On today’s episode of Azure for Executives, Sujit D'Mello joins us to discuss Mastodon and federated systems. This episode deviates a bit from our standard fare, but we thought it would be fun to delve into this topics.

In addition to learning about the Mastodon micro-blogging system, Sujit helps us understand federated systems, their advantages, and why your company may be interested in setting up its own server.

Sujit D’Mello

Follow Sujit on your favorite social platform and listen to him on the Azure Podcast.

• Mastodon
• LinkedIn
• The Azure Podcast

Hosts:

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Commercial Marketplace Service Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Software Development Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services Team at Microsoft. Follow him on  LinkedIn  and  Mastodon

.

In this timely discussion, we were joined by Zia Mansoor on the Azure for Executives podcast. Zia is Vice President for Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Data and AI Business. He shares his thoughts on the present and future of AI, the relationship between data and AI, what is driving the AI wave, and much more.

Join us for this great conversation about how organizations can realize the models and benefits of AI and the data that is enabling it.

Follow Zia Mansoor on LinkedIn 

• Azure Synapse Analytics
• Azure Pervue
• Microsoft Intelligence Data Platform
• Microsoft Designer
• Data mesh
• Azure applied AI services
• Azure OpenAI in the Azure Marketplace

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Commercial Marketplace Service Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Software Development Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Mastodon.

We’re joined by Amanda Silver, CVP of Product in Microsoft’s Developer Division (DevDiv). She takes us through the present and future of developer tools and how organizations are making investments on next-generation development ecosystems.

Guest information

Follow Amanda on LinkedIn

Topics discussed in this episode include the following.

• Visual Studio
• Visual Studio Code
• Microsoft Dev Box
• GitHub Copilot
• Azure Spring Apps
• And much more!

Host information

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Commercial Marketplace Service Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Software Development Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Mastodon.

This is a unique episode. Short and sweet. Since David and Paul really don’t have a chance to introduce themselves in regular episodes, they thought it might be good to take an opportunity to do so in this episode.

After introductions, they share announcements regarding the future of this podcast.

Episode Links:

• Mastering The Marketplace

Hosts:

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Commercial Marketplace Service Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Software Development Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Mastodon.

Transcript:

DAVID: Rebooting the podcast with your hosts, Paul Maher, and David Starr.

Welcome to the Azure for Executives Podcast, the show for technology leaders. This podcast covers trends and technologies in industries and how Microsoft Azure is enabling them. Here, you'll hear from thought leaders in various industries and technologies on topics important to you. 

So I'm sure you've noticed that the Azure for Executives Podcast has been on a bit of a hiatus for a few months. Well, we're back. And we're back with some really great news, which I'll leave for a few minutes as we kind of settle into this episode. 

Now, this is a unique episode, as it'll be pretty short and sweet. We don't have any guests today. But instead, you get my co-host, Paul Maher, and me talking a little bit about the show and our futures. Since we don't really have a chance to introduce ourselves in regular episodes, we thought it might be good to take an opportunity to do so in this episode. So after introductions, we'll have some announcements regarding the future of the podcast. 

Paul, why don't you talk a little bit about what you do at Microsoft and maybe some of your passions?

PAUL: Thanks, David. And it's great to be back. And it's nice to have the opportunity, as you said, to actually introduce ourselves. We spend a lot of time talking to our guests, so it's a fun opportunity to say hi to our listeners. 

And so, just a little bit about myself, I mean, I've worked in various business and technology-related leadership roles throughout my career with some of the largest companies worldwide across multiple industries. But for the past few years, I've really been focused on cloud across many different roles and initiatives. So you could call me kind of really the cloud evangelist if you will. But currently, at Microsoft, I lead the commercial marketplace services organization. And my focus is really on helping businesses transform by moving to the Microsoft Azure Cloud and growing sales through the Microsoft commercial marketplace. 

So great to be here, great to have the opportunity to introduce myself to the listeners. And, David, maybe you want to take the opportunity to do the same.

DAVID: Sure. Thanks, Paul. I'm a Principal Software Development Engineer here at Microsoft, and I live in the same organization as Paul, and that is the commercial marketplace services team. And, Paul, if you think back, you hired me directly. And I was about number seven in the org at that time, if you'll recall. And --

PAUL: That's right. Lucky number 7, David. Lucky number 7.

DAVID: [laughs] Indeed. And we have a pretty good-sized organization now, so we've grown quite a bit over the last four years, which is how long I've been with the team, four years and counting. So I'll tell you that this is my second stint at Microsoft. And my first go-round was working on Visual Studio. For those who might use Visual Studio on the show, may not be you but people who work for you; I put a feature, or I was part of a team, I should say, a good-sized team that put a feature called CodeLens into Visual Studio. So that was a good piece of work. 

