Category: Microsoft news

In Thailand, there are more than 1.7 million people with disabilities, but only 30 percent of them have a job. That’s an issue Methawee Thatsanasateankit thought she could help solve.

Thatsanasateankit co-founded Vulcan Coalition in 2020 with the objective of both developing new AI services in Thai language and improving the quality of life of people with disabilities.

According to neuroscience studies, some individuals who are blind or deaf have heightened perceptions that allow them to compensate for their sensory loss.

“We learned that people with disabilities almost have a superpower,” Thatsanasateankit said. “So, we saw an opportunity to match them to this type of work.”

That combination would assist a major problem in Thailand, where the startup is based: a lack of workers capable of labeling the large amounts of data being produced in Thai language.

Data labeling involves identifying raw data, like audio files or videos, and adding informative labels for context. This allows a machine learning model to learn from the data, which enables apps like chatbots and voice recognition services.

Thatsanasateankit and fellow co-founder Niran Pravithana developed a curriculum they could present to the Thai government to show that people with disabilities could perform well as data labelers through this reskilling effort. Vulcan partnered with the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security to educate 2,000 people in data labeling. The Vulcan Academy portal serves as a training and testing tool for potential candidates.

“When we first told people that we would like to employ them as data levelers, they were a little bit scared because it was out of their comfort zone,” Thatsanasateankit said. “People have told them that they couldn’t do many types of work. We had to convince them to take the course. But now it’s something they can be proud of because they can tell other people they do this high-value job.”

Punnaphoj Aeuepalisa is a blind senior software engineer at Vulcan Coalition. He helped create the platform used by individuals to label data through speech-to-text and other processes, and is a key voice in how the company is developing AI programs moving forward.

“I have had an interest in computer science since I was a child,” Aeuepalisa said. “I enrolled at university in the computer engineering department. After graduation, I met the chief research officer at Vulcan and he told me he’d like to form an engineering department of people with disabilities. So, I joined the team and we do many products and platforms using our system. There are also many projects we are doing in collaboration with outside organizations.”

Microsoft’s global mission to empower every person and every organization to achieve more took root in the worldwide AI for Good program, which brings the full technological capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud and AI platforms to make the world more sustainable and accessible to everyone.

Not only was Vulcan Coalition recognized by Microsoft for its steps in AI for Accessibility, it also won the Thailand Virtual Hackathon for a hardware and software solution that automized health and check-in processes for visitors with disabilities, including automatic visual detections of masks powered by AI on the Microsoft Cloud.

The Vulcan team utilized its deaf members to label and train AI using visual data in the Vulcan Data Labeling Platform. The company earned a USD 25,000 grant and rewards aimed at further supporting the project’s development, including mentoring and support for an AI for Good grant application and fast-tracked listing on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

“Without Microsoft’s help, it would be harder for a small startup like us to be recognized by larger companies,” Thatsanasateankit said.

Now, Vulcan Coalition is working with banks, human resource and home automation companies to create chatbots, AI processes and models for use across the country. Approximately 30 percent of revenue from Vulcan’s AI service will be shared with the staff to support their long-term sustainability.

In Thailand, a company must hire one employee with a disability for every 100 employees. In some cases, Vulcan said companies simply pay the money to the individuals and don’t offer a real work opportunity.

For Vulcan, it partners with companies who are eager to utilize skilled workers. The company estimates that within two years of the program’s start, it will have matched 600 people with disabilities into AI jobs. For the workers, it offers them a dignified source of income apart from getting trained in high-demand tech skills.

“Our workforce has been very intrigued about our project. They want to know how it’s going and how our work can be used in the future,” Aeuepalisa said. “They are very interested and very proud of what they are doing.”

Top image: Punnaphoj Aeuepalisa, a senior software engineer at Vulcan Coalition, helped create a platform to label data through speech-to-text and other processes. Photo by Adryel Talamantes for Microsoft.

There’s nothing quite like watching a basketball game and cheering on your favorite team as they battle it out for points before the buzzer sounds. From the players and employees to the technology, all need to work in lockstep to deliver a truly immersive experience.

As fans, we expect personalized experiences that bring the virtual world and the real world together on and off the court. This means brand new viewing experiences and virtual reality, real-time highlights of our favorite basketball games, and seamless ways to connect with other fans (and rivals!) when we want, how we want.

Having the right technology partner and cloud-based app transformation strategy is necessary to help organizations like the National Basketball Association (NBA) continue to deliver such unforgettable experiences and exceed fan expectations. Successful app modernization requires teamwork, which is why we’re proud to share our latest customer story featuring our partnership with the NBA.

