooler Screens’ current partnership with Walgreens.

CHICAGO, Il. and REDMOND, Wash. (October 28 (8am PT), 2020) — Cooler Screens and Microsoft Corp. announced a multi-year collaboration focused on bringing an immersive digital experience to brick-and-mortar retail environments. Through the collaboration, Cooler Screens will work with Microsoft to scale the delivery of its immersive digital media and merchandising platform hosted on Microsoft Azure to retailers and product brands. The companies will also explore additional integration opportunities to deliver enhanced experiences to customers.

Cooler Screens’ retail technology replaces traditional cooler doors with IoT enabled, high-resolution smart screens which use sensors both outside and inside of the coolers to track inventory and product placing. The solution uses “identity-blind” data from consumer interactions, combined with external data like weather to deliver more personalized experiences.

“We are thrilled to collaborate with an industry leader like Microsoft to drive innovation in retail and build the largest in-store digital media platform in the world,” said Greg Wasson, co-founder and chairman of Cooler Screens. “We are changing the way consumers shop for the better, and this collaboration not only gives us the capabilities to implement our strategy but also gives us immediate massive scale.”

“Retailers today are looking to use digital technology to transform their businesses and redefine the shopping experience for customers,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “Through the power of Microsoft Azure, companies like Cooler Screens are meeting this important need by bringing immersive digital experience to brick and mortar stores.”

Cooler Screens are currently located in more than 50 Walgreens locations. Cooler Screens will expand its platform into 2,500 Walgreens stores across the U.S. in 2021, reaching over 75 million in-store consumers monthly, including 2.5 million on a daily basis.

“Walgreens is committed to enhancing our customer shopping experience through digital transformation, one of our key strategic priorities,” said Stefano Pessina, Executive Vice Chairman and CEO, Walgreens Boots Alliance. “Pairing the Cooler Screens digital media and merchandising technology with Microsoft’s Azure platform will bring a unique and innovative offering to Walgreens customers shopping the cooler aisle.”

Brands including MillerCoors, Coca-Cola, Red Bull, Chobani, Tyson Foods and Monster Energy currently advertise with Cooler Screens. The company is working with a number of leaders in the grocery and convenience store industry, including Kroger and GetGo, to bring more contextually relevant shopping to the stores.

To learn more about how Cooler Screens is working to transform the in-store retail experience, visit www.coolerscreens.com.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. 

About Cooler Screens

Cooler Screens is reimagining the consumer experience in brick-and-mortar retail. The company has developed a patented in-store digital merchandising and media platform that enables consumers to experience in-store what they love about shopping online. Enjoying simplified access to the latest and most relevant information, consumers can now make more informed in-store decisions to best fit their budgets, taste and health preferences. The impact for retailers is a dynamic way to increase sales by offering shoppers a better, more personalized experience at the last mile of advertising. For consumer product companies, Cooler Screens is providing a new platform to build brand awareness, market their products at the point-of-sale, and improve visibility with real-time analytics. Cooler Screens fully adopted Privacy by Design, a rigorous framework developed by global privacy experts and is now one of only 10 organizations with the PECB MS Privacy by Design certification. For more information, please visit http://www.coolerscreens.com.

For more information, press only:

Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications, (425) 638-7777, [email protected]