And today, instead, I focus on working with partners for the commercial marketplace, as you've heard, a pretty good focus on the commercial marketplace in our past episodes. Well, what that means is that I take consults. These are sort of one-time answer questions for partners who might be struggling a little bit with their onboarding or work with partners in a longer-term engagement to get them from start to finish and get their products onboarded to the commercial marketplace. So that's the essence of what I do. I work with partners in that context. 

And my little side project baby I have to mention, is Mastering the Marketplace. That is a resource where you or your technologists on your team can go to learn more about how to do that implementation. And we have videos and code and hands-on labs to grow skills, so all that good stuff to help you get going. And the URL for that will be posted in the show notes. I'll say here it's aka.ms/masteringthemarketplace. With that, Paul, what's the big news that we were talking about?

PAUL: So the big news, even though we are part of the Microsoft commercial marketplace organization and that's our day job and our priority, we've taken a step back. And we feel like broadening the focus of the podcast here to include all topics Azure will be really relevant and interesting to our listeners, and executives, and leaders who are looking to move to Azure. So with a goal of making sure that folks who tune in and listen can get the best experience and the best knowledge exchange from tuning into the podcast, we'll be broadening the reach of the podcast to cover all things Azure which I'm super excited about. 

Historically, we made the decision to have a singular focus on the show. But I think the new format will really benefit everyone and really be applicable to a diverse audience. So I'm excited that we're expanding our remit, expanding our scope, and excited about the topics that will be upcoming in future shows. So with that, I mean, David, do you want to talk a little bit about the new format for our listeners?

DAVID: Sure, Paul. And just to reiterate, I'm really excited too about where the show is going. I think we're going to have a really good dearth of topics and be a show that is more of a resource for technology decision-makers, so as we said, with regard to format, but as we said, our focus will be broadening. 

And while our audience demographic of leadership positions within technology organizations remains the same, our show topics will include specific technologies, patterns and practices, recommendations, and guidance on how to get the most from Azure, particularly as it relates to your business processes, your business goals, and how to achieve your technology goals. Our intent is to bring experts to the show and share real-world experiences to help you be successful in your technological adventures.

PAUL: That's great, David. So with that, carrying on then, now we understand a little bit about that new format where we're broadening the scope. We have lots of good stuff in terms of thinking about all things Azure patterns and practices, recommendations. What I'm excited about is that it's really hopefully going to be a consumable digest for all listeners to learn about all things Azure. Specifically, David, is there anything you are excited about the future of the show?

DAVID: You bet there is. I'm excited to talk with some of the great guests we've got lined up and learn from them about many aspects of using Azure, how they've implemented their solutions, how they've perhaps even changed their business to work with cloud technologies, and how they drive new business and enable technologists in their organizations. 

And I won't give away any spoilers here, Paul, but I will say that I'm glad to be back producing the show. So to the listeners, whether you're a long-time listener or someone who's just joining us for the first time, I'm positive that you'll enjoy the diversity of conversation. 

I have to tell you, Paul, I listen to a bunch of other podcasts. I don't listen to us really after [laughs] we've produced the show. But I love podcasts myself, technology ones in particular. And I especially like them for my morning walks to and from my gym. And for me, that means I like about a 25 to 35-minute episode, which is what we'll target for the show going forward. We'll try and keep it within those bounds. Now, speaking of excited about the show, how about you, Paul?

PAUL: Yeah, I'm super excited, David. I mean, I'm looking forward to rebooting the show. It's been a little while. I've enjoyed the summer time off, but now it's time to get back to business. Just to reiterate what you've said, David, I think a 25 to 35-minute sweet spot is great. I think it's long enough for the content to be meaningful but not too long, where it becomes a little bit of a challenge to get through the contents. So we're excited about that.  

We've carried forward the learnings from our podcasts, and we've listened to the listeners. And so excited about the format, excited about the timings. And I hear you about...I hate hearing my own voice also [chuckles], but I encourage the listeners to tune in and listen. 

But what am I looking forward to as we reboot the show? Well, number one, of course, it's all about the listeners, so I'm super excited to reconnect with our listeners. Thank you for following us so far, and excited about what we'll bring in the future. Of course, in the fast-paced technology world that we all live in, I'm excited to learn about the latest advancements from our guests, of which it's a changing world, of course, but most importantly, really sharing practical hands-on guidance with our listeners. So hopefully, we're helping our listeners achieve their goals and accelerate their path to success. 