Inside the customer playbook: NBA’s IT Application Development Group

Our latest customer story takes you into the world of the NBA’s IT Application Development Group, a dedicated team responsible for developing and maintaining the NBA’s applications for internal and external users. The NBA leveraged Microsoft Azure application platform services for app modernization to accelerate the time to market of apps for multiple use cases that have elevated the NBA experience wherever fans, referees, and employees engage.

This process involved consolidating the apps and data the NBA was running from multiple locations into one place, including those that were on-premises. Modernizing a large app estate requires the NBA’s IT Application Development Group to plan for many tasks, from configuration and security to provisioning and scaling, and optimizing the networking and storage needs. Utilizing cloud technologies such as Azure App Service enabled the NBA to accelerate time to market by offloading these routine but important tasks to a fully managed application platform. They further streamlined the app development process with low-code and no-code capabilities using Azure and PowerApps.

How did this translate for fans, referees, and employees? Here’s a sneak peek of the use cases that you can read in detail in our customer story:

Fans: See how the NBA used virtual simulations and digital in-game experiences, to ensure fans felt connected to the game (and one another) when gathering in person was still difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic. Referees (but really, fans!): Learn about REPS (Referee Engagement and Performance System), an app designed to aid referees and management in evaluation, collaboration, training, and development to ensure game consistency—and no bad calls. Employees: Discover NBAOne, an internal mobile-first app the NBA created for its 1,800 employees consolidating no fewer than 50+ different applications into a single-sign-on experience. This simple-to-use app helped employees do everything from booking game tickets to marking time off, significantly improving their day-to-day employee experience.

Achieving a faster time to market

When it comes to delivering new experiences, we know that faster time to market is what keeps customers coming back. Azure brings not only the technology but also a number of fully managed services to support faster app and data modernization at scale:

• Leverage fully managed application and data services such as Azure App Service, Azure Spring Apps, Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, and Azure Cosmos DB.
• Quickly deploy line of business apps with low-code application development using Power Apps and Azure.
• Build on containers with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
• Manage continuous deployment and development workstreams with AzureDevOps.
• Get unmatched technical expertise through Microsoft United Support.

As a versatile platform with global scale, built-in security, and high availability, Azure is the all-star in your playbook to accelerate time-to-market with modern apps.

Choose your modern apps transformation strategy

Every customer is a potential fan, and when it comes to choosing the right technology partner, accelerating time to market, enabling higher productivity, and global scale are factors that deliver memorable customer experiences time and time again. We’re thrilled to have the NBA partner with Azure on this important mission and love the opportunity to this customer story.

Is your organization exploring app modernization? Learn more about Application and data modernization and how Azure can help you accelerate time to market to deliver incredible experiences.

Midway through the Dutch Grand Prix, radio traffic between 20 Formula 1 drivers and their busy crews buzzed with the usual chatter about lap times, tire conditions and pleas to “push now” – a frantic wall of sound rivaling the powerful engines roaring around the track.

But precisely 59 minutes and 27 seconds into that Sept. 4 race, one sentence from the comms chorus grabbed the attention of Matthieu Dubois, chief strategist for BWT Alpine F1 Team, based in Enstone, England and Viry-Châtillon in France. What Dubois detected was a simple instruction to Lando Norris, a driver with McLaren, Alpine’s top rival.

“Lando, both safety car windows are open, please confirm,” the McLaren race engineer told Norris, who was leading both Alpine drivers at the time.

A large data display on BWT Alpine F1 Team’s pit wall instantly transcribed the McLaren engineer’s spoken words. Leveraging Microsoft Azure, Dubois had plucked that snippet from the radio din by simply typing the keyword “window.”  It would change the race for Alpine.

“That was crucial information,” Dubois recalls. “McLaren was telling their driver that a safety car was on track (due to another car stopping). So, they were telling Norris to pit.”

With that intel, Dubois instructed BWT Alpine F1 Team driver Fernando Alonso to also pit for fresh tires. His quick decision allowed Alpine to exploit a brief stretch when every car slowed for the caution period – and when Alpine’s top competitor was momentarily off the track.

Driving on the new tires, Alonso soon posted one of the day’s fastest laps (averaging 128 mph). Then, Alonso passed Norris, finishing sixth overall, and nosing out the McLaren driver by a mere half second. That result earned BWT Alpine F1 Team eight points in the Formula 1 standings, pushing Alpine further ahead in their season-long fight with McLaren.

“We gained position with the help of this information,” Dubois says. “Data is probably most of our world now.”

