Collaboration will build pathways to financial security and provide tools for sustainable growth
PURCHASE, N.Y., and REDMOND, Wash. — July 28, 2020— On Tuesday, Mastercard and Microsoft Corp. announced a collaboration to shape the future of digital commerce, drive startup innovation and enable financial inclusion. The collaboration will accelerate Mastercard Labs’ cloud native research and development activities, enabled by Azure and AI, to advance Mastercard Labs’ mission to de-risk and commercialize emerging technologies and platforms for digital commerce. Through access to technical expertise and cutting-edge technologies, Mastercard’s partners will be further empowered to build and securely scale new solutions.
“We are thrilled to deepen our longstanding relationship with Microsoft by advancing the research, development and scaling of new technologies and business models,” said Ken Moore, executive vice president and head of Mastercard Labs. “This strategic collaboration will strengthen and extend our cloud services and capabilities for clients and fintech partners, sparking innovation and creativity for the ecosystem. It will enable us to explore opportunities focused on new client segments, technologies and trends as we continue to drive financial inclusion and build the future of commerce.”
“Mastercard’s commitment to innovation and financial inclusion has accelerated digital commerce for individuals and businesses around the world,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business. “We look forward to building on our strong relationship and accelerating co-innovation to help connect and power a digital economy for everyone, everywhere.”
Empowering fintech innovation, advancing digital commerce
Capitalizing on Mastercard’s global network and leveraging Azure’s global reach, the collaboration will enable Mastercard’s ecosystem of partners to explore the use of emerging innovations and new commerce capabilities such as devices that enable digital payments in new ways. Through access to Azure technologies, augmented and virtual reality and Internet of Things, fintech partners will be empowered to create new user experiences to advance how consumers, businesses and governments exchange value.
Mastercard’s Start Path program has assisted with the development of over 230 fintech companies worldwide, democratizing access to financial services. Building on that momentum, the collaboration will expand support for the fintech community by helping diversify and build new businesses, and create and scale new cloud-first digital products and services.
Enabling financial inclusion
Mastercard and Microsoft share a commitment to ensuring people in underserved communities have access to digital products and services to realize their full potential. The collaboration will advance Mastercard’s vision to improve the lives of people by building pathways to financial security and access to critical services. The Azure cloud environment will serve as the native infrastructure for Mastercard Labs’ inclusion efforts and support Mastercard Community Pass — a platform that pulls together complex ecosystems and provides underserved communities with access to essential services, such as education, agriculture marketplaces and basic healthcare.
Microsoft Azure provides Mastercard — and the ecosystems they jointly serve — with a scalable and flexible platform imperative for establishing secure connections and protecting data, co-innovating with partners and delivering access to financial services
About Mastercard
Mastercard (NYSE:MA) is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments and businesses realize their greatest potential. Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
For more information, press only:
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, rrt@we-worldwide.com
Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.
Five-year partnership will accelerate PepsiCo’s ability to meet the rising demand for its food and beverages and drive new innovations across its operations and consumer experiences
PURCHASE, N.Y., and REDMOND, Wash. — July 27, 2020 — PepsiCo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced a five-year partnership that establishes Microsoft as a preferred cloud provider to accelerate PepsiCo’s infrastructure, ERP, and data estate consolidation and modernization.
As part of the agreement, PepsiCo will roll out Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams to all of its 270,000 employees worldwide. In addition, Microsoft Azure will provide PepsiCo with greater agility and the ability to derive new insights from its data estate to fuel product innovations, customer intimacy and sustainability goals.
“As a global leader in convenient food and beverages, our commitment to the timely delivery of PepsiCo products has never been more important,” said PepsiCo CIO, Seth Cohen. “Through our partnership with Microsoft, we aim to improve service delivery capabilities to meet rising demand for essential goods while driving new innovations to make our operations and workforce stronger and more resilient for the future.”
“Our partnership with PepsiCo applies Azure and AI capabilities to the ever-changing supply chain and retail landscape in new and exciting ways. By migrating PepsiCo’s global data estate and SAP landscapes to Azure, we’ll be able to help PepsiCo drive efficiencies from farmer to consumer,” said Deb Cupp, Microsoft CVP Enterprise Commercial Business. “We’re also pleased to deliver Microsoft 365 to PepsiCo’s associates worldwide as part of this partnership. Mobile communication and collaboration for PepsiCo’s workforce will be one of the keys to realizing the value Microsoft brings.”
This partnership is expected to fuel PepsiCo’s operational goals and aggressive innovation plans by leveraging agile cloud capabilities while providing Microsoft the opportunity to expand its relationship with a leading global provider of consumer-packaged goods.
About PepsiCo
PepsiCo products are enjoyed by consumers more than one billion times a day in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. PepsiCo generated more than $67 billion in net revenue in 2019, driven by a complementary food and beverage portfolio that includes Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, Quaker and Tropicana. PepsiCo’s product portfolio includes a wide range of enjoyable foods and beverages, including 23 brands that generate more than $1 billion each in estimated annual retail sales.
Guiding PepsiCo is our vision to Be the Global Leader in Convenient Foods and Beverages by Winning with Purpose. “Winning with Purpose” reflects our ambition to win sustainably in the marketplace and embed purpose into all aspects of the business. For more information, visit www.pepsico.com.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
For more information, press only:
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, rrt@weworldwide.com
Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.
PepsiCo Cautionary Statement
Statements in this release that are “forward-looking statements” are based on currently available information, operating plans and projections about future events and trends. Terminology such as “aim,” “believe,” “expect,” “intend,” “estimate,” “project,” “anticipate,” “will,” or similar statements or variations of such terms are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain such terms. Forward-looking statements inherently involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted in any such forward-looking statement. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: the impact of the spread of COVID-19; future demand for PepsiCo’s products, as a result of changes in consumer preferences or otherwise; the ability to protect information systems against, or effectively respond to, a cybersecurity incident or other disruption; PepsiCo’s ability to implement shared services or utilize information technology systems and networks effectively; and other factors that may adversely affect the price of PepsiCo’s publicly traded securities and financial performance. For additional information on these and other factors that could cause PepsiCo’s actual results to materially differ from those set forth herein, please see PepsiCo’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent annual report on Form 10-K and subsequent reports on Forms 10-Q and 8-K. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made. PepsiCo undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
NEW YORK and REDMOND, WA – July 23, 2020 – MSCI Inc. (NYSE: MSCI) and Microsoft Corp. have formed a strategic alliance to accelerate innovation among the global investment industry. By bringing together the power of Microsoft’s cloud and AI technologies with MSCI’s global reach through its portfolio of investment decision support tools, the companies will unlock new innovations for the industry and enhance MSCI’s client experience among the world’s most sophisticated investors, including asset managers, asset owners, hedge funds and banks.
