I attended this conference with the hopes of gaining insight into where Microsoft is heading in regards to 3 major categories: Business Intelligence, SQL Server, and .NET Development. Below you will find my breakdown of all the key points in regards to each category. Before I begin, let me state that Microsoft Azure was the underlying theme that tied everything together. Microsoft stressed the use of their cloud services for many different reasons, and made a point to show how superior they were to their competitors (namely Amazon). All of the latest and greatest toolsets that were displayed were also specifically made to work with Azure. My big takeaway here is that moving to the cloud has become imperative, and the risk of delaying could mean working with outdated technology and toolsets.

SQL Server SQL Server 2016 has seen quite a bit of improvement with a slew of new functions, features and built in analytics. For starters “It simply just runs faster”, the technology used behind the scenes enables faster performance without lengthy and costly infrastructure changes. The new SQL Server combined with Azure now offers built in smart tuning models which include tailored recommendations, auto tuning and insights into query performance. Consolidation of servers and resources that used to take months, now takes minutes and can be scheduled to deploy and just as easily rolled back. Other than the new query store technology, “temporal tables” provided many opportunities for solutions to use right now at my company. Automatic logging and auditing of changes in data offer a plethora of applications across all reporting and transactional databases. Here at my company we are seeing trends in not only displaying critical data in our reports, but also telling a story of how that data ended up in that state, with temporal tables we would be able to share that information without all the traditional coding that would be required.

Business Intelligence/Analytics One of the biggest changes here was the complete overhaul of the SQL Server Reporting Services. The new more modern enterprise reporting and mobile BI solution is infused with the key components of the Power BI product. Developers and users alike will now be able to create custom reports and dashboards that can interact with company data and be portable on any mobile device. Advanced analytics was a point of emphasis in many sessions I attended; most attendees were interested in applying this to their current businesses to discover predictive insights. Microsoft now offers machine learning, stream analytics, R, and cognitive services to use through Development studio and SQL Server. I think this is a key area to apply within our Finance group; there might be some real value that could be added to current modeling being used for planning, budgeting and forecasting at my company.

.NET Development New key technologies now provided across Microsoft development tool, including Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team Services, Azure and Office 365, mobile, web and desktop platforms create modernized applications. The new cross-platform .NET Core framework allows developers to seamlessly develop and deploy applications across Windows, MAC and Linux. I was not really sold on the impact the new tools would have here at my company, currently we are not developing any mobile apps and thus can’t take advantage of some of the major features. Microsoft’s purchase of Xamarin has made them a key player in the app development world, considering the familiarity of using Visual Studio to other frameworks.