My hope with the podcast ultimately is that we're providing in that 25 to 35 minutes bite-sized consumable content that is really clear in terms of the delivery but also actionable. My goal is that the conversation doesn't stop with the podcast. That's the beginning of the conversation. So that's what I'm excited about, David. And then so with that, I mean, David, as we look to close things out, is there anything you'd like to share on logistics?

DAVID: You bet. Let's talk about how we're going to move forward producing the show. We'll be working to hit a cadence of an episode about every two weeks or so, and to be honest, that's about all either of our schedules can tolerate for getting episodes on air. And beyond that, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, Google Podcasts, Podcast Addict, and all those other podcast aggregators and hosts. 

Also, you can get to us on our homepage easily by going to this URL: aka.ms/azureforexecs. And we post every show there, and you can listen to it through a web page if you choose. And that's our landing page for the show. So I encourage you to head over there, where you'll be able to see show notes and be able to subscribe to the show in various ways. Just click the Listen & Subscribe button. 

So speaking of show notes, I want to add for this episode, we're going to obviously include links to some of the things we've talked about and also to Paul's social accounts and to my socials as well. And I'll tell you, you know, even though I'll probably post a Twitter account, I stepped away from that lately [laughs]. I don't know why. 

I really like it when people hit me up though on LinkedIn and talk about the show, give me some feedback, tell us what you'd like to hear in future episodes. So hit me up on LinkedIn, and my LinkedIn profile will be in the show notes. So really looking forward to moving forward and to hearing from you as we reboot the show and have a different path forward.

PAUL: That's awesome. So not only are we rebooting the show, David, I hear we need to get more social. So be on the lookout for us dialing back up and being more social on LinkedIn and our Twitter accounts. So with that, let's stop the introductions and get on with the first show in the new format. 

Thank you so much to our listeners who have stuck with us over the years, and welcome hopefully to new listeners. It's great to have you here. We're delighted you're all joining us, too, for the Azure for Executives Podcast. And with that, on with the show.

DAVID: Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Azure for Executives Podcast. We love hearing from you. And if you have suggestions for topics, questions about issues discussed on the show, or other feedback, contact the show host, David Starr or Paul Maher, through the social media links included in the show notes for each episode. We look forward to hearing from you.

Are you still considering a move to the Azure cloud? If so, this episode is for you.

In this episode of the Azure for Executives podcast we discuss Azure Landing Zones, tools for helping organizations move their workloads into Azure. Beyond prescriptive guidance, Azure Landing Zones provide reference architectures for solutions of all sizes to help with moving to Azure.

Guests

• Dom Allen on LinkedIn
• Jeff Mitchell  on LinkedIn

More on Azure Landing Zones

1. Join the upcoming Azure Landing Zone community call – Jan. 31st, 2023
2. What is an Azure Landing Zone?
3. Journey to the target architecture

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Commercial Marketplace Service Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Software Development Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Mastodon.

Today's episode focuses on the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF) with our guest, Global Engineering Lead for the CAF, Brian Blanchard. The CAF framework provides guidance for creating and implementing business and technology strategies for the cloud.

We discuss moving your technology and business to Microsoft Azure and talk about some best practices for business decision-makers, cloud architects, and other technology leaders. We also talk about mistakes people can make along the way.

Episode Links:

• Episode Transcript
• The Cloud Adoption Framework
• Cloud Adoption Strategy Evaluator
• Cloud Adoption Framework Discover Workshops
• Microsoft Learn Modules
• Azure Migration and Modernization Program

Guest:

Brian Blanchard is the Global Engineering Lead for the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure (CAF).

Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Hosts:

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Software Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services team at Microsoft.

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we’re talking about how Microsoft engages with the developer community. 

Growing and maintaining a strong community of developers has always been important to Microsoft. Our developer relations team, led by Corporate Vice President of Developer Relations at Microsoft Jeff Sandquist, makes the world better for developers and enables them to apply the latest technologies to create software that changes the world.

Episode Links:

• Episode Transcript
• Azure Developer Community Blog
• Developer Communities
• Microsoft Reactor

Guest:

Jeff Sandquist is the Corporate Vice President of Developer Relations at Microsoft.

Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Hosts:

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Software Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services team at Microsoft.

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Microsoft believes security and information privacy are fundamental rights. And Microsoft has taken this to heart with a Confidential Computing initiative as part of the overall Azure promise on trust and security.

In this episode, Graham Bury, Eden Cohen, and Anna Montalat Campamar talk about what Confidential Computing is, what is Microsoft’s vision for Confidential Computing in the Azure space is, pros and cons to computing confidentially on the cloud rather than a private data center, and a few stories about how partners and customers are working with Microsoft to move forward their own Confidential Computing initiatives.