Initially, the companies will focus on migrating MSCI’s existing products, data and services onto Azure as its preferred cloud platform in stages, starting with its Index and Analytics solutions followed by its Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) products and ratings; Real Estate data and solutions; and MSCI’s risk analytics platform Beon. By modernizing MSCI’s data and analytics services and infrastructure, the companies will be able to deliver new capabilities which will help investors more swiftly and efficiently manage data and understand the drivers of risk and performance.
In addition, MSCI and Microsoft will explore collaboration opportunities to drive climate risk and ESG solutions, leveraging Microsoft’s Azure and Power Platform and MSCI’s ESG and climate solutions capabilities. This future collaboration, in line with both organizations’ commitment to sustainability, is intended to help investors better understand and interpret the business risks and opportunities that climate change brings.
“Investors’ needs to rapidly innovate and adapt as strategies and business models evolve, build and manage big data, and improve operational efficiencies are growing at a critical speed around the world,” said Henry Fernandez, Chairman and CEO of MSCI. “Our strategic alliance with Microsoft underscores MSCI’s commitment to driving relentless innovation in the technology of our products and services to help investors achieve their desired investment outcomes.”
“Our strategic collaboration with Microsoft is the latest step in our long and established heritage of innovation and we are excited about the long-term potential of this relationship,” added Jigar Thakkar, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Engineering at MSCI. “MSCI is a future-focused business and Azure enables us not just to enhance our capabilities and client solutions of today, but also provide the platform to accelerate our journey in building world-class technology and tools to solve the investment industry’s challenges of tomorrow.”
“Investors rely on cutting-edge technologies to deliver intelligent insights, manage risk and detect anomalies so they can help customers achieve their investment goals,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud +AI, Microsoft. “By harnessing the power of Azure and its AI capabilities, together with MSCI’s expertise and position within the investment ecosystem, we will be able to accelerate new innovations that help investors better optimize their clients’ performance capabilities.”
“This alliance opens exciting frontiers for the global investment community,” said Merrie Williamson, Microsoft VP of Azure Apps and Infrastructure. “The combination of MSCI’s relentless pursuit of innovation with Microsoft’s deep data expertise, expansive partner ecosystem, and go-to-market capabilities forms an alliance with the potential to accelerate the investment industry.”
About MSCI MSCI is a leading provider of critical decision support tools and services for the global investment community. With over 45 years of expertise in research, data and technology, we power better investment decisions by enabling clients to understand and analyze key drivers of risk and return and confidently build more effective portfolios. We create industry-leading research-enhanced solutions that clients use to gain insight into and improve transparency across the investment process. To learn more, please visit www.msci.com.
About Microsoft Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
For more information, press only:
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, rrt@we-worldwide.com
Americas Client Service +1 888 588 4567 (toll free)
Asia Pacific Client Service + 852 2844 9333
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements relate to future events or to future financial performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the use of words such as “may,” “could,” “expect,” “intend,” “plan,” “seek,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential” or “continue,” or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements because they involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that are, in some cases, beyond MSCI’s control and that could materially affect actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements.
Other factors that could materially affect actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements can be found in MSCI’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2019 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) on February 18, 2020 and in quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K filed or furnished with the SEC. If any of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or if MSCI’s underlying assumptions prove to be incorrect, actual results may vary significantly from what MSCI projected. Any forward-looking statement in this press release reflects MSCI’s current views with respect to future events and is subject to these and other risks, uncertainties and assumptions relating to MSCI’s operations, results of operations, growth strategy and liquidity. MSCI assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law.
Alliance supports demand for cloud solutions, aiming to compress years of innovation into months for 8,500 banking and financial institutions worldwide
LONDON and REDMOND, Wash. — July 20, 2020 — Finastra and Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced a strategic, multiyear cloud agreement to help accelerate the digital transformation of financial services.
“This is a truly exciting step change in the relationship between our two companies,” said Simon Paris, CEO, Finastra. “We believe the future of finance is open. Together with Microsoft, we can provide people, businesses and communities with the solutions and services that fit around their needs and lives, unlocking the power and potential of finance for everyone. As the pandemic has brought the future forward with regard to digitization, our vision to transform the world of financial services aligns closely with Microsoft’s ambitions, and I believe that together we can help accelerate this digital shift.”
This move marks a commitment and builds on the 3,000 banks and financial institutions already supported by both companies across payments, lending, treasury and retail banking on Azure. The agreement, paired with the unparalleled disruption of the industry, will reimagine the way banks and credit unions use technology and how we all think about sustainable, open finance. Using Microsoft platforms has already enabled Finastra to accelerate its product road maps to bring even more of its mission-critical solutions to the cloud for its 8,500 customers, alongside advancements in data, AI and open banking.
“Finastra’s open developer platform, built on Microsoft Azure, is leading the way in accelerating collaboration and innovation in financial services. By helping with capabilities such as e-signatory and e-notary, Finastra is able to quickly extend those solutions for more customers,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud + AI, Microsoft. “We’re thrilled to be working with Finastra to transform the future of financial services by accelerating its move to the cloud. Together we will fuel the digital transformation of financial services, and by delivering on operational efficiencies and reducing risk, we will help increase productivity and enable deeper client engagement.”
Along with the strategic partner relationship, Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud open innovation platform will continue to encourage co-innovation of next-generation financial services applications. Powered by Microsoft Azure, it allows developers unprecedented access to build on top of Finastra’s core systems for faster incubation of high-value applications at scale.
Microsoft Azure, the Power Platform and Office 365 are also helping Finastra to transform its own business and optimize operations. With a focus on creating a workplace of the future, these technologies are supporting smart working, delivering greater collaboration and driving a “digital-first” mindset among employees. The Microsoft Workplace Analytics capabilities — with deeper insight gained from data — are also enabling faster, definitive decision-making.
