Microsoft 2015 Annual Report Download - page 10

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will design applications as dual-use with the intelligence to partition data between work and life while respecting each
person’s privacy choices. The foundation for these efforts will rest on advancing our leading productivity,
collaboration, and business process tools including Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint,
Bing, and Dynamics. With Office 365, we provide these familiar industry-leading productivity and business process
tools as cloud services, enabling access from anywhere and any device. This creates an opportunity to reach new
customers, and expand the usage of our services by our existing customers.
We see opportunity in combining our offerings in new ways that are more contextual and personal, while ensuring
people, rather than their devices, remain at the center of the digital experience. We will offer our services across
ecosystems and devices outside our own. As people move from device to device, so will their content and the
richness of their services. We are engineering our applications so users can find, try, and buy them in friction-free
ways.
Build the intelligent cloud platform
In deploying technology that advances business strategy, enterprises decide what solutions will make employees
more productive, collaborative, and satisfied, and connect with customers in new and compelling ways. They work to
unlock business insights from a world of data. To achieve these objectives, increasingly businesses look to leverage
the benefits of the cloud. Helping businesses move to the cloud is one of our largest opportunities, and we believe
we work from a position of strength.
The shift to the cloud is driven by three important economies of scale: larger datacenters can deploy computational
resources at significantly lower cost per unit than smaller ones; larger datacenters can coordinate and aggregate
diverse customer, geographic, and application demand patterns, improving the utilization of computing, storage, and
network resources; and multi-tenancy lowers application maintenance labor costs for large public clouds. As one of
the largest providers of cloud computing at scale, we are well-positioned to help businesses move to the cloud so
that businesses can focus on innovation while leaving non-differentiating activities to reliable and cost-effective
providers like Microsoft.
With Azure, we are one of very few cloud vendors that run at a scale that meets the needs of businesses of all sizes
and complexities. We believe the combination of Azure and Windows Server makes us the only company with a
public, private, and hybrid cloud platform that can power modern business. We are working to enhance the return on
information technology (“IT”) investment by enabling enterprises to combine their existing datacenters and our public
cloud into a single cohesive infrastructure. Businesses can deploy applications in their own datacenter, a partner’s
datacenter, or in our datacenters with common security, management, and administration across all environments,
with the flexibility and scale they want.
We enable organizations to securely adopt software-as-a-service applications (both our own and third-party) and
integrate them with their existing security and management infrastructure. We will continue to innovate with higher-
level services including identity and directory services that manage employee corporate identity and manage and
secure corporate information accessed and stored across a growing number of devices, rich data storage and
analytics services, machine learning services, media services, web and mobile backend services, and developer
productivity services. To foster a rich developer ecosystem, our digital work and life experiences will also be
extensible, enabling customers and partners to further customize and enhance our solutions, achieving even more
value. This strategy requires continuing investment in datacenters and other infrastructure to support our devices and
services.
Create more personal computing
Windows 10 is the cornerstone of our ambition to usher in an era of more personal computing. We see the launch of
Windows 10 in July 2015 as a critical, transformative moment for the Company because we will move from an
operating system that runs on a PC to a service that can power the full spectrum of devices in our customers’ lives.
We developed Windows 10 not only to be familiar to our users, but more safe and secure, and always up-to-date. We
believe Windows 10 is more personal and productive, working seamlessly with functionality such as Cortana, Office,
Continuum, and universal applications. We designed Windows 10 to foster innovation – from us, our partners and
developers – through experiences such as our new browser Microsoft Edge, across the range of existing devices,
and into entirely new device categories.