Category: Microsoft news

Microsoft news, features, events, and press materials

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Plan ahead to celebrate the holidays with loved ones virtually

Everyone has their own vision of what makes a perfect holiday, but there’s one thread that unites us all: coming together to celebrate with loved ones.

Carve out time to catch up with friends and loved ones

The holidays are the perfect time to comb through old memories and forge new traditions. Video calling makes it easy to spend time together, even when you’re time zones apart. Here are some ideas for how to spend your time while connecting:

  • Keep traditions alive. Light candles or lanterns, decorate your house or tree, open presents, sing carols around the piano, enjoy holiday baking sessions, and more. The memories you plan on making this year can still be shared with your loved ones via video call.
  • Give thanks. Make your holiday dinner an online party using Meet Now. You may not be able to pass potatoes in person, but you can share what you’re grateful for, swap stories, and enjoy time with your loved ones virtually.
  • Craft holiday fun. Whether it’s a gingerbread house with graham crackers or cutting out paper snowflakes, create your masterpieces together and then send and share your “nailed it” photos.

Don’t let distance get in the way of celebrating with your friends and family this holiday season. With Meet Now, you can easily get together on a video chat. From virtual holiday gatherings with your family or spontaneous chats with your friends, you can connect no matter where you are. The best part is you don’t need to download an app or sign up for an account to video chat! Just add the Meet Now link to the Outlook calendar invitation you created above.

Make a yearbook video

This has been a year like no other. Whether you want to document your life at home, work from home, or your adventures beyond your home, capture and share those moments with a Video Recap in Microsoft Photos.

Stroll down memory lane from different perspectives

See the events in your life from the eyes of your friends and family with Shared Albums in OneDrive. Invite everyone to combine their photos and videos to get fresh, unique perspectives of memories. Remember, unless it’s a selfie, the person most likely not to be in the picture is the photographer. So make sure everyone’s included with Shared Albums!

Design your own holiday card

Create and customize heartfelt holiday greetings for friends and family that you can mail, email, or text. In Microsoft PowerPoint, you can transform each card into something truly special with your own personal touches.

While this holiday season will be different, it can still be extraordinary. Group video calls, shared albums, and digital cards can help you stay in touch with your friends and family over the holidays. Use these tips to make and share new memories you will cherish for a lifetime.

*Calls up to 24 hours each, but just call back to start a new call and keep talking!

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It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month — there still is a lot to do

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM). And there is still a lot to do!

For the last 17 years, the National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM) campaign, driven by the Department of Homeland Security, has raised awareness about the importance of cyber security across the Nation with the mission of ensuring that all Americans have the resources they need to be safer and more secure online.

In alignment with this noble mission, Microsoft Security is providing educational content and executive speakers to empower our customers, employees and families. Tune into the CyberTalks recap to listen to the keynoted delivered by @Ann Johnson, Corporate Vice President of Security, Compliance and Identity, on how to future proof your security strategy.

Cyber security podcasts

In addition to the blog series that is taking over our blog in October, Microsoft Security is also sponsoring two security podcasts in CyberScoop.com we want to encourage our community to tune in and listen to both conversations.

  • Available now: Enabling secure remote work by embracing Zero Trust—One of the greatest challenges we often hear from public and private sector CISOs, when it comes to achieving a Zero Trust IT operating environment, is the question of how to tackle such a massive undertaking—and where to begin. Tune in to listen to CTO, Steve Faehl, to learn more about Microsoft’s journey towards Zero Trust.
  • Available October 19: Risk Reduction—Podcast featuring GM, Alym Rayani who delivers an in-depth conversation about compliance and its connection to security.

Additional security blogs to read

Government agency audit traceability

The reality today for many government agencies is there is no audit traceability to determine which email messages and content an attacker may have seen during a breached session into a user’s mailbox. The standard level of Office 365 auditing includes events that a user logged into their mailbox but does not include detailed information on the activity that occurs within the mailbox. As a result, organizations have no choice but to assume all content within the mailbox is compromised whether sensitive data or PII was viewed by the adversary. To learn more about how using Advanced Audit can help improve forensic investigation capability, read this blog from Matthew Littleton, Principal Technical Specialist on this Public Sector blog.

Top 5 security questions asked by US Government customers

In an era of remote work, end users wanted to collaborate with outside agencies but in a way that meant their data was secure. IT Admins wanted to know which configuration options best fit their organization’s security posture. CIO’s wanted to lean in and give their workforce the best in class technology, all while following US Government accreditation standards. The common theme in most questions asked by our customers was around security. Read more about the top 5 security questions asked by our US Government customers for Microsoft Teams.

October is my favorite time of year, between the change of season, Major League Baseball playoffs, and with football underway. It’s also National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, though with so many cyberattacks and incidents in the news, one month of dedicated focus hardly seems sufficient. Learn how Microsoft delivers on an end-to-end security strategy to reduce risk and deliver on its commitment to customers.

To learn more about how to be #Cybersmart visit the cybersecurity 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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What’s new in Microsoft Teams: live captions with attribution, individual spotlights and more

Welcome back! This month we have a packed blog with a lot of new features that are now generally available to improve your experience with meetings and calling, chat and collaboration, as well as a number of new updates to Microsoft Teams devices. This blog also contains a few industry specific items for Education, Firstline Workers, and our Government customers. We have updates on Teams platform capabilities and we’re introducing a new section called “App spotlight” that showcases 3rd party apps available in Teams.

What’s New: Meetings & Calling
Live Captions with speaker attribution
Microsoft Teams added speaker attribution to live captions so that you can see who is speaking along with what’s being said, making meetings more inclusive and easier to follow along.

Spotlight an individual video participant for all attendees in a Teams meeting
Presenters can now pin an individual video feed for all attendees to see during a Teams meeting. Once pinned, the individual identified as the spotlight will be the main video shown to all participants. This applies to PC, Mac, mobile (view only) and Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows. Learn more

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Prevent attendees from unmuting in Teams Meetings
Meeting organizers and presenters can now prevent attendees from unmuting during the meeting and enable specific attendees to unmute when they raise their hands. This can be helpful for press conferences and classrooms scenarios where you want to be in control of who’s speaking. Learn more

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Advanced Production for Teams Meetings

Transform your Teams Meeting into a virtual stage with a new advanced production option for broadcasts. Network Device Interface (NDI) support for Teams allows event producers to convert each participant’s video into a discrete video source that can be used in the video streaming production tool of your choice. This functionality enables you to use Teams meetings in new ways, including bringing speakers into Together Mode or customized views, to deliver professional broadcasts to the end point of your choice and reach audiences wherever they are.