About Finastra
Finastra is building an open platform that accelerates collaboration and innovation in financial services, creating better experiences for people, businesses and communities. Supported by the broadest and deepest portfolio of financial services software, Finastra delivers this vitally important technology to financial institutions of all sizes across the globe, including 90 of the world’s top 100 banks. Our open architecture approach brings together a number of partners and innovators. Together we are leading the way in which applications are written, deployed and consumed in financial services to evolve with the changing needs of customers. Learn more at finastra.com.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
For more information, press only:
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, rrt@weworldwide.com
Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.
HOUSTON – July 17, 2020– Halliburton (NYSE: HAL), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Accenture (NYSE: ACN) today announced they have entered into a five-year strategic agreement to advance Halliburton’s digital capabilities in Microsoft Azure.
Under the agreement, Halliburton will complete its move to cloud-based digital platforms and strengthen its customer offerings by:
Enhancing real-time platforms for expanded remote operations,
Improving analytics capability with the Halliburton Data Lake utilizing machine learning and artificial intelligence, and
Accelerating the deployment of new technology and applications, including SOC2 compliance for Halliburton’s overall system reliability and security.
“The strategic agreement with Microsoft and Accenture is an important step in our adoption of new technology and applications to enhance our digital capabilities, drive additional business agility and reduce capital expenditures,” said Jeff Miller, Halliburton chairman, president & CEO. “We are excited about the benefits our customers and employees will realize through this agreement, and the opportunity to further leverage our open architecture approach to software delivery.”
“Moving to the cloud allows companies to create market-shaping customer offerings and drive tangible business outcomes,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president, Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business. “Through this alliance with Halliburton and Accenture, we will apply the power of the cloud to unlock digital capabilities that deliver benefits for Halliburton and its customers.”
The agreement also enables the migration of all Halliburton physical data centers to Azure, which delivers enterprise-grade cloud services at global scale and offers sustainability benefits. Accenture will work closely with Microsoft, in conjunction with their Avanade joint venture, to help transition Halliburton’s digital capabilities and business-critical applications to Azure. Accenture will leverage its comprehensive cloud migration framework, which brings industrialized capabilities together with exclusive tools, methods, and automation to accelerate Halliburton’s data center migration and provide for additional transformation opportunities.
“Building a digital core and scaling it quickly across a business is only possible with a strong foundation in the cloud,” said Julie Sweet, chief executive officer, Accenture. “Halliburton recognizes that this essential foundation will provide the innovation, efficiency and talent advantages to do things differently and fast. We are proud to be part of driving this transformational change, which builds on our long history of working with Halliburton and Microsoft.”
The companies expect to complete the staged migration by 2022.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
About Halliburton
Founded in 1919, Halliburton is one of the world’s largest providers of products and services to the energy industry. With approximately 50,000 employees, representing 140 nationalities in more than 80 countries, the company helps its customers maximize value throughout the lifecycle of the reservoir – from locating hydrocarbons and managing geological data, to drilling and formation evaluation, well construction and completion, and optimizing production throughout the life of the asset. Visit the company’s website at www.halliburton.com. Connect with Halliburton on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.
About Accenture
Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services in strategy and consulting, interactive, technology and operations, with digital capabilities across all of these services. We combine unmatched experience and specialized capabilities across more than 40 industries — powered by the world’s largest network of Advanced Technology and Intelligent Operations centers. With 513,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture brings continuous innovation to help clients improve their performance and create lasting value across their enterprises. Visit us at www.accenture.com.
For Microsoft
Microsoft Media Relations WE Communications for Microsoft (425) 638-7777 rrt@we-worldwide.com
That vision meshes with the 99-year mission at Land O’Lakes.
The company, based in Minnesota, is a farmer-owned cooperative with a network spanning more than 300,000 producers and touching about half of America’s harvested areas. In other words, Land O’Lakes is way bigger than butter.
Through the alliance, digital solutions built on Microsoft Azure and its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities will help farmers better react to current and future challenges that impact their bottom lines. The timing is urgent.
In recent years, U.S. farmers have been squeezed by international trade issues and changing consumer appetites. This year, COVID-19 has affected the food and ag supply chain, leaving farmers with millions of pounds in produce they can’t sell. Increasingly, each year climate change affects their operations and their bottom line.
Transform recently spoke with Bekele to hear more about his work to fortify American farmers – and honor his father’s legacy.
TRANSFORM: What is it like for you to blend your family’s agricultural history with your own tech expertise to help today’s farmers thrive?
BEKELE: That’s why I wake up. It gets me going every day. At Land O’Lakes, I started to see the impact tech could have on farming, how it could revolutionize this business and bring more stability during uncertain times.
Weather dictates 70 percent of what’s going to happen on a farm. Weather is still something we can’t predict accurately at the hyper-local level. But what if farmers could prepare themselves for these risks and react to them with data and insights?
I looked at what technology could do to protect the decisions farmers were making. I fell in love with that.
TRANSFORM: Your dad was an agronomist, yet he relied on his intuition to raise crops – as generations of farmers have done. How eager are modern farmers to use data, the cloud and AI to make crucial decisions on planting, feeding and harvesting?
BEKELE: Farmers in general like taking risks. If you didn’t like taking risks, I don’t think you’d be a farmer. That’s because every year is different and unpredictable. What you did last year won’t work out the same way this year. The challenges you face are going to be different, down to the individual field level.
So more of them would love to rely on the technology to make decisions and use data to be able to improve themselves from one year to the next.
TRANSFORM:By harnessing Azure, how will Land O’Lakes help farmers – and their fields – become more productive?
BELEKE: For almost 20 years, we’ve done research plots across the farming areas we serve. We planted different seed varieties and crop-protection applications, put in different farming practices then collected data on those plots to provide insights to farmers – like the right crop variety for the type of soil. But that research was all brute force, planting and collecting the data by hand.
Azure brings machine learning and artificial intelligence to the brute force that we applied in the fields. We use computer modeling, algorithms and replicated trials to derive the insights. The plots can then be used to validate our models and findings.
TRANSFORM: How do you envision farmers in the Land O’Lakes cooperative using AI recommendations to specifically react to what their fields are telling them?
BEKELE: It starts when you create the plan for the fields you will manage this year. What’s the best prescription for each field, given the topography, soil type and climate?
After planting, can you get early detection of where diseases might be occurring? If you give the fields nutrients like nitrogen or potassium, which field needs the most help today? What’s the right balance between what you put into the ground versus how many bushels per acre you will harvest?
Today, those calculations happen in a farmer’s head. But instead of manual thinking, an optimized algorithm says: This is how much money you should spend today for the outcome you are seeking.