Episode Links:

• Episode Transcript
• Azure Confidential Computing
• Key foundations for protecting your data with Azure confidential computing

Customer stories:

• Accelerating healthcare AI innovation with Zero Trust technology
• Scaling secure enclave environments with Signal and Azure confidential computing
• RBC creates relevant personalized offers while protecting data privacy with Azure confidential computing
• MobileCoin creates fast, trusted cryptocurrency transfers with Azure confidential computing

Guests:

Graham Bury joined Azure’s Compute organization two years ago to lead the commercialization and developer platform for confidential computing.  He brings over 15 years of experience at Microsoft across client and service products from Windows to Surface Hub and HoloLens.

Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Eden Cohen joined Azure's Compute organization earlier this year and leads the infrastructure product team within Confidential Computing. He is responsible for virtual machine and hardware-based products. 

Follow him on LinkedIn.

Anna Montalat Campamar leads the product marketing efforts for Azure Security platform and Confidential Computing. She has experience in a wide array of technologies – from infancy such as quantum to growing ones, including confidential computing.

Follow her on LinkedIn or Twitter. 

Host:

David Starr is a Principal Software Engineer in the Commercial Marketplace Services team at Microsoft.

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We are discussing what it means for technology executives to lead their companies through true digital transformations, both from technology and cultural change perspectives. We’ve mentioned digital transformation several times over various episodes. 

Today, we’ll be making digital transformation very tangible and providing guidance for leaders looking to revamp their organizations with technically driven initiatives with our guest Merrie Williamson, the Corporate Vice President of Azure Infrastructure, Digital and App Innovation, and Azure IoT at Microsoft.

Episode Links:

Episode Transcript
Digital Transformation with Microsoft
Microsoft Learn course - Enabling Digital Transformation 
Microsoft Industry digital transformation blog
Satya Nadella on Digital Transformation for Microsoft (Video)

Guest:

Merrie Williamson is the Corporate Vice President of Azure Infrastructure, Digital and App Innovation, and Azure IoT at Microsoft.

She is responsible for global commercial sales, strategy, and execution for the core multi-billion-dollar Azure business. She has a strong background in leading engineering and product teams and in marrying sales to engineering.

Follow her on LinkedIn.

Hosts:

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Today we’re talking about opportunities partners have in marketing and selling their solutions through Microsoft’s commercial marketplace. Through our commercial marketplace, partners have an opportunity to unlock access to millions of customers at a worldwide scale. 

Here, you’ll learn how the commercial marketplace works and steps you can take to take advantage of this in your business strategy.

Episode Links:

Episode Transcript
ISVs and Partners: Publish Your App
Customers: Buy an app
Marketplace Business Office Hours  
Marketplace Developer Office Hours
Join the Microsoft Partner Network
Events

Guest:

Tanuj Bansal is the General Manager of Azure Product Marketing. He has been in various leadership roles in product marketing for the Azure business from its very early days, always championing customer and partner success. 

Follow him on LinkedIn.

Hosts:

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

On this episode, we are talk about the Azure Marketplace in the retail space: how the Azure Marketplace can help retailers, and how the it may be important for your business, both as a customer or as a solution publisher with our guest, Orlando Fernandes of XNFY Labs.

Episode Links:

Episode Transcript
XNFY
Microsoft Cloud For Retail
Azure For Retail

Guests:

Orlando Fernandes works in Innovation & AI for the retail segment. He has the goal to create solutions that could change paradigms and create unique value.

Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn. Or visit his blog: https://medium.com/@orlando.ribas.

Sahir Anand is the Principal Category Lead for the Microsoft Azure Cloud for Retail and Data & AI.

Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Hosts:

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Low Code solution creation is all the rage. A Gartner report even forecasts, “By 2024, 75% of large enterprises will be using low-code development tools.” In this episode we’re discussing Microsoft’s Low Code platform. We’ll hear why it can matter for you at a strategic level in your organization and we’ll also be digging down into the capabilities of the platform.

Our guests today, Charles Lamanna and Ryan Cunningham, talk about what types of solutions people are building using the platform, who uses the platform and who the most common type of “Low Code” users are, Microsoft’s Dataverse as a key part of the Power Platform and what it is, and how someone new to these technologies gets up and running to try it out and get started.

Episode Links:

Episode Transcript
Low Code Application Development on Azure
Microsoft Power Apps on Azure
Power Automate
Power Automate Robotic Process Automation

Guests:

Charles Lamanna is the Corporate Vice President of the Business Applications & Platform (BAP) at Microsoft. He leads the engineering teams in the business applications & platform across both Product Management and Development. 

Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Ryan Cunningham is the GM for Power Apps at Microsoft. Power Apps is the Low Code platform used by millions of people around the world to build apps that make their working lives better.

Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Hosts:

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

COVID-19 has presented major challenges to healthcare, and lately that’s included accelerating the development and delivery of vaccines and therapeutics at scale. Luckily, in recent months we’ve seen an acceleration in the supply lines of delivering vaccines from manufacturers to recipients.

Today we are talking with Microsoft partner Schrocken’s Sunil Ghogre and Yogendra Chordia, and Microsoft’s David Houlding about empowering life sciences organizations to meet supply chain challenges.

Episode Links:

Episode Transcript
Schrocken
Shrocken on LinkedIn
Azure Marketplace Offer
Microsoft Health
Azure Marketplace
AppSource
How to get started partnering with Microsoft
Microsoft for Startups

Ignite Sessions:

• What’s new in Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
• Learn how Microsoft & Intel unlock the potential of edge & AI in healthcare to collect data & turn it into actionable insights
• Intro to Mixed Reality Business Apps + Real-Life Use Cases in Healthcare
• Get started on your HealthTech Journey

Guests:

Sunil Ghogre has over 30 years of diverse, global experience delivering exceptional manufacturing operations management and supply/sourcing expertise in the Pharmaceutical and Consumer industries.

Follow him on LinkedIn.

Yogendra Chordia is a technologist with 25+ years of enterprise software experience. At Schrocken he is focusing on applying his hi-tech supply chain experience in digitizing biopharma contract manufacturing supply chain.

Follow him on LinkedIn.

David Houlding is the Director of Strategic & Healthcare Engagements for Microsoft Azure. He served as Chair of the HIMSS Blockchain task force for over 2 years, and currently serves as an Advisor to the British Blockchain Association. He has technology interests and specialties in cloud, privacy, security, compliance, blockchain and AI.

Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Hosts:

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we’re talking about the IoT (Internet of Things) space and the related data that drives the industry with two industry leaders from Crate.io who specialize in IoT data management: Christian Lutz, founder, and president, and Eva Schönleitner, CEO. Data in the IoT space is unique in many ways, most notably in shape and scale.

Also discussed are some of the many announcements made by Microsoft at the annual Ignite conference, which was held recently. As always, there was a lot of big news that came out of Ignite. Microsoft’s Diego Tamburini, Principal Industry Lead for Cloud for Manufacturing gives the scoop.

Episode Links:

Episode Transcript
Crate.io
.NET Core on GitHub
Percept
Azure Percept: Edge intelligence from silicon to service

Guests:

Christian Lutz is the founder and president of Crate.io. He has over 20 years of experience as a startup entrepreneur with strong experience in enterprise software. 

Follow him on LinkedIn.

Eva Schönleitner is CEO of Crate.io. She has extensive worldwide experience in the technology and industrial segments and has a track record of developing high-performing organizations. 

Follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Diego Tamburini is Principal Industry Lead for Cloud for Manufacturing at Microsoft. He helps build the best ecosystem for software partners developing manufacturing solutions on Azure and helps them be successful. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Host:

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Insurance has some problems. It’s too complex, too expensive, and it doesn’t cover everyone. 

Our guest today, Rob Galbraith, the most interesting man in insurance and author of the book The End of Insurance as We Know It, says that tech can help though, but it must be relevant to the consumer’s needs. To support this hypothesis, he has coined the acronym S.C.A.L.E.D. to focus on the technologies he believes are transforming the insurance industry. He tells us what it means and explains each part in detail.

Additionally, usual host Paul Maher takes on a guest role this week as a former CTO at Milliman and talks about what some of Microsoft’s big investments in insurance are and how Microsoft AI technologies are impacting insurers and financial services as a whole.

Episode Links:

Episode Transcript
The End Of Insurance As We Know It (Rob’s book)
Azure for Financial Services
Azure for Insurance

Guest:

Rob Galbraith is the most interesting man in insurance. He is a keynote speaker, media contributor, and bestselling author of The End of Insurance as We Know It. He is the Insuretech Business Series man of the year for 2020.

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Special Guest:

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. He was formerly CTO at Milliman.

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Host:

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we talk about looking at various technologies and their impact on business and society. Our guest and digital speaker, Dr. Mark van Rijmenam, talks about cutting-edge tech like augmented reality and describes how wearables can be used by insurers to promote good health, which benefits both insurers and their clients.