 

Microsoft Whiteboard read-only mode

Microsoft Whiteboard read-only mode is available in Teams allowing for more flexibility for you to either present the digital whiteboard in read-only mode, or to allow others to edit and collaborate when given access.

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Meeting & Calling recordings stored in OneDrive and SharePoint
Teams meeting and call recordings can now be stored in your OneDrive for Business or in SharePoint, providing the ability to share recordings with guests or external users, access meeting recordings faster, and manage recordings with security and compliance controls available to other file types in Microsoft 365. Teams Admins can select their recording storage location by updating policies using PowerShell. Learn more

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Updated functionality for downloading participant reports in Teams meetings
Meeting organizers, especially teachers and event organizers, often need to know who joined and how many people joined their Teams meetings. Now you can easily download a participant report after the meeting within the meeting chat. We’ve also added new data into the report that allows you to better manage your attendance. Learn more

Changes in Incoming IP Video policy (New Audio and Video Policies)
We are updating our meeting policies to allow IT administrators more control over how video is managed in Teams meetings. Current policy can only be set to prevent outgoing video. We have extended the Allow IP Video policy to prevent both outgoing and incoming video as needed. Tenant administrators can use this policy to manage bandwidth. Learn more

 

What’s New: Devices
ARM64 Native Teams App
Unleash the full power of Microsoft Teams on your favorite ARM devices with the new native ARM64 Teams client now generally available. Stay connected and organized while enjoying improved performance, reliability, and battery life in devices such as the Surface Pro X.

New capabilities coming to Microsoft Teams Rooms
Features beginning to roll out to Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows include:

  • Spotlight support: Microsoft Teams Rooms now supports the spotlight feature in Teams meetings, which enables you as a meeting organizer or presenter to select a video feed as the spotlight for all attendees. Once selected, the individual identified as the spotlight will be the main video shown to all participants, which is great to make sure everyone focuses on, for example, the presenter.
  • Hard mute: This feature allows you as a meeting organizer to disable microphone controls for all meeting participants. This feature can be useful for scenarios like distance learning or executive board meetings where organizers want a higher level of control over who can unmute their microphone and when. Teams Rooms supports this setting and joins muted with microphone disabled unless granted permission.

Dell Meeting Space Solution for seamless onsite and remote collaboration
Dell’s newest Meeting Space Solution for Microsoft Teams Rooms offers a complete group collaboration ecosystem that includes the OptiPlex 7080 Micro running the Teams Rooms experience on Windows, Dell Large Format Monitors, plus Logitech Tap and ConferenceCams. With proximity detection and one-touch join, you can start a meeting while instantly projecting content in the room and to virtual participants.

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EPOS announces two new headsets certified for Microsoft Teams
The IMPACT MB Pro 1 UC ML and 2 UC ML have now passed the rigorous reliability testing required to be certified for Microsoft Teams. You can now experience high end audio tools that provide optimal comfort, easy call handling and rich, natural sound – all while reliable, intelligent technologies filter out unwanted noise, enhance audio and boost efficiency.

See the latest in Teams Devices at http://aka.ms/teamsdevices

What’s New: Chat & Collaboration

Pinned Posts

Keep important information easily accessible and top of mind with Microsoft Teams. You can pin any message in a channel, and it will appear in the channel information pane for all members of the channel to see.

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New offline presence status
Let others know when you are not available in Microsoft Teams. You can now change your presence to “Offline”. This allows you to have full access to Teams while signaling to colleagues that you are unavailable.

Language-aware proofing
Communicate using multiple languages in Microsoft Teams. If you write different messages in different languages, you now see spellchecking relevant to the language you use when typing a message in the Teams desktop app.

Templates for creation of a new Team
When creating a new team, you can now choose from a variety of customizable templates including event management, crisis response, as well as industry-specific templates like hospital ward and bank branch. Microsoft publishes a set of first-party templates and as an IT professional you can also create new custom templates for your organization, allowing you to standardize team structures, surface relevant apps, and scale best practices.

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New file sharing experience
Team members share and work together on content from a single source of truth seamlessly with Microsoft Teams. You can now create a shareable link for any file stored in Teams and directly set the appropriate permissions. Additionally, you can also set permissions for files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive while composing a private chat or starting a channel conversation. Learn more

Updated SharePoint pages app
Using SharePoint pages is a great way to consolidate and share content in the right context using images, Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents, videos, links, Twitter feeds and more – all on the same page. And now you can more easily add your pages as tabs in Microsoft Teams. Learn more

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New and simplified global notification settings
As a user you can now configure and customize your notification settings through a newly designed notification settings section. This new experience makes it easier to find the exact notifications you want so you can keep track of the activity you care about. To access, go to your profile picture > Settings > Notifications. We also added a new setting that allows you to turn off message previews in chat notifications if you desire more privacy.

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What’s New: Teams for Education
Anonymous grading and marking in Assignments
Tackle unconscious bias and even the playing field in class with Anonymous Grading. When enabled in the assignment detail view, students’ names are anonymized and avatars are temporarily removed, presenting a random list of students. This allows you as an educator to review work with identities hidden, no shuffling of paper involved.

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View assignments across all classes
Being able to see what’s upcoming, whether you’re an educator or student, is critical to getting a handle on your week, month, or year. Now both educators and students can once again view upcoming and turned in assignments by class or view them across all classes. Just visit Assignments in your app bar on the left-hand side of Teams to view assignments across all classes. Students can also filter by category, see the due date, and assigned value of the assignment and more.

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What’s New: Firstline Workers
Off-shift access controls
With off-shift access controls, IT administrators can now configure Teams to alert you when you are accessing the app on your personal device outside of working hours. The feature prompts you to accept that you will not be getting paid for time spent on Teams to help ensure that you are not involuntarily working while not on shift and helps your employer to comply with labor regulations. The feature does not require active usage of the Shifts app, but it does require Shifts being configured and schedule data being inside the app; either added natively with Excel import or including workforce management API connectors like Kronos, BlueYonder and more. Learn more

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What’s New: Government
These features currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD).