TRANSFORM: Can you describe one way that the alliance with Microsoft will help improve sustainability on American farms?
BEKELE: For years, farmers put nutrients down in the fall to prep the fields they’ll plant in the spring. That was the old-school way. But what if you know – throughout the growing season – exactly what and how to feed the crop? That makes that field perform better now and in the future.
That can improve productivity. And you can do it in an environmentally sound way, for example by avoiding nutrients leaching out of the field into waterways when it rains. Any nutrient you put into the ground should stay in the ground – and then in the plant to make it healthier and more productive.
TRANSFORM: Land O’Lakes and Microsoft are working together to deliver AI solutions that will help farmers’ profit potential. What would that mean for one farm now on the financial edge?
BEKELE: If you’re at break-even today, the technology gets you to a spot where farming is exciting – you become a profitable farm. And you would not have to add more acres or put yourself at greater risk to get there. It just means you’re making better-optimized decisions with the technology.
For the smaller farmer who is facing a drop in commodity prices, they may be operating in the red. An improvement of 10 to 30 percent means they are no longer losing money. A life-altering change.
TRANSFORM: Could such an increase in profitability lead farmers to experiment with new techniques or new crops that improve the overall food supply?
BEKELE: If you’re questioning whether you will make it financially, you’re less willing to try different farming practices or change your nutrient recipe or try another crop. Maybe a farmer who has been growing corn and soybeans for years should be looking at lentils or peas. But when you’re at break-even, you’re not going to try something that might lose you money.
That reduces innovation and the diversity of crops. But if we can get folks into a position where they can try things, now you also have diversity of crops, which betters their business and betters everybody else.
TRANSFORM: How would these innovations have changed your dad’s life as a farmer – and maybe your own life?
BEKELE: If my dad had access to this technology, he would have tried it, for sure. He was on the bleeding edge when it came to emerging technologies. I would have then been exposed to them. If I had seen the transformation they were bringing, I might have stuck to a career in agriculture.
Or maybe I would have pursued computer science with a focus on agriculture. That would have been an interesting path – although I guess I still landed in basically the same spot 25 years later.
Top photo: A farm in Wisconsin that is part of the Land O’Lakes cooperative. (All photos courtesy of Land O’Lakes.)
Together the companies aim to build tighter connections between consumers and farmers through innovative new technologies built on Microsoft’s cloud
ARDEN HILLS, Minn., and REDMOND, Wash. — July 15, 2020 — Land O’Lakes Inc. and Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced a multiyear strategic alliance to pioneer new innovations in agriculture and enhance the supply chain, expand sustainability practices for farmers and the food system, and close the rural broadband gap. As one of the nation’s largest farmer-owned cooperatives with 150 million acres of productive cropland in its network, Land O’Lakes is deeply connected to rural America and has a unique understanding of farmers’ needs and the communities where they and their families live and work. Combined with Microsoft’s trusted cloud technologies and AI capabilities, the companies will deliver solutions that help farmers’ profit potential and adoption of sustainable agricultural practices.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. farms contribute more than $130 billion to the economy, emphasizing the critical role farmers play in our nation’s food supply. Yet the industry faces challenges that threaten its viability, including climate change, trade issues and an evolving workforce. With the emergence of COVID-19, the industry is increasingly facing production and supply-chain issues, and many farmers are facing new economic challenges for their family-owned businesses.
“Land O’Lakes is one of the most important food suppliers in the U.S., and our nation’s farmers and consumers rely on its ability to rapidly adapt to changing market forces through innovation,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “Through our partnership, we will apply the power of Azure and its AI capabilities to help Land O’Lakes solve some of the most pressing challenges facing the industry and bridge the divide between rural and urban communities.”
“As America’s farmers continue to deliver the world’s safest, most affordable food supply, they face an increasing number of obstacles that are beyond their control. The data-based, precision agriculture tools that we are building with Microsoft will provide the edge they need, but unreliable or nonexistent high-speed internet in rural areas keeps these tools out of reach for many. Through this alliance, we will work to address this need and help farmers remain profitable and sustainable,” said Beth Ford, president and CEO of Land O’Lakes, Inc.
Accelerating agriculture innovation
Initially, the companies will focus on developing a connected AgTech platform, built on Microsoft Azure, that will bring together Land O’Lakes’ portfolio of innovative AgTech tools, such as WinField United’s R7® Suite, Data Silo and Truterra™ Insights Engine under one unified architecture. By standardizing on Azure and harnessing the power of Azure FarmBeats, Land O’Lakes will be able to derive insights that enable intelligent agriculture solutions for farmers to be more productive with their time and resources. This includes early mitigation of plant stress to guide precisely where and when farmers should take action on their field for ideal growth conditions, maximization of yield potential by planting the right seed varieties and nutrients, optimizing fertilizer investments, and ensuring accurate output ratio to meet demand properly, all while lowering the farm carbon footprint.
Built on top of the AgTech platform, the companies will collaborate to advance an aggregator of data with Data Silo, as well as leverage Microsoft Azure and its AI capabilities and insights from WinField United Answer Plot® test fields, to support more predictable decisions for placement of crop inputs such as seeds and treatments, with the goal of increasing return on investment with the entire acre.
The companies will create a Digital Dairy solution, harnessing the power of edge computing to capture data from farms with poor internet coverage, and the power of AI to provide data-driven insights for dairy producers. This initiative will bring together multiple data streams — including weather, feed management and animal health — from sensors and third-party applications to help dairy producers improve profit potential, adopt conservation practices and reduce waste by feeding livestock only what they need and ensuring milk supply doesn’t go bad in the supply chain. Through the Digital Dairy solution, the companies will enable Traceability throughout the Land O’Lakes supply chain, providing transparency to milk, butter and cheese, ensuring consumer confidence that foods are of the highest quality and sustainably sourced. At a time when the dairy industry is stressed with changing customer demand and supply-chain disruptions, these digital tools will help producers improve efficiencies and profit potential, while helping to ensure food gets to the people who need it most.
Advancing sustainability initiatives
With the challenges of a changing climate, more extreme weather and a growing world population, Land O’Lakes and Microsoft share a commitment to sustainability and natural resources stewardship to help farm fields be both more resilient and productive for generations to come. We can help farmers improve the health and function of their farms’ soils to both produce more food and store greenhouse gas, including carbon. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that agricultural soils could hold up to 10% of human-caused emissions within 25 years. Yet, soils are largely absent from global carbon markets. As a result, farmers lack adequate information and incentives to practice regenerative agriculture to capture and store carbon.