In Formula 1, every race week is jampacked with live data. Each team fields two cars that are essentially mobile IoT devices. The cars are equipped with a few hundred sensors that send a constant flow of telemetry back to the teams, revealing everything from engine temperature to brake wear, while collectively generating more than 600,000 numbers per second.

Still more data is produced at the teams’ technical centers as new car parts are manufactured and tested during the days leading up to the races. In total, Formula 1 teams gather as many as 50 billion data points each week.

In data processing terms, that’s a mighty big heap of bits and bytes. The trick is to unify those raging data streams into a single source of real-time insights that’s accessible across an entire organization.

For the 2022 season, BWT Alpine F1 Team built a cloud-hosted, data science platform that relies on Azure infrastructure to deliver decisive insights from the team’s manufacturing and testing work and from its practice laps and race-day sprints.

The platform helps Alpine shape design decisions and make real-time race adjustments, team members say.

According to one more slice of data – Formula 1’s team standings – the technologies have helped boost BWT Alpine F1 Team during 2022. With one grand prix race remaining in the 2022 season – Nov. 20 in Abu Dhabi – Alpine has amassed enough points to reach fourth place, on pace for its highest finish since 2018. McLaren sits in fifth place.

“The entire organization is here solely to make the car go faster,” says Pierre d’Imbleval, BWT Alpine F1 Team’s vice president of information systems and IT. “In our business what matters is always to get the information sooner and to shrink the time we have.”

But the team’s cloud-based infrastructure also helps fuel smart and safe race strategies – tactics that require less velocity.

“We are so dependent on data,” d’Imbleval says. “Almost every race, there is a moment of truth where you get a combination of data that tells you to slow down a bit to save the lifetime of your brakes or your engine.

“During races, we are so close to the failure point on certain parts that it’s super important to monitor all data at every moment.”

It’s equally vital to monitor competitors’ radio traffic. But the BWT Alpine F1 Team crew no longer must physically listen to all that cross-communication – a public broadcast that’s piped into the paddock. Instead, they now merely glance at a large screen on their pit wall to read selected phrases uttered by the other teams.

To accomplish that, the Alpine staff fed audio files from past races into Azure to train a computer model that now delivers nearly real-time transcripts from every driver and race engineer.

This enables the Alpine crew to search for keywords, such as “tires overheating,” allowing the team to quickly adjust their race strategy.

“We need to make decisions in fractions of seconds,” says Sergio Rodriguez, BWT Alpine F1 Team’s data science and engineering manager.

Indeed, modern success in Formula 1 is not so much about big data as it is about fast data. And the need for speed is just as pressing at Alpine’s two manufacturing hubs as it is on the track.

The team designs and assembles its chassis at a facility in Enstone and builds its hybrid V6 engines at a technical center in Viry-Châtillon, a Paris suburb. Hundreds of engineers and mechanics work at each site, developing, testing and assembling new parts, many aimed at improving the cars’ aerodynamics or power.

The process is painstaking yet often performed at pace. The team creates computer-simulated models of new parts then calculates how those virtual prototypes would react to, say, drag or downforce, ultimately predicting how they would perform in a real-world race car.

“That involves big data clusters,” Rodriguez says. “Once we say, ‘This looks good,’ we manufacture a small version of the part and put it in our wind tunnel. We pass wind through it. We check pressures. All this data we gather as well.”

BWT Alpine F1 Team is relying on its cloud-hosted, data science platform to “unlock the information we have in the data,” which saves precious time when pushing new parts from the factories to the cars, Rodriguez says.

“The work that we are doing in the factories this year is almost more important than the work we are doing (at the track) on the weekends,” Rodriguez adds.

“Every Formula 1 team is building new parts and improved versions of their cars every weekend. But if you are able to bring out a new part one race before your competitor, that’s one race that you are going to be in front of him,” he adds.

This season, BWT Alpine F1 Team accomplished that feat for the British Grand Prix on July 3. In Enstone, team engineers and mechanics worked nearly non-stop in the hours before the race to design and build a new floor.

“We had people in the factory over the weekend finishing the floor,” Rodriguez says. “We were improving it overnight, then taking it back for Saturday testing, and then we brought it back to the track on Sunday. We managed to overtake McLaren thanks to this push from the factory.”

At the British Grand Prix, Alonso finished fifth, 2.37 seconds ahead of McLaren’s Norris, who finished sixth.

“The data is fundamental in all of this – in our efforts to improve efficiency, in our efforts to bring new developments to the car faster,” Rodriguez says.