Priority notifications
Share urgent messages and time-sensitive information more effectively with Teams. Priority notifications alert a recipient of an urgent message on their mobile and desktop devices until a response is received, every two minutes for up to 20 minutes. IT admins can manage this feature as part of messaging policies in Teams. Priority notifications are now available in GCC, GCC High, and DoD. Learn more

Read receipts
Now available in GCC, read receipts in private chats allow senders to know that a message was read by the recipients. IT admins can configure messaging policies from the Microsoft Teams admin center to enable or disable this feature for users. Learn more

File viewer upgrades
Teams file viewer is being upgraded for Gov clouds from legacy to OneUp for non-Office file types and to unified app for Office file types (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel).

Together mode
Together mode, now available in GCC, uses AI segmentation technology in meetings to digitally place participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else.

Large Gallery view (Preview) – see up to 49 participants
Large Gallery is providing a new way to view video up to 49 participants at once on a single screen (7×7). This feature rolled out to production with the new multi-window experience. To take advantage of this new view, users will need to turn on the new multi-window meeting experience. Large Gallery is now available in GCC.

Spotlight an individual video participant for all attendees in a Teams meeting
We are delivering the ability for presenters to lock on an individual video feed for all attendees to see during a Teams meeting. Once selected, the individual identified as the spotlight will be the main video shown to all participants. This applies to PC, Mac, mobile, and Microsoft Teams room systems. The spotlight feature is now available in both GCC and GCC High.

Improvements to meeting notes
Meeting notes now support 100 users by default. Also, if anyone joins your meeting past after it is scheduled and, doesn’t have access to notes, they can now request access from the note’s owner in one click. Meeting notes are now available in GCC, GCC High, and DoD.

Changes in Incoming IP Video policy (New Audio and Video Policies)
We are updating our meeting policies to allow IT administrators on GCC more control over how video is managed in Teams Meetings. Current policy can only be set to prevent outgoing video. We are extending the Allow IP Video policy to prevent both outgoing and incoming video as needed. Tenant administrators can use this policy to manage bandwidth. Learn more

What’s New: Healthcare
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
Earlier this week we announced the general availability of our first industry-specific cloud offering, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, including the new Microsoft Teams EHR connector for Epic EHR. This allows clinicians to launch a virtual visit in Teams from within their electronic health record system. Learn more about how and about the many new features now available as part of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

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What’s New: Platform
Microsoft Teams and Power Automate – Simpler automation for everyone
A new Power Automate app for Teams makes automating workflows easier than ever with new templates and a simplified editor experience.

Organizational branding for line-of-business Teams app catalog
IT Admins can now customize their Teams line-of-business app catalog using their organization’s branding. This enhances the user experience for end users and increase organic discovery and use of an organization’s line-of-business apps. Learn more

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Resource-Specific Consent now generally available on the Microsoft Graph v1.0 endpoint
We are excited to announce that Resource-Specific Consent (RSC) is now generally available on the Microsoft Graph v1.0 endpoint! Your Teams app can now call Teams Graph APIs from the BETA endpoint without needing admin consent. This capability empowers Team owners to install an app for their specific team and restrict the app’s scope and access to data to only that one team, without needing the global IT admin to provision access. Learn more

App certification
Publishers building Microsoft Teams add-ins can now work with Microsoft to certify that their app – and its supporting infrastructure – protect the security and privacy of sensitive customer data. Certified apps receive a badge that is visible in AppSource and from within the Microsoft 365 tenant administrator’s console. We strongly encourage app publishers to take advantage of this program, and over time, expect to make it a requirement. Learn more

Publisher verification
It’s critical that IT Admins and end-users know that partner apps come from verified sources. Using a process that relies on a verified Microsoft Partner Network account, Microsoft now offers application developers a publisher verification service. Verified apps receive a badge that is visible in AppSource and in the consent dialog when a user or admin installs an application. Learn more

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Teams App Spotlight 

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Clio is a cloud-based legal software that law firms trust to manage their practices and clients from intake to invoice. As the needs of legal professionals have changed over the last year, Clio has been focused on building solutions law firms need in this new digital-first reality. To make remote collaboration even easier, Clio customers can now check the status of their matter, scan recent communications, and plan for upcoming events all within Microsoft Teams. Learn more

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Putting differential privacy into practice to use data responsibly

Data can help businesses, organizations and societies solve difficult problems, but some of the most useful data contains personal information that can’t be used without compromising privacy. That’s why Microsoft Research spearheaded the development of differential privacy, which safeguards the privacy of individuals while making useful data available for research and decision making. Today, I am excited to share some of what we’ve learned over the years and what we’re working toward, as well as to announce a new name for our open source platform for differential privacy – a major part of our commitment to collaborate around this important topic.

Differential privacy consists of two components: statistical noise and a privacy-loss budget. Statistical noise masks the contribution of individual data points within a dataset but does not impact the overall accuracy of the dataset, while a privacy-loss budget keeps track of how much information has been revealed through various queries to ensure that aggregate queries don’t inadvertently reveal private information.

Since differential privacy was created, Microsoft has conducted research and developed and deployed technologies with the goal of enabling more people to participate in, contribute to and benefit from differential privacy. Last year, we partnered with Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) to announce the OpenDP Initiative, and earlier this year released the initial version of our open source platform. We chose to develop differential privacy technologies in the open to enable increased participation in the creation of tools that empower a larger group of people to benefit from differential privacy.

Introducing SmartNoise

In June, we announced that we would be renaming our open source platform to avoid any potential misunderstanding of our intentions for this project and the community. Language and symbols matter, especially when you are trying to build an inclusive community and responsibly enable AI systems.

I’m thrilled to share that this platform will be renamed SmartNoise. The SmartNoise Platform, powered by OpenDP, captures an essential step in the differential privacy process and follows best practices of renaming terms like whitelist and blacklist to allowlist and blocklist.

By using SmartNoise, researchers, data scientists and others will be able to derive new and deeper insights from datasets that have the potential to help solve the most difficult societal problems in health, the environment, economics and other areas.

How we’re using SmartNoise and differential privacy today at Microsoft

As we apply differential privacy to our own products and begin to work with customers to do so, we’re learning a lot about what works and what we need to explore further.

Our first production use of differential privacy in reporting and analytics at Microsoft was in Windows, where we added noise to users’ telemetry data, enabling us to understand overall app usage without revealing information tied to a specific user. This aggregated data has been used to identify possible issues with applications and improve user experience.

Since then, we’ve applied differential privacy in similar ways to understand data that benefits our customers and helps us improve our products. We’ve learned that differential privacy works best in cases where a query or dataset with a limited set of computations will be refreshed on an ongoing basis – in these cases the work required to apply differential privacy pays off because you can spend the time to optimize it and then reuse that work. An example of this is the Insights for People Managers within Workplace Analytics. These insights enable managers to understand how the people in their team are doing and to learn how to drive change by using aggregated collaboration data without sharing any information about individuals.

An application of differential privacy with limited parameters but that enables interactivity is advertiser queries on LinkedIn. Advertisers can get differentially private answers to their top-k queries (where k is a number representing how many answers the advertiser wants from the query). Each advertiser is allotted a limited number of queries, which helps to ensure that multiple queries can’t be combined to deduce private information. So, for example, an advertiser could find out which articles are being read by software engineers or employees of a particular company, but wouldn’t be able to determine which individual users were reading them.

Another key application area for differential privacy is in machine learning, where the goal is to produce a machine learning model that protects the information about the individual datapoints in the training dataset.

For example, in Office suggested replies, we use differential privacy to narrow the set of responses to ensure that the model doesn’t learn from any replies that might violate an individual user’s privacy.

During the training of a machine learning model, the training algorithm can add differentially private noise and manage the privacy budget across iterations. These algorithms often take longer to train, and often require tuning for accuracy, but this effort can be worth it for the more rigorous privacy guarantees that differential privacy enables.

To take this scenario further, we are also exploring the potential for synthetic data in machine learning, which is currently only an option if we know the specific task or question the algorithm needs to understand. The idea behind synthetic data is that it preserves all the key statistical attributes of a dataset but doesn’t contain any actual private data. Using the original dataset, we would apply a differential privacy algorithm to generate synthetic data specifically for the machine learning task. This means the model creator doesn’t need access to the original dataset and can instead work directly with the synthetic dataset to develop their model. The synthetic data generation algorithm can use the privacy budget to preserve the key properties of the dataset while adding more noise in less essential places.

SmartNoise and differential privacy going forward

We have learned so much about differential privacy, and we’re only scraping the surface of what’s possible – and starting to understand the barriers and limitations that exist.

We continue to make investments in our tools, develop new ones and innovate with new practices and research. On the technical side, there are a few areas we will pursue further. Most production applications are using a known limited set of computations, so we’ll have to go further in making differential privacy work well for a larger set of queries. We will further enable interactivity, which means dynamically optimizing so queries work well without hand-tuning. We will develop a robust budget tracking system that would allow many different people to use the data. And we will adopt security measures that would allow an untrusted analyst to query and use the data without having full access to the dataset.

There are also policy, governance and compliance questions that need to be addressed. For example, if we are allocating budget for a dataset across a diverse set of users and potential projects, how do we decide how much budget each researcher accessing the data gets? Going forward, we will strive to answer these important questions with the help of the open source differential privacy community.

And synthetic data is a particularly exciting area for exploration because anyone could access and use it without privacy ramifications. However, there are still many research questions on how to effectively implement differential privacy – while still providing accurate results – when we don’t know what the analysis will look like in advance.

Many questions remain, and we know we will need help from the community to answer them. With the OpenDP Initiative and SmartNoise project, we announced our commitment to developing differential privacy technologies in the open to enable more people to participate and contribute, and we look forward to collaborating with and learning from all of you.

Gary King, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, had this to say: “We created OpenDP to build a far more secure foundation for efforts to ensure privacy for people around the world.  We are proud to release SmartNoise with Microsoft and hope to build an active and vibrant community of researchers, academics, developers and others to fully unlock the power of data to help address some of the most pressing challenges we face.”

If you want to get involved in OpenDP and SmartNoise, find us on GitHub. We will also continue to openly share our technical and non-technical learnings as we deploy differential privacy in production across the company.

Sarah Bird is a principal program manager and the Responsible AI lead for Cognitive Services within Azure AI. Sarah’s work focuses on research and emerging technology strategy for AI products in Azure. Sarah works to accelerate the adoption and impact of AI by bringing together the latest innovations in research with the best of open source and product expertise to create new tools and technologies.

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Join the global livestream of the launch of Xbox Series X and S Nov. 10 at 11 a.m. PT

Gaming connects us even in the most difficult of times. In a year that’s consistently thrown challenge and change our way, games told us new stories, enriched our lives, and brought us together across physical and social distances. Your actions in games showed the power of play and the imaginative feats we can accomplish together.

To honor the launch of the new Xbox generation, we invite you to celebrate this power of play with us. On November 10, we invite you, players of all identities and backgrounds, console generations and devices, skill sets and tastes, to celebrate, connect, and play together. We invite you to grab your device of choice and play alongside Team Xbox, your favorite creators, and our partners, right from your homes around the world. We invite you to take a glimpse behind-the-scenes of the next generation of games, hear the stories of people who make them, and play along with them. We invite you to tune in to our global livestream in celebration of play on November 10 at 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET on YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook Gaming.

Think of our livestream celebration as a companion to your gaming plans for the day.  We’ll host “Let’s Play” segments with the creators, showcase special launch highlights from around the globe and harness the power of gaming to raise vital funds for great causes. This will be a moment of play, not press releases, as next generation consoles begin to land in the hands of players around the world. Instead of big announcements, we will mark the beginning of a new era by gaming alongside one another. We will take this moment to have some fun and look forward to having you join us.

November 10 marks a formative moment, the very beginning of the new generation of play.

You will be able to experience many of its benefits right away – like the incredible look and feel of movement at 120fps, faster load times, richer gaming libraries, the mobile reach of cloud gaming, and new unforgettable game experiences. As creators tap into the power of the new Xbox console generation over the next decade, you will see gaming shake free from its former limits. Unique custom-designed innovations will make Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S highly coveted this holiday season, and we are working hard with partners around the world to bring as many new consoles to as many players as possible over time.

With the goal of empowering everyone to join this new generation and experience the power of play everywhere on the planet, gaming with Xbox will transform throughout the next decade as our investments across content, console, cloud gaming and PC evolve in harmony – with each other and with what players want. For the gaming industry, there’s no better measure of success than more people playing, and more players discovering games they love.

I can’t wait to celebrate with you on November 10, and I’m looking forward to experiencing what we will all create through play. See you on Xbox soon.

Phil

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WHO and Microsoft study whether data can help speed our recovery from COVID-19

Addressing Covid-19 is just the starting point. Microsoft and the WHO are also collaborating on a project that could drive improved health outcomes for everyone. The World Health Data Hub, for example, will use artificial intelligence to create a global information center for disease surveillance and knowledge sharing that could help further the SDGs by providing a targeted picture of disease patterns and sharing insight into where particular health issues most need attention.

“The problem with Covid-19 is that it has redirected so many resources in the world that there are other issues being neglected,” says Spelhaug. “Like tropical diseases that kill millions of people each year, and the world has taken their eye off it, because we need to focus on Covid-19, but we’re very interested to make sure that, in the communities that suffer from neglected tropical diseases, which are the poorest communities in the world, we are advancing the analytics and the understanding of the patterns that are emerging in these communities, so we’re focusing on that on the data platform.”

In low- and middle-income countries, millions of children continue to die from preventable illnesses each year, and metrics such as stunting – impaired growth and development stemming from poor nutrition, repeated infection and inadequate social stimulation – will be included on the World Health Data Hub when it is rolled out in 2021. The goal is for the platform to be a nerve center for scientists, governments and aid organizations to help target not just Covid-19, but also treat chronic physical and mental health issues.

“The World Health Data Hub truly has the ambition and the support to be a game changer,” says Dr. Asma. “We are restless. We know we can deliver. It is our responsibility – collectively – and we know we can’t do it alone.”

[READ MORE: 4 ways sharing data is improving our world]

The private and public sectors are increasingly partnering on global challenges. Alongside its WHO projects, Microsoft has recently been working with the World Food Programme on creating a digital identity for those – such as refugees – who don’t have the records needed to match them to the right food, medicine, support and services. It’s the kind of investment that has a multiplier effect, not just for the World Food Programme, but for every global aid organization.

Whether it’s in delivering food and medicine or battling disease, “we need to make sure that we’re taking a problem or opportunity-oriented approach,” says Spelhaug. “We’re not implementing technology for technology’s sake.”

“Covid-19 is a challenge, but also an opportunity,” adds Dr. Asma. “We were already trying to work out, over the past year, how we resolve the fragmentation, so that we can make data and create knowledge in a more structured, organized way [and] predict not only impending epidemics or pandemics, but also forecast where we will be in terms of scenarios, simulation, using AI and machine learning. There are so many possibilities that health has not really scratched even the surface of it.”

If tech can help global health concerns catch up after Covid-19, then the global ambitions for the SDGs – and our wider well-being – may yet be achievable. “What we’ve learned,” says Spelhaug, “is the impact we can have together when we frame the right strategic priorities.”

For more on Microsoft’s work with the UN, visit our UN Affairs page. And follow @MSFTIssues on Twitter.  

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How veteran entrepreneur Jeff Ma is helping Microsoft double down on startups

Deborah Bachwritten by

Deborah Bach

How a veteran entrepreneur is helping Microsoft double down on startups

No one would have thought Jeff Ma would land where he did, least of all Ma himself.

For decades, Ma has been known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur who launched and sold several successful and diverse companies. More famously, he was a member of the MIT blackjack team that won millions from Las Vegas casinos and the inspiration for the main character in the movie “21” and the book “Bringing Down the House.” Ma has been an options trader, was a water polo coach for years, is an author and professional speaker, and has been a writer and on-air personality for ESPN.

He is, in other words, someone who defies easy pigeonholing. And when Ma took on a new role in the spring, the move raised eyebrows across Silicon Valley’s startup community. The seasoned entrepreneur with the colorful and unpredictable career was going to … one of the world’s tech giants?

“The fact that he went to Microsoft is a big deal,” said Kevin Compton, former operating partner at Kleiner Perkins and now co-founder of Radar Partners, a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto. “People were surprised. He could have gone anywhere, and he went there.”

The Golden Gate Bridge

In April, Ma became the vice president of Microsoft for Startups, a program launched in 2018 to give startups access to Microsoft’s technologies and marketing expertise and allow them to co-sell their products through the company’s global sales force. Ma was working on a consulting project when his longtime friend Eric Boyd, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s AI platform, approached him about the job. Boyd figured Ma would be a good fit, but Ma was initially skeptical. He’d been an entrepreneur for decades and just couldn’t see himself working for Microsoft.

But Ma knew Microsoft’s culture had shifted dramatically since CEO Satya Nadella took the reins in 2014, and he was intrigued. He flew up to the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and met with some executives. What he heard and saw convinced him that there was a unique possibility before him, a chance to do more for entrepreneurs whose needs and challenges he understood as well as anyone.

“I realized it was a huge opportunity,” he said. “Satya has made it clear that nurturing an ecosystem and making our partners successful is ultimately the most important thing to us.”

Six months into the job, Jeff Ma is proactively seeking out targeted startups and strengthening Microsoft’s presence in Silicon Valley.

Now six months into the job, Ma is shaking up Microsoft’s startup strategy, proactively seeking out targeted startups and strengthening Microsoft’s presence in Silicon Valley, where, he acknowledges, the company has traditionally not been top of mind for startups. Ma aims to change that through a feet-on-the-ground approach — talking to entrepreneurs about what Microsoft can do for them and raising awareness among venture capitalists and other influencers.

Jeff Ma poses by the San Francisco Bay.

“It’s ultimately the place we need to win. It’s the place where most of the successful startups come out of, and it’s the ecosystem that will have the greatest impact broadly on the rest of the ecosystem,” said Ma, who lives with his wife and their 1- and 3-year-old sons in Belvedere, just north of San Francisco.

Compton and others say if anyone can raise Microsoft’s profile in the hyper-competitive Silicon Valley, it’s Ma. They describe him as universally known in the valley’s startup world, an inclusive leader who builds teams of talented people and draws the best ideas from them. He’s charismatic, highly inquisitive and intensely smart, they say, able to process information and look at data in ways other people don’t, but also down-to-earth and fun to be around.

Ma is the type of person, Boyd said, who doesn’t just go to a restaurant, enjoy the experience and leave, like most people. He’ll chat up the chef, get to know the employees and strike up relationships.

“He’s a connector. He talks to everybody,” Boyd said. “He’s that type of personality that’s always sort of seeking out and finding people. I imagine he knows everyone in the valley and, if he doesn’t, then he knows someone who can get them in touch with them. In the startup world, connections are everything.”

“He’s a connector. He talks to everybody.”

Ma likes to talk about specialized versus generalized learning. A massive sports buff, he frames the distinction in those terms: Tiger Woods played golf from day one and is a specialized learner, he said, while Roger Federer was a generalized learner who played sports other than tennis while growing up. Ma is firmly in the latter category.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to a chemical engineering professor father and a nurse anesthetist mother who both emigrated from China after the Communist takeover in 1949, Ma was the youngest of three children and the only boy. His parents were hardworking, strict and ambitious, sending their two daughters and son to the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Ma’s sisters enrolled as sophomores but he went as a freshman: As a strong-willed kid who was “too smart for my own good,” he chafed against his parents’ expectations and was eager to go away to school.

Ma graduated from Exeter and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a degree in mechanical engineering in 1994. His father wanted him to become a doctor and he did enroll in pre-med but eventually realized medicine wasn’t for him. It was hard to let his father down, Ma said. He thinks about the sacrifices his parents made, how selfless they were about giving him and his sisters opportunities to succeed.

There’s a story about Ma’s father that stands out in his mind. He arrived in Seattle on a boat from Taiwan, then took a train to South Bend, Indiana. He had only about $50 on him and bought two hot dogs for the trip, but was so anxious about spending money that he couldn’t bring himself to eat them.

“I think about the times that I’m sitting around on a weekend with friends drinking wine, just enjoying ourselves. And I just don’t think my parents ever had many moments like that in their life,” Ma said. “It’s not really what they wanted and it’s not what they were ever able to allow themselves to do. Everything they did was for us.”

Two books leaning against one another

The summer after Ma’s senior year, he was living in his fraternity house with a couple of friends who were playing on the MIT blackjack team as a summer job. Ma liked to play poker but thought there was something a little unsavory about gambling in casinos. Still, he wanted to hang out with his buddies, and when he found out how much they were making, he was willing to give it a try.

Ma started flying to Vegas with the team on weekends, winning at blackjack by counting cards. He got good at it — so good that he became one of the team’s top players, helping the team win around $5 million during the seven years he was part of it. One night at an Irish pub in Boston, he met writer Ben Mezrich and told him about his experiences on the team. The main character in Mezrich’s book is based on Ma; the book was followed by the movie, with Ma making a cameo as a blackjack dealer in Vegas.

Looking back, what Ma misses most about those days isn’t the lavish lifestyle or the excitement of beating the casinos — it’s the camaraderie.

“We were a real team. The only other times I’ve felt that amount of collegiality was when I started companies,” he said.

Ma left the team in 2001, taking with him valuable lessons about how to analyze and apply data, stay with a data-driven approach and avoid bad decisions based on emotion or bias. He detailed those insights in a 2010 book, “The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big in Business,” and applied them in the four companies he launched: instructional golf site GolfSpan.com (sold to Demand Media), loan management company CircleLending (sold to Virgin), fantasy sports site Citizen Sports (sold to Yahoo) and productivity web service tenXer (sold to Twitter).

Ma spent three and a half years at Twitter, where he was vice president of analytics and data science. His presence and network in Silicon Valley, success as an entrepreneur and experience working for an established company like Twitter made him the ideal person to head Microsoft for Startups, said Charlotte Yarkoni, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Cloud + AI.

“Jeff is a tenured entrepreneur who’s had multiple startups. Amazingly enough, they’ve all had a positive exit, which is really challenging to do,” Yarkoni said. “It’s a really, really substantial skill set you have to have to be an entrepreneur and be successful.

“Part of what we were looking for was a seasoned entrepreneur who had been in the startup space,” she said, “but who also had the maturity to understand and be able to leverage the broader benefits of a large company like Microsoft so we could achieve our aspiration of helping startups be successful, regardless of what their stage of maturity is.”

We’re going to try to do a lot to change the way the entrepreneurial mix looks, from a diversity and inclusion, gender and opportunity standpoint.

Jeff Ma sitting on a bench

Evan Reiser wasn’t even considering using a different cloud provider for his San Francisco-based security startup, Abnormal Security Corp. But Ma reached out a few months ago and told him about the support Microsoft for Startups could offer his two-and-half-year-old company beyond just technology.

“My immediate response was, ‘What are you talking about? Isn’t it all about technology?’” recalled Reiser, Abnormal’s CEO.

The business benefits of Microsoft prompted Abnormal to move its software onto the Azure platform. Under the partnership, Abnormal’s cybersecurity solution is now available to Microsoft’s large enterprise customers through its cloud storefronts, Azure Marketplace and App Source, as well as through its co-selling relationship. Those customers get Azure consumption credits for buying Abnormal’s solution and can purchase and easily integrate it directly through Microsoft, eliminating the lengthy procurement cycle that can sink startups.

Reiser said he’s impressed by Microsoft’s commitment to security and the advanced technologies, like Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, accessible through Microsoft for Startups. The partnership strengthens Abnormal’s credibility, he said, and makes it easier to get in front of Fortune 500 companies.

“Our investment in the Microsoft ecosystem has helped us grow very quickly,” Reiser said. “I’m impressed from the top level down that there’s commitment from Microsoft to invest in startups and ultimately to enable all developers, whether at small companies or big companies, to build innovative things on their platform.”

Spending most of his days lately at home on Teams calls, Ma has been building his own team, which so far includes about 55 employees. His colleagues say he’s a leader who has strong opinions and is not afraid to disagree, but who is also caring and collaborative.

“Jeff is a really good leader because he sets very clear direction and a very clear strategy, but trusts you to do the right thing and execute against that strategy however you see fit,” said Lahini Arunachalam, Microsoft for Startup’s director of product management, who first worked with Ma at a tech company in 2018.

“He’ll listen to your opinion, listen to people on the team,” she said. “He wants to understand what’s going on, not only from a work perspective but also from a life and morale perspective. He cares deeply about his team and the people on his team.”

There are already thousands of companies in the Microsoft for Startups program, and Ma is focused on how to best support them and attract new ones in several different sectors. Longer term, he has two main goals in his role. He wants to shift the perception of Microsoft so entrepreneurs worldwide see it as the tech leader they want to work with. And he wants to create new programs and opportunities to help increase the number of startups launched by women and underrepresented minorities.

“Startup opportunity is definitely not distributed equally now, and it needs to be,” Ma said. “With Microsoft’s resources and ideas, we’re going to try to do a lot to change the way the entrepreneurial mix looks, from a diversity and inclusion, gender and opportunity standpoint.”

Ma’s oldest sister, Vivian, also worked for Microsoft before passing away in 2015. It’s bittersweet for him, thinking about how she would feel about his new role. “She would be so proud. I can only imagine how amazing it would be to be working here with her,” he said. “She would always still treat me like her little brother, which I think would be funny.”

Ma sees his position at Microsoft as a fortuitous confluence of choice and chance. His education — Exeter’s liberal arts environment and the technical world of MIT — and diverse career gave him a broad range of experience to bring to the role. But it was serendipity that Boyd thought to reach out to him about the job, he said, and serendipity that the opportunity came about during the COVID-19 pandemic, when a position at stable, thriving Microsoft was especially appealing.

“In many ways, I’ve never had any real idea of what I wanted to be. Even when I was an entrepreneur, it wasn’t really an intentional thing. It was, ‘This is an opportunity to learn and do something interesting.’ And that’s what I did,” Ma said.

“The Microsoft job is the first one that I have actually looked at and been like, ‘I’ve been building toward this my whole life, and it’s cool.’”

Originally published on 10/30/2020 /  Photos by Brian Smale /  © Microsoft

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Microsoft named a Leader in the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms

Embracing digital transformation in Industrial IoT requires companies to rethink and shift business models and operations. Doing so, however, has become more difficult in the past six months due to production slowdowns, restrictions on employee movement with social distancing, and rapidly shifting market demands. Yet for many companies, the industry disruptions caused by COVID-19 have actually accelerated integral transformation in emerging technology directly linked to IoT, such as AI and edge computing. Manufacturers preparing for the future are rapidly building their operations around a digital core and actively integrating their value chain to the whole supply chain, doing so to increase efficiency and production capacity.

This why we are sharing that Gartner has positioned Microsoft as a Leader in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Azure for Industrical IoT Platforms

A strong global ecosystem

Our vision is to support customers to connect, monitor, and manage their operations whether they want to build and manage their own IoT solutions with Microsoft Azure platform services such as Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, or Microsoft Azure Time Series Insights, or purchase solutions directly from Microsoft Azure Marketplace. As a founding member of the Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP), an alliance founded in 2019 to help manufacturing companies accelerate innovation at scale through cross-industry collaboration, knowledge, and data sharing, we are also excited to share the Leaders quadrant in this report with two key Azure partners, Hitachi and PTC. Together, we are in a unique position to support thousands of customers all around the world to achieve better outcomes. The OMP was founded under the umbrella of the Joint Development Foundation, which is part of the Linux Foundation.

Global insights and IoT momentum

Despite these challenging times, we learned recently that looking ahead to the next two years, two out of three organizations are planning to use IoT even more than they do today. This is according to our latest global research, IoT Signals Edition 2 released October 2020, where we captured feedback from over 3,000 business decision makers, IT decision makers, and developers of which nearly 600 were IoT decision makers dedicated to industrial IoT solutions. We want to share three key drivers for Manufacturers according to our survey.

Learn more detailed insights in the free IoT Signals Editions 2 Report.

  1. Improving efficiency is the primary driver for IoT adoption in manufacturing.
  2. Manufacturing organizations are increasingly using AI as part of their IoT solutions.
  3. Complexity and talent challenges exist and are slowing adoption.

For us, the seamless integration of AI, a smarter edge strategy, the security affording freedom to create, the flexibility, scalability, our partner network—these are the means we offer you to make more possible.

Believe more is possible, and make it a reality.

Next steps

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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‘Leave positive tracks’: Wayve’s self-driving solution seeks to protect people and the planet

Let’s momentarily exit 2020 and pay an imaginary visit to 2029.

(If only we could, right? Anyway, back to our mental trek.)

Picture the world’s cities by the end of this decade: Streets, intersections and roundabouts are a safer, cleaner, quieter and vastly more organized stream of connected, self-driving electric vehicles. Block by block, their shared “driving brain” learns from roadway experiences to make traffic deaths tragedies of our messy past.

Rush hour jams? No chance. Horns? No need. Road rage? No more.

That’s how Alex Kendall sees our urban future. Kendall is the co-founder and CEO of Wayve, a London-based startup that’s building an artificial intelligence (AI) solution that will enable autonomous vehicles to operate not in a single city but in any urban environment, securely moving people and goods.

His vision blends cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities with heavy doses of human equity and healthy air to deliver a new transportation model that will be sustainable, affordable and accessible to people in all cities. He calls it: “Riding the Wayve.”

“One of our values is to leave positive tracks,” Kendall says, “so we exclusively work on electric vehicles.”

A Wayve vehicle drives down the street in London, collecting data via an array of cameras and sensors.
A Wayve vehicle drives down a London street, collecting data via an array of cameras and sensors.

To scale their solution, the three-year-old company is leveraging both Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft for Startups: Autonomous Driving program, which provides benefits like free Azure credits and access to Microsoft engineers and program managers to support the development of these complex workloads on the cloud.

Transform recently chatted with Kendall via Microsoft Teams to hear about our commutes of tomorrow.

TRANSFORM: Autonomous driving means different things to different people. What does it mean to you?

 KENDALL: It means the start of a new era, creating artificial intelligence that we trust to move people and goods throughout our cities without requiring supervision by humans. We’re talking about a world of autonomous mobility services that disrupts private car ownership, that makes it more sustainable for people to move around cities and, ultimately, that reduces road deaths to zero.

TRANSFORM: Wayve aims to be the first company to launch its self-driving technology in 100 cities, not just one city. Tell me about that goal.

 KENDALL: Across the self-driving industry today, many teams are trying to make it work in one place, just trying to get something out there as quickly as they can. This comes at the expense of what we call “generalization”: How quickly can the system go from working in one place to many places?

When humans learn to drive, they go from understanding how to drive in one city to quickly learning how to drive in other cities. In that same way, scaling our technology to other cities should just be a matter of adding a small amount of experience to adapt to each new place.

TRANSFORM: Where are some of those 100 projected cities?

KENDALL: We’re headquartered in London. That will be our first city. Beyond the UK, we are most excited about targeting a few cities in Europe as next expansion points. Next countries include the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

TRANSFORM: You mentioned how humans learn to drive. What does that mean?

 KENDALL: Humans are interesting because they use many means of learning to learn how to drive. The dominant one is unsupervised learning. That is how humans watch and view the world.

Every time you’re sitting in a car or observing cars driving, you’re building an internal mental model about how things behave, how things move, how things interact. When you actually get in a car, it’s this internal model that makes it efficient for you to learn how to drive.

TRANSFORM: How will Wayve’s machine learning system mimic the human process?

KENDALL: Just like humans, our system learns most efficiently using many sources, including unsupervised learning, imitation learning and reinforcement learning.

First, we learn to drive (autonomously) by copying expert humans. We record the driving data from their vehicles. Based on the data, we learn to copy their expert driving. This is called imitation learning.

From that, we build a self-driving system and deploy it on the roads with safety drivers. (These are people who sit behind the steering wheel during testing and, if needed, immediately take control.) Every time the system makes a mistake, and the safety driver intervenes, we learn from that feedback. This is called reinforcement learning.

Finally, we use computer simulation to learn from the situations that are too dangerous or too rare to experience in the real world. Through these three steps, we build a safe and robust autonomous driver.

The dash board of a car holds a Surface laptop to the left of the steering wheel.
Wayve equips its fleet with Microsoft Surface devices.

TRANSFORM: Who are the expert drivers that you mentioned, and how do you record their driving data?

KENDALL:  We deploy our self-driving platform with data-collection devices across large scale-commercial fleets.

We provide these vehicles with data-collection computers – fully integrated, self-driving, sensing suites – and small computers with a 4G connection. Integrated with Azure cloud and IoT services, this allows us to understand this data and send back interesting examples to the cloud, ultimately for our system to learn from.  At scale, this will provide us access to millions of images per second.

TRANSFORM: In your computer simulations, are you estimating the accident rates?

 KENDALL: We’ve built a scalable (simulation) system to extract insights from every part of the drive. We classify these into scenarios and look at the metrics for each one, whether that’s driving through traffic lights or going through a roundabout in the rain.

It gives us a good view on what we are and aren’t good at – and where we should focus our resources and our learning.

Within each of these scenarios, we can accurately estimate human-level performances and what we need to beat. For example, humans can pass through roundabout intersections without an accident causing injury 99.999 percent of the time. We want to be able to surpass this.

TRANSFORM: What has the Microsoft for Startups: Autonomous Driving program meant for your company and achieving your vision?

 KENDALL: In the early days, we were building an autonomous car in our garage, driving it around the block and testing it.

We had nothing to show and everything to prove. Despite that, Microsoft was excited about what we were building. This early engagement was critical. More than the financial credit support, the engineering support around the backend and the quick turnaround to our requests and questions allowed us to get that speed of iteration we needed.

Because we had this speed of iteration, we were able to quickly graduate from a house and build a headquarters and an organization that ultimately decided to build our infrastructure at scale in Azure.

Computer vision shows a car driving down a city street.
Wayve’s technology models the real world with computer vision.

TRANSFORM: When your technology is fully deployed, how will this look in the real world?

 KENDALL: We envision a world where we have large fleets of connected vehicles, all sharing experiences to improve and train a driving brain that ultimately learns from its mistakes and learns to adapt to society’s needs at a rapid pace.

TRANSFORM: And this self-driving network will be available to all who want to use it?

 KENDALL: Yes, for people who are disabled, self-driving is a technology that should massively increase their mobility options. It should reduce the stigma and the cost (of today’s accessible transportation options).

Also, I don’t want to see self-driving only deployed in affluent areas with expensive infrastructure. I want to see self-driving address urban societies throughout the world. This requires a more intelligent autonomous driving system which is able to understand the world around it. This is only possible with machine learning.

TRANSFORM: When might this become part of everyday life?

KENDALL: Over the next few years, Wayve will get to a point where we have the safety case in place, where we’ll invite members of the public to experience riding the Wayve. They will do this, first, with a safety driver supervising the ride, then as an autonomous service.

By the end of this decade, I think riding the Wayve will be dominant within the multimodal transportation options we use in cities throughout the world. It will just be a matter of time before it is as prevalent as today’s ride-hailing services.

Top photo: Alex Kendall. (All photos courtesy of Wayve.)

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DHL shelving ‘out of stock,’ thanks to smart supply chains built in the cloud

Venter’s vision is to leverage DHL’s unique position to optimize customers’ supply chains, making them more resilient and, at the same time, more agile and flexible.

“The importance of access to real-time information was evident pre-crisis, but the pandemic exposed an even greater need for end-to-end visibility across the supply chain to enable fast response. A solid IT infrastructure and powerful tools to predict and analyze terabytes of data in real time is helping us make supply chains smarter,” says Venter.

The company’s ability to support its customers through this challenging period was because DHL Supply Chain invested significantly over the past few years in digital transformation, working in partnership with Microsoft and Blue Yonder on the strategic deployment of automation and digital solutions.

A safe working environment, high transparency and visibility along the whole supply chain, as well as a sophisticated technology infrastructure are what Venter believes sets DHL apart from its competitors. “Smart supply chains, fueled by data help us unlock higher service levels, optimize costs and enable predictive modelling – as well as faster response times. This is what it is all about,” he says.

Examples of such optimization include routing in DHL’s sizeable warehouses to pick and pack goods faster and more effectively, or the “more intelligent” allocation and the structured processing of millions of orders each day.

But it’s not just about coping with the expected, it’s about anticipating demand.

Data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) are essential technology investments for DHL, as it goes beyond “just putting a bunch of robots in a warehouse,” as Venter explains. “It’s about really making supply chains intelligent and smart.”

A DHL warehouse in Beringe, the Netherlands.
A forklift driver, one of DHL’s “everyday heroes,” at a warehouse in Beringe, the Netherlands.

The company’s worldwide scale and access to information across regions helped it earlier on in the pandemic: “Our global footprint gave us early supply warning signals from Asia, which meant we could take quick action in Europe”.

Predictive modelling is enabling the company to better manage demand and anticipate potential disruption to keep customers’ businesses moving, and crucially, keep them competitive.

Are we ready for the next challenge? Venter considers the next big challenge for international supply chains will be the global distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine, which some experts have described as the supply chain challenge of the century.

“This may sound superlative, but I can’t recall having seen any operation of that scale,” he says. “We are preparing for that, and we stand by to execute as soon as we will be assigned to do so.”

As DHL prepares for this, Venter highlights the importance of collaboration to leverage digitalization successfully and scale globally, “data is a sensitive topic and its fundamental to build your digital capabilities through a secure platform, with a partner you can trust. It’s business critical,” Venter says.

”Smart supply chains will not only save businesses and keep industries afloat – but in the truest sense of the word, smart supply chains will save lives.”

Top photo: A DHL employee uses “vision picking,” a form of augmented reality, at a DHL warehouse in Beringe, the Netherlands. (Photos courtesy of DHL)