The companies are working together to change that by developing a technology suite to help farmers improve their profit potential and generate new revenue in carbon markets. The new alliance will develop capabilities to quickly and effectively predict the carbon benefits of regenerative practices like no-till, precision nutrient management and planting of cover crops. Combining such capabilities with the real-time transparency from remote sensing and satellite data will make certification of these projects in global carbon markets easier, quicker and less expensive — ultimately maximizing the economic value for farmers.
The companies will explore integrating these new capabilities into the Truterra™ Insights Engine to create a unique soil health platform that can help farmers identify new opportunities to adopt practices to improve the quality and function of their farms’ soils, estimate the natural resource and economic benefits of those new practices, generate soil carbon credits, and connect to soil carbon markets that sell certified credits to buyers.
The platform would help unlock the potential of hundreds of millions of acres of farmland to be an effective carbon removal system and improve soil health and productivity, while providing farmers with the insights they need to make the best decisions for their farms. Markets like these may help Microsoft reach its goal to be carbon negative by 2030 and remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emitted since its founding by 2050, and help other businesses take advantage of soil carbon credits and the market to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Connecting rural America
Broadband is essential to fully participate in the modern economy. Unfortunately, more than 18 million Americans, 14 million of whom live in rural communities, don’t have access to broadband connections. Both companies are working to connect rural communities: Microsoft’s Airband Initiative has worked around the country to eliminate the rural broadband gap, and Land O’Lakes’ American Connection Project aims to close the digital divide through action and advocacy.
The companies are launching pilots that will lead to long-term programmatic solutions in rural communities. Combining Microsoft’s Airband program and specific locations within the Land O’Lakes owner network, broadband will be deployed to rural communities along with services including telehealth, educational resources and digital skilling. Both companies are also advocating for policy changes to accelerate the availability of broadband in rural communities, including broadband mapping to fully understand who has and does not have access to broadband, and federal funding in upcoming legislation.
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic makes the digital divide even worse for many people. Remote work, education and healthcare are out of reach for people living in rural communities without online access. The companies are answering this immediate need for connectivity by working together to turn on free public Wi-Fi at more than 150+ locations in 19 states using a mix of technologies, including fixed wireless, and supplying internet service providers with the necessary hardware.
Land O’Lakes to transition its IT platforms to Microsoft
Through this agreement, Microsoft becomes Land O’Lakes’ strategic cloud provider, and Land O’Lakes will migrate the majority of the company’s IT infrastructure onto Microsoft Azure. The company has enabled Microsoft 365 and Teams for its workforce, empowering them with next-generation digital experience technology for increased productivity, advanced security, internal collaboration and customer engagement.
About Land O’Lakes Inc.
Land O’Lakes, Inc., one of America’s premier agribusiness and food companies, is a member-owned cooperative with industry-leading operations that span the spectrum from agricultural production to consumer foods. With 2019 annual sales of $14 billion, Land O’Lakes is one of the nation’s largest cooperatives, ranking 232 on the Fortune 500. Building on a legacy of more than 99 years of operation, Land O’Lakes today operates some of the most respected brands and businesses in agriculture and food production including Land O’Lakes Dairy Foods, Purina Animal Nutrition, WinField United and Truterra, LLC. The company does business in all 50 states and more than 60 countries. Land O’Lakes, Inc. corporate headquarters are located in Arden Hills, Minn.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
For more information, press only:
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, rrt@we-worldwide.com
Land O’Lakes Media Relations, Brooke Dillon, (651) 202-1670, BDillon@landolakes.com
Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.
New pilot collaboration offers single, integrated portal for managing devices and smart appliances in buildings
SEOUL, South Korea and REDMOND, Wash. — July 13, 2020 — Samsung Electronics Co. and Microsoft Corp. today announced a global collaboration focused on digitally transforming the real estate development and property management industries. This collaboration, combining smart appliances and digital cloud technologies, aims at helping to drive improved building operations and maintenance, along with creating better experiences for both service technicians and residents.
This new strategic alliance, with pilots currently under development, brings together the power of Microsoft’s Azure IoT platform and productivity cloud services with Samsung’s smart devices and SmartThings platform, to help optimize building operations, equipment maintenance, energy management, asset performance, and new tenant experiences for commercial, hospitality and residential buildings as well as mixed-use developments.
The companies will leverage Samsung’s smart home appliances, HVAC systems and smart TVs integrated with SmartThings, together with Microsoft’s Azure Digital Twins technology and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, to improve building maintenance and management by aggregating and analyzing IoT data from building systems and connected appliances. For example, with this new capability building managers can not only create an integrated dashboard for handling building issues in real time but potentially before failure, saving time and resources.
Microsoft’s Azure IoT platform is able to process data messaging from millions of building sensors and devices and then use machine learning and AI to help building managers and operators determine what issues should be addressed in what order, and then link to Dynamics 365 Field Service to determine who is the right person, with the right skills, in the right location to resolve the issue. This helps to reduce service calls while also improving the productivity of service technicians who can now troubleshoot multiple issues on a single visit and, if needed, get remote assistance through the Microsoft Teams application.
This collaboration with Samsung extends this capability to include Samsung smart appliances, HVAC systems and TVs, with plans to expand into digital signage equipment. The alliance also covers Samsung mobile devices, including the XCover Pro mobile phone, to create improved experiences for frontline workers involved in handling building issues. Additionally, Samsung plans to offer SmartThings mobile development tools to enable builders to craft custom, tailored connected living experiences for their end users.
The collaboration will leverage data from Samsung’s range of smart refrigerators, washing machines, vacuums, air purifiers, ovens and other devices connected through the intelligent SmartThings platform. Such data integration allows building operators to monitor nearly all devices in real time, identify issues and take appropriate measures before real damage happens, should a problem occur.
“We believe collaboration with a key partner like Microsoft is essential for innovation, as the company shares our vision of inspiring the world to shape the future by innovating in technology and products,” said Chanwoo Park, corporate vice president heading up the IoT Biz Group at Samsung. “Providing building owners and operators with a robust and powerful set of tools to help them optimize their building costs and equipment, including the management of Samsung’s connected appliances and other devices, is paramount to our long-term alliance. Together with Microsoft, we are helping to solve real challenges faced by our customers by creating secure integrated insight and digital solutions that keep properties functioning sustainably and efficiently while providing better experiences for residents.”
