Tag: analyst reports

We’re excited to share that Forrester has named Microsoft as a leader in the inaugural report, The Forrester New Wave™: Function-As-A-Service Platforms, Q1 2020 based on their evaluation of Azure Functions and integrated development tooling. We believe Forrester’s findings reflect the strong momentum of event-driven applications in Azure and our vision, crediting Azure Functions with“robust programming model and integration capabilities”, and also confirm Microsoft’s commitment to be the best technology partner for you as customers call out the responsiveness of Microsoft Azure’s “engineering and support teams as key to their success.”

Best-in-class development experience

Azure Functions is an event-driven serverless compute platform with a programming model based on triggers and bindings for accelerated and simplified applications development. Fully integrated with other Azure services and development tools, its end-to-end development experience allows you to build and debug your functions locally on any major platform (Windows, macOS, and Linux), as well as deploy and monitor them in the cloud. You can even deploy the exact same functions code to other environments, such as your own infrastructure or your Kubernetes cluster, enabling seamless hybrid deployments.

In their report, Forrester noted Azure Functions programming model“supports a multitude of programming languages with extensive integration options, … and bindings for Azure Event Hub, and Azure Event Grid helps developers build event-driven microservices.”

Enterprise-grade FaaS platform

Enterprise customers like Chipotle love the velocity and productivity that event-driven architectures bring to developing applications. We are committed to building great experiences that enable the modernization of those enterprise workloads, and the Forrester report states that “strategic adopters of Azure will find that Azure Functions helps integrate Microsoft’s fast-expanding array of cloud services”, making that transformation journey easier. Some of our latest innovations are focused on the needs of enterprise customers, such as the Premium plan to host functions without cold-start for low latency workloads or PowerShell support enabling serverless automation scenarios for cloud and hybrid deployments.

In their report, Forrester also recognized Azure Functions as “a good fit for companies that need stateful functions” thanks to Durable Functions, an extension to the Azure Functions runtime that brings stateful and orchestration capabilities to serverless functions. Durable Functions stands alone in the serverless space, providing stateful functions and a way to define serverless workflows programmatically. Forrester mentioned specifically in the report that “clients modernizing enterprise apps will find that Durable Functions offers an alternative to refactoring existing business logic into bite-size stateless chunks.”

Read the full Forrester report and learn more about Azure Functions today.

If you have any feedback or questions, please reach us on Twitter, GitHub, StackOverflow or UserVoice.

We often hear from customers about the explosion of data, and the challenge this presents for organizations in remaining compliant and protecting their information. We’ve invested in capabilities across the landscape of information protection and information governance, inclusive of archiving, retention, eDiscovery and communications supervision. In Gartner’s annual Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving (EIA), Microsoft was named a Leader again in 2019.

According to Gartner, “Leaders have the highest combined measures of Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They may have the most comprehensive and scalable products. In terms of vision, they are perceived to be thought leaders, with well-articulated plans for ease of use, product breadth and how to address scalability.” We believe this recognition represents our ability to provide best-in-class protection and deliver on innovations that keep pace with today’s compliance needs.

This recognition comes at a great point in our product journey. We are continuing to invest in solutions that are integrated into Office 365 and address information protection and information governance needs of customers. Earlier this month, at our Ignite 2019 conference, we announced updates to our compliance portfolio including new data connectors, machine learning powered governance, retention, discovery and supervision – and innovative capabilities such as threading Microsoft Teams or Yammer messages into conversations, allowing you to efficiently review and export complete dialogues with context, not just individual messages. In customer conversations, many of them say these are the types of advancements that are helping them be more efficient with their compliance requirements, without impacting end-user productivity.

Learn more

Read the complimentary report for the analysis behind Microsoft’s position as a Leader.

For more information about our Information Archiving solution, visit our website and stay up to date with our blog.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving, Julian Tirsu, Michael Hoeck, 20 November 2019.

*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 from Microsoft.

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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Microsoft accelerates application development with Azure Integration Services

Personal computers revolutionized the way work was done. New software unlocked unprecedented levels of productivity, and for a time, business flourished. As the personal computer exploded in popularity, more and more software was created. For the individual, this was a golden age. For the enterprise, this was also a golden age … with an asterisk.

As it was when you add more people to an organization, so too it was with software. Making software work cooperatively with other unrelated software ended up being a very tricky problem to solve. The more software that was added, the more that overhead was introduced. This was an unfortunate consequence. The cost of doing business increased, meaningful results decreased, and organizational productivity plummeted.

Large businesses and enterprises were locked in this pattern, until a new category of software was created, integration software. And for many years, on-premise integration tools, such as Microsoft BizTalk Server, helped mitigate the issue created by the rapid proliferation and adoption of new software.

And then one day, everything changed. The cloud was born, and with it, the need for new ways to connect everything together.

The adoption of cloud-native integration platforms to support business workflows

As before, a new category of software has come into existence to help solve the challenges organizations are struggling with. iPaaS, or Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service tools are key to a successful integration strategy, and in turn, a successful application development strategy.

Microsoft is once again named a leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS.)

Microsoft is powering enterprises across industry verticals in adopting comprehensive app innovation and modernization strategies, with integration as the backbone to these efforts. In fact, most modern application design makes use of integration capabilities, without being cognizant that they are doing so. Application development and application integration are becoming more and more intertwined, making it almost impossible to figure out where one starts and the other one ends

We are continuously investing in our integration offerings, including how APIs play a role in the modern enterprise, how business units increasingly need more and more flexible rules and logic to accommodate changing market demands, and more.

Integration is the surface upon which strong application infrastructure stands

Microsoft goes way beyond just integration, and instead focuses on helping you make better applications. Companies like Finastra, Evoqua, and Vipps are using a wide variety of Azure services, such as Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure API Management, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Functions, and more to create applications faster, easier, and better connected with the rest of their application ecosystem.

“Our platform intersects a great deal of data and technology,” says Félix Grévy, Global Head of Product Management at FusionFabric.cloud, Finastra, “yet our complete integration with Azure streamlines our infrastructure, simplifies our processes and makes our lives infinitely easier.”

Register for Manage Your Microservices, a webinar about how application integration enables application innovation and development. Learn how to use Azure API Management, Azure Functions, Azure Kubernetes Service, and more, to create a comprehensive microservice infrastructure.