The floor upgrade increased downforce, enabling the car to “stick to the track in the corners,” Rodriguez says. “The faster you can go in the corners, the faster you can go during the race.”

And in the world of Formula 1, fast is everything.

Top photo: Fernando Alonso races during the Mexican Grand Prix in October 2022. All images courtesy of BWT Alpine F1 Team.

On August 4, 2022, Microsoft publicly shared a framework that it has been using to secure its own development practices since 2019, the Secure Supply Chain Consumption Framework (S2C2F), previously the Open Source Software-Supply Chain Security (OSS-SSC) Framework. As a massive consumer of and contributor to open source, Microsoft understands the importance of a robust strategy around securing how developers consume and manage open source software (OSS) dependencies when building software. We are pleased to announce that the S2C2F has been adopted by the OpenSSF under the Supply Chain Integrity Working Group and formed into its own Special Initiative Group (SIG). Our peers at the OpenSSF and across the globe agree with Microsoft when it comes to how fundamental this work is to improving supply chain security for everyone.

What is the S2C2F?

We built the S2C2F as a consumption-focused framework that uses a threat-based, risk-reduction approach to mitigate real-world threats. One of its primary strengths is how well it pairs with any producer-focused framework, such as SLSA.¹ The framework enumerates a list of real-world supply chain threats specific to OSS and explains how the framework’s requirements mitigate those threats. It also includes a high-level platform- and software-agnostic set of focuses that are divided into eight different areas of practice:

Each of the eight practices are comprised of requirements to address the threats and reduce risk. The requirements are organized into four levels of maturity. We have seen massive success with both internal and external projects who have adopted this framework. Using the S2C2F, teams and organizations can more efficiently prioritize their efforts in accordance with the maturity model. The ability to target a specific level of compliance within the framework means teams can make intentional and incremental progress toward reducing their supply chain risk.

Each maturity level has a theme represented in Levels (1 to 4). Level 1 represents the previous conventional wisdom of inventorying your OSS, scanning for known vulnerabilities, and then updating OSS dependencies, which is the minimum necessary for an OSS governance program. Level 2 builds upon Level 1 by leveraging technology that helps improve your mean time to remediate (MTTR) vulnerabilities in OSS with the goal of patching faster than the adversary can operate. Level 3 is focused on proactive security analysis combined with preventative controls that mitigate against accidental consumption of compromised or malicious OSS. Level 4 represents controls that mitigate against the most sophisticated attacks but are also the controls that are the most difficult to implement at scale—therefore, these should be considered aspirational and reserved for your dependencies in your most critical projects.

The S2C2F includes a guide to assess your organization’s maturity, and an implementation guide that recommends tools from across the industry to help meet the framework requirements. For example, both GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) and GHAS on Azure DevOps (ADO) already provide a suite of security tools that will help teams and organizations achieve S2C2F Level 2 compliance.

The S2C2F is critical to the future of supply chain security

According to Sonatype’s 2022 State of the Software Supply Chain report,² supply chain attacks specifically targeting OSS have increased by 742 percent annually over the past three years. The S2C2F is designed from the ground up to protect developers from accidentally consuming malicious and compromised packages helping to mitigate supply chain attacks by decreasing consumption-based attack surfaces. As new threats emerge, the OpenSSF S2C2F SIG under the Supply Chain Integrity Working Group, led by a team from Microsoft, is committed to reviewing and maintaining the set of S2C2F requirements to address them.

Learn more

View the S2C2F requirements or download the guide now to see how you can improve the security of your OSS consumption practices in your team or organization. Come join the S2C2F community discussion within the OpenSSF Supply Chain Integrity Working Group.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

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¹Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA).

²8^th Annual State of the Software Supply Chain Report, Sonatype.

Today, I am honored to kick off our inaugural Marketplace Summit. For the first time, we are welcoming thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) and Software as a service (SaaS) providers as we broadcast live from Microsoft Studios to share how we are committed to our shared success by helping ISVs maximize the marketplace opportunity.

The mass migration to the cloud since the pandemic is forcing an inflection point where customers are looking to optimize and streamline their investments — this creates an opportunity for SaaS providers and ISVs. Because of this growing demand for SaaS services, we are firmly committed to provide the right resources, tools and support to take advantage of these opportunities. Today, we are thrilled to announce the global public preview of the ISV Success Program. We are excited to offer this personalized support at the solution level and support every ISV to innovate on the Microsoft Cloud and rapidly go-to-market through the commercial marketplace.

Creating scalable growth models for ISVs
Marketplace is at the core of the ISV Success program as we aim to help every ISV not only build on the Microsoft Cloud but go-to-market with Microsoft and sell through the commercial marketplace.

In an uncertain economic environment cloud budgets are durable and still on an upward trajectory. Cloud marketplaces are outpacing cloud growth and are becoming the centralized go-to-market channel of the future. According to Tackle’s 2022 annual State of Cloud Marketplaces report, cloud marketplaces continue to generate more revenue year over year and Bessemer Venture Partners noted that in 2021, marketplace transactions grew an estimated 70% to $4 billion, which is 3x faster growth than the public cloud at large.

With the cloud embedded into every business, there is massive opportunity for any company selling SaaS or cloud-based solutions, but it’s becoming harder and harder for ISVs to differentiate and acquire new customers. Those who embrace the marketplace and are strategically executing a marketplace-first, go-to-market approach are seeing the most cost-effective growth. At Microsoft the marketplace continues to become central to how we connect customers and partners at scale and ISVs of all sizes and maturity find success when they build a cloud-centric, go-to-market strategy.

“Wiz was born in the cloud and our ecosystem is built around the marketplace motion,” says Trish Cagliostro, Head of Worldwide Channels and Alliances at Wiz. “When we work with customers in the marketplace, they usually have cloud consumption commitments through their Microsoft contracts. They can use this to consolidate IT spend and reduce total cost of ownership, which is powerful and gives Wiz the opportunity to have elevated conversations with customers.”

To support every ISV in harnessing the growing cloud opportunity, Microsoft is investing in programs and benefits across the Microsoft commercial marketplace. We are making concrete investments in programs that can benefit all ISVs, regardless of their size, scope or history. Over the past year, the marketplace has matured into a thriving commerce environment. We’ve seen:

• 288% growth in SaaS-billed sales
• 319% increase in customers with consumption commitments buying via marketplace
• 200% increase in private offers sold by Cloud Solution Providers

This momentum continues as customers look to centralize their cloud portfolio through B2B marketplaces to increase efficiency, buy with confidence, and spend smarter. Some of the recent marketplace innovations include:

Enterprise deal making
With 95% of the Fortune 500 using Azure, Microsoft has direct access to enterprise customers and through the marketplace, we can unlock access to these customers. We’ve seen a 164% increase in enterprise sales through the marketplace, and this will continue to grow with our commitment to partner success. Furthermore, Microsoft is unique in that we offer every dollar of cloud spend to count toward a customer’s cloud consumption commitment when they buy an eligible solution. This, paired with our enhancements to private offers and multi-year SaaS functionality, is cutting through procurement red tape and closing 7- and 8- digit deals regularly through the marketplace.

Empowering the ecosystem
Microsoft has always been a partner-focused organization. As customer needs continue to evolve, Microsoft commercial marketplace is empowering our ecosystem of over 400,000 partners around the world to work together at a faster pace, on a larger scale and on their terms. Earlier this year, we announced the general availability of margin sharing. ISV partners can create private offers and extend a margin to scale through partners in the Cloud Solution Provider program. With margin sharing, SaaS providers and ISVs can extend their sales forces and reach new markets.

To further enhance the ability for all partners to work together, we also announced that multi-party partner private offers will soon be entering private preview. This additional functionality will empower any set of partners to come together, create personalized offers with customized payouts, sell directly to Microsoft customers through marketplace and have the sale count toward the customers’ cloud consumption commitment. This will pioneer new opportunities for every partner and we look forward to sharing more details in the coming months.

The value of partnership
Only through co-innovating and jointly going to market can we truly meet customers where they are — and that synergy is the goal of the commercial marketplace. According to IDC, partners that build their own software and services are the most profitable high-growth partner business model. They estimate for every $1 of Microsoft revenue, $10.11 is made for partners that build software — 25% more than the estimates for services-led partners.

From the beginning, Microsoft has been a partner-first company. And as Microsoft’s portfolio has grown, we’ve increased our focus to ensure that our partners can access all of the innovation we create through our research and development investments, as well as to deliver their own services and solutions on top of that innovation.

Today marks an important milestone as we commit to supporting every ISV in their growth with Microsoft with the ISV Success Program and the variety of other tools and resources we outlined to support ISV success. For more details, Anthony Joseph, vice president for Marketplace and ISV Journey, covers the opportunity with the ISV Success Program on the Azure blog channel. We are excited to work side-by-side with the ISV and SaaS community to realize all the potential of building on the Microsoft Cloud and selling through the commercial marketplace.

Tags: Cloud, ISVs, Marketplace Summit, Microsoft Azure, SaaS