“With Azure Digital Twins, we can create comprehensive digital models of entire environments and a living digital replica of real-world things, places, business processes and people to help customers gain insights that drive better products, optimization of operations, cost reduction and breakthrough customer experiences. This collaboration with Samsung opens up new opportunities for further innovation in the real estate development and property management industries,” said Sam George, corporate vice president, Azure IoT, Microsoft. “Together, we’ll bring the best of Microsoft’s trusted, easy-to-use and secure Azure IoT platform, Azure Digital Twins and Dynamics 365 Field Service technology with Samsung’s expertise in connected devices and appliances to streamline building operations and maintenance.”
In addition to bringing new capabilities to the real estate and property management world, the companies have aligned their worldwide marketing, partner and sales programs to deliver these new integrated solutions for their customers, including facilities management companies and real estate developers.
Oxford Properties, one of the largest real estate companies in North America, also with operations in Europe and Australia, says this new alliance has the potential to add high value for customers.
“We are excited about the collaboration of Microsoft’s Digital Twins technology and Samsung’s range of connected devices, and the potential of these instruments to deliver meaningful new insights across the commercial real estate value-chain,” said Dean Hopkins, chief operating officer, Oxford Properties. “Investing in digital twins sets a foundation to unlock future opportunities. We are working with thought leaders around the world to advance the intelligence of our buildings and see enormous potential to positively impact building operations, asset management and customer experiences. Microsoft and Samsung coming together to accelerate the value that digital twins are bringing to the commercial real estate ecosystem is a great step forward.”
The National University of Singapore (NUS) will serve as a pilot for solutions pioneered under this alliance between Samsung and Microsoft as part of the university’s ongoing efforts to create a smart, safe and sustainable campus for students and staff.
“NUS is very excited to work with Microsoft and Samsung in piloting smart building management solutions on our campus,” said Professor Yong Kwet Yew, senior vice president of Campus Infrastructure at NUS. “The experience gained from this trial could help us transform the way we maintain our buildings with predictive maintenance, enable better user experiences and create a smart campus ecosystem, and it has potential to scale up at the national level.”
About Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
Samsung inspires the world and shapes the future with transformative ideas and technologies. The company is redefining the worlds of TVs, smartphones, wearable devices, tablets, digital appliances, network systems, and memory, system LSI, foundry and LED solutions. For the latest news, please visit the Samsung Newsroom at http://news.samsung.com.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
For more information, press only:
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, rrt@we-worldwide.com
Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.
Microsoft named ONE Championship’s preferred cloud provider, delivering new fan engagement experiences powered by Microsoft Azure and best-in-class collaboration with Microsoft 365
SINGAPORE — July 6, 2020 — The largest global sports media property in Asian history, ONE Championship™ (ONE) and Microsoft Corp. (Microsoft) today announced a strategic partnership to harness the Microsoft cloud, including Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, to transform digital fan experiences and enhance collaboration for employees. Microsoft is now ONE’s preferred cloud and data services provider, powering its digital transformation and accelerating innovation across all touchpoints.
Microsoft and ONE, through this alliance, are co-investing in digital fan experience transformation. The partnership is set to further enhance ONE’s position as a leading global sports media property and further execute its vision to engage fans through its unique brand of Asian values, world-class athletes and global appeal. As ONE accelerates its digital journey, the company will leverage the power of the cloud and data to build new capabilities and deliver cutting-edge digital experiences for its millions of fans around the world.
Empowering and enriching fan experiences
ONE will further enhance its over-the-top platform by leveraging Azure to accelerate its world-class streaming services and personalized content offers for fans around the world. AI-powered recommendation engines and analytics on fan behavior and viewing habits will allow ONE to better engage fans across all touchpoints and provide them with reimagined, tailor-made experiences.
Through Azure AI, machine learning and data analytics, ONE will expand its core data capabilities and transform its direct-to-consumer digital experiences. To further delight fans, ONE will provide them with unique sets of data and statistics to better understand the strength of a kick or a punch. Ultimately, the fans will be able to enjoy a more immersive experience when watching live events.
The collaboration between Microsoft and ONE will also allow fans to experience events remotely with the flexibility and scalability needed to address increasing demand from end users — especially during this unprecedented time when sports entertainment shifts to digital. In the future, the partnership will also enable ONE to explore other innovations such as the use of holographic computing in injury prevention; as well as the ability to improve athletic performance through AI and machine learning.
“I am thrilled to announce that ONE Championship has officially partnered with Microsoft to deliver fans the absolute best in data-driven digital experiences,” Chatri Sityodtong, chairman and CEO of ONE Championship, stated. “ONE Championship is a global leader in live sports, and through the Microsoft cloud, we can accelerate our capabilities and digital presence.”
“Demand for digital experiences has never been higher and our partnership with ONE Championship — a leader in sports entertainment with the largest and most rapidly growing millennial fan base — will enable them to deliver on this opportunity in innovative new ways and enhance the services they provide for supporters, athletes and employees,” Jean-Philippe Courtois, EVP and president, Microsoft Global Sales, Marketing & Operations, stated. “We’re looking forward to working with ONE to help accelerate its digital transformation for the benefit of millions of sports fans around the world.”
Expanded productivity and content ecosystem
As part of its push toward digital transformation, ONE will roll out Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams, as the primary productivity platform for ONE employees worldwide, helping to ensure seamless collaboration in a new remote work reality.
In addition, to provide fans with a one-stop source of digital content, ONE has also partnered with Microsoft to bring its exclusive content stacks to the Microsoft News ecosystem, which reaches more than 500 million people in 180 countries every month through personalized news feeds on MSN, Bing and Microsoft Edge, as well as through dozens of global syndication partners.
World-class global sports thought leadership
ONE and Microsoft will also leverage the Global Sports Innovation Centre (GSIC),[1] a collaborative initiative between private, public and academic partners powered by Microsoft, to support innovation in the sports industry around the world. ONE is a powerhouse of innovation and thought leadership in sports, and through its involvement in GSIC activities, initiatives and open innovation projects, ONE will connect with industry stakeholders in other continents, exchange experiences, learn and add value to the sports tech ecosystem of start-ups, companies, organizations, universities and research groups.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
About ONE Championship™
ONE Championship (ONE) is the largest global sports media property in Asian history. Headquartered in Singapore, ONE is the world’s largest martial arts organization, hosting bouts across all styles of martial arts such as Muay Thai, Kickboxing, Karate, Kung Fu, Silat, Sanda, Lethwei, Mixed Martial Arts, Tae Kwon Do, Submission Grappling, and more. ONE hosts the biggest sports entertainment events across Asia, featuring some of the world’s best martial artists and world champions on the largest global media broadcast in Asia. ONE Esports, a subsidiary of ONE Championship, runs Asia’s largest global esports Championship Series with some of the biggest blockbuster game titles in the world. With a focus on both martial arts and esports, ONE Championship is currently the largest producer of millennial live sports content in Asia. In addition to its digital platforms, ONE Championship broadcasts to over 2.7 billion potential viewers across 150+ countries with some of the largest global free-to-air and digital broadcasters, including Star Sports, Tencent, ABS-CBN, Astro, ClaroSports, Startimes, Fox Sports, Thairath TV, Turner Sports, Skynet, Mediacorp, Great Sports, Mediaset Italia, ProSiebenSat.1, Dubai Sports, and more.
For more updates on ONE Championship, please visit https://www.onefc.com/about-us/, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @ONEChampionship, and like us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ONEChampionship.
For more information, press only:
Microsoft Asia, Joanna Frackowiak, joannafr@microsoft.com Microsoft Singapore, Antonia Ong, anong@microsoft.com Edelman (Partner Agency for Microsoft Asia), Adeline Goh / Amanda Sng, EdelMSFTComm@edelman.com
ONE Championship, Tammy Chan, Director of PR & Communications, +601 9326 2473, t.chan@onefc.com ONE Championship, Cissy Long, Director of PR & Communications, China, +86 186 2179 9403, c.long@onefc.com
[1] The Global Sports Innovation Center (GSIC) is a collaborative initiative between private, public, and academic partners to support innovation in the sports industry across the world, as a driver of job creation and economic growth. Its goal is to improve the value chain of the Sports Industry by leveraging the most advanced technologies, and enabling business connections among startups, sports organizations, educational institutions, and enterprise organizations. With over 170 members located in 20 countries all around the world, the GSIC has become a worldwide reference for the sports industry.
“In the era of big data, insights collected from cloud services running at the scale of Azure quickly exceed the attention span of humans. It’s critical to identify the right steps to maintain the highest possible quality of service based on the large volume of data collected. In applying this to Azure, we envision infusing AI into our cloud platform and DevOps process, becoming AIOps, to enable the Azure platform to become more self-adaptive, resilient, and efficient. AIOps will also support our engineers to take the right actions more effectively and in a timely manner to continue improving service quality and delighting our customers and partners. This post continuesourAdvancingReliabilityserieshighlightinginitiatives underway to keep improving the reliability of the Azure platform. The post that follows was written by Jian Zhang, our Program Manager overseeing these efforts, as she shares our vision for AIOps, and highlights areas of this AI infusion that are already a reality as part of our end-to-end cloud service management.”—Mark Russinovich, CTO, Azure
This post includes contributions from Principal Data Scientist Manager Yingnong Dang and Partner Group Software Engineering Manager Murali Chintalapati.
As Mark mentioned when he launched this Advancing Reliability blog series, building and operating a global cloud infrastructure at the scale of Azure is a complex task with hundreds of ever-evolving service components, spanning more than 160 datacenters and across more than 60 regions. To rise to this challenge, we have created an AIOps team to collaborate broadly across Azure engineering teams and partnered with Microsoft Research to develop AI solutions to make cloud service management more efficient and more reliable than ever before. We are going to share our vision on the importance of infusing AI into our cloud platform and DevOps process. Gartner referred to something similar as AIOps (pronounced “AI Ops”) and this has become the common term that we use internally, albeit with a larger scope. Today’s post is just the start, as we intend to provide regular updates to share our adoption stories of using AI technologies to support how we build and operate Azure at scale.
Why AIOps?
There are two unique characteristics of cloud services:
The ever-increasing scale and complexity of the cloud platform and systems
The ever-changing needs of customers, partners, and their workloads
To build and operate reliable cloud services during this constant state of flux, and to do so as efficiently and effectively as possible, our cloud engineers (including thousands of Azure developers, operations engineers, customer support engineers, and program managers) heavily rely on data to make decisions and take actions. Furthermore, many of these decisions and actions need to be executed automatically as an integral part of our cloud services or our DevOps processes. Streamlining the path from data to decisions to actions involves identifying patterns in the data, reasoning, and making predictions based on historical data, then recommending or even taking actions based on the insights derived from all that underlying data.
Figure 1. Infusing AI into cloud platform and DevOps.
The AIOps vision
AIOps has started to transform the cloud business by improving service quality and customer experience at scale while boosting engineers’ productivity with intelligent tools, driving continuous cost optimization, and ultimately improving the reliability, performance, and efficiency of the platform itself. When we invest in advancing AIOps and related technologies, we see this ultimately provides value in several ways:
Higher service quality and efficiency: Cloud services will have built-in capabilities of self-monitoring, self-adapting, and self-healing, all with minimal human intervention. Platform-level automation powered by such intelligence will improve service quality (including reliability, and availability, and performance), and service efficiency to deliver the best possible customer experience.
Higher DevOps productivity: With the automation power of AI and ML, engineers are released from the toil of investigating repeated issues, manually operating and supporting their services, and can instead focus on solving new problems, building new functionality, and work that more directly impacts the customer and partner experience. In practice, AIOps empowers developers and engineers with insights to avoid looking at raw data, thereby improving engineer productivity.
Higher customer satisfaction: AIOps solutions play a critical role in enabling customers to use, maintain, and troubleshoot their workloads on top of our cloud services as easily as possible. We endeavor to use AIOps to understand customer needs better, in some cases to identify potential pain points and proactively reach out as needed. Data-driven insights into customer workload behavior could flag when Microsoft or the customer needs to take action to prevent issues or apply workarounds. Ultimately, the goal is to improve satisfaction by quickly identifying, mitigating, and fixing issues.
My colleagues Marcus Fontoura, Murali Chintalapati, and Yingnong Dang shared Microsoft’s vision, investments, and sample achievements in this space during the keynote AI for Cloud–Toward Intelligent Cloud Platforms and AIOps at the AAAI-20 Workshop on Cloud Intelligence in conjunction with the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The vision was created by a Microsoft AIOps committee across cloud service product groups including Azure, Microsoft 365, Bing, and LinkedIn, as well as Microsoft Research (MSR). In the keynote, we shared a few key areas in which AIOps can be transformative for building and operating cloud systems, as shown in the chart below.
Figure 2. AI for Cloud: AIOps and AI-Serving Platform.
AIOps
Moving beyond our vision, we wanted to start by briefly summarizing our general methodology for building AIOps solutions. A solution in this space always starts with data—measurements of systems, customers, and processes—as the key of any AIOps solution is distilling insights about system behavior, customer behaviors, and DevOps artifacts and processes. The insights could include identifying a problem that is happening now (detect), why it’s happening (diagnose), what will happen in the future (predict), and how to improve (optimize, adjust, and mitigate). Such insights should always be associated with business metrics—customer satisfaction, system quality, and DevOps productivity—and drive actions in line with prioritization determined by the business impact. The actions will also be fed back into the system and process. This feedback could be fully automated (infused into the system) or with humans in the loop (infused into the DevOps process). This overall methodology guided us to build AIOps solutions in three pillars.
Figure 3. AIOps methodologies: Data, insights, and actions.
AI for systems
Today, we’re introducing several AIOps solutions that are already in use and supporting Azure behind the scenes. The goal is to automate system management to reduce human intervention. As a result, this helps to reduce operational costs, improve system efficiency, and increase customer satisfaction. These solutions have already contributed significantly to the Azure platform availability improvements, especially for Azure IaaS virtual machines (VMs). AIOps solutions contributed in several ways including protecting customers’ workload from host failures through hardware failure prediction and proactive actions like live migration and Project Tardigrade and pre-provisioning VMs to shorten VM creation time.
Of course, engineering improvements and ongoing system innovation also play important roles in the continuous improvement of platform reliability.
Hardware Failure Prediction is to protect cloud customers from interruptions caused by hardware failures. We shared our story of Improving Azure Virtual Machine resiliency with predictive ML and live migration back in 2018. Microsoft Research and Azure have built a disk failure prediction solution for Azure Compute, triggering the live migration of customer VMs from predicted-to-fail nodes to healthy nodes. We also expanded the prediction to other types of hardware issues including memory and networking router failures. This enables us to perform predictive maintenance for better availability.
Pre-Provisioning Service in Azure brings VM deployment reliability and latency benefits by creating pre-provisioned VMs. Pre-provisioned VMs are pre-created and partially configured VMs ahead of customer requests for VMs. As we described in the IJCAI 2020 publication, As we described in the AAAI-20 keynote mentioned above, the Pre-Provisioning Service leverages a prediction engine to predict VM configurations and the number of VMs per configuration to pre-create. This prediction engine applies dynamic models that are trained based on historical and current deployment behaviors and predicts future deployments. Pre-Provisioning Service uses this prediction to create and manage VM pools per VM configuration. Pre-Provisioning Service resizes the pool of VMs by destroying or adding VMs as prescribed by the latest predictions. Once a VM matching the customer’s request is identified, the VM is assigned from the pre-created pool to the customer’s subscription.
AI for DevOps
AI can boost engineering productivity and help in shipping high-quality services with speed. Below are a few examples of AI for DevOps solutions.
Incident management is an important aspect of cloud service management—identifying and mitigating rare but inevitable platform outages. A typical incident management procedure consists of multiple stages including detection, engagement, and mitigation stages. Time spent in each stage is used as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to measure and drive rapid issue resolution. KPIs include time to detect (TTD), time to engage (TTE), and time to mitigate (TTM).
Figure 4. Incident management procedures.
As shared in AIOps Innovations in Incident Management for Cloud Services at the AAAI-20 conference, we have developed AI-based solutions that enable engineers not only to detect issues early but also to identify the right team(s) to engage and therefore mitigate as quickly as possible. Tight integration into the platform enables end-to-end touchless mitigation for some scenarios, which considerably reduces customer impact and therefore improves the overall customer experience.
Anomaly Detection provides an end-to-end monitoring and anomaly detection solution for Azure IaaS. The detection solution targets a broad spectrum of anomaly patterns that includes not only generic patterns defined by thresholds, but also patterns which are typically more difficult to detect such as leaking patterns (for example, memory leaks) and emerging patterns (not a spike, but increasing with fluctuations over a longer term). Insights generated by the anomaly detection solutions are injected into the existing Azure DevOps platform and processes, for example, alerting through the telemetry platform, incident management platform, and, in some cases, triggering automated communications to impacted customers. This helps us detect issues as early as possible.
For an example that has already made its way into a customer-facing feature, Dynamic Threshold is an ML-based anomaly detection model. It is a feature of Azure Monitor used through the Azure portal or through the ARM API. Dynamic Threshold allows users to tune their detection sensitivity, including specifying how many violation points will trigger a monitoring alert.
Safe Deployment serves as an intelligent global “watchdog” for the safe rollout of Azure infrastructure components. We built a system, code name Gandalf, that analyzes temporal and spatial correlation to capture latent issues that happened hours or even days after the rollout. This helps to identify suspicious rollouts (during a sea of ongoing rollouts), which is common for Azure scenarios, and helps prevent the issue propagating and therefore prevents impact to additional customers. We provided details on our safe deployment practices in this earlier blog post and went into more detail about how Gandalf works in our USENIX NSDI 2020 paper and slide deck.
AI for customers
To improve the Azure customer experience, we have been developing AI solutions to power the full lifecycle of customer management. For example, a decision support system has been developed to guide customers towards the best selection of support resources by leveraging the customer’s service selection and verbatim summary of the problem experienced. This helps shorten the time it takes to get customers and partners the right guidance and support that they need.
AI-serving platform
To achieve greater efficiencies in managing a global-scale cloud, we have been investing in building systems that support using AI to optimize cloud resource usage and therefore the customer experience. One example is Resource Central (RC), an AI-serving platform for Azure that we described in Communications of the ACM. It collects telemetry from Azure containers and servers, learns from their prior behaviors, and, when requested, produces predictions of their future behaviors. We are already using RC to predict many characteristics of Azure Compute workloads accurately, including resource procurement and allocation, all of which helps to improve system performance and efficiency.
Looking towards the future
We have shared our vision of AI infusion into the Azure platform and our DevOps processes and highlighted several solutions that are already in use to improve service quality across a range of areas. Look to us to share more details of our internal AI and ML solutions for even more intelligent cloud management in the future. We’re confident that these are the right investment solutions to improve our effectiveness and efficiency as a cloud provider, including improving the reliability and performance of the Azure platform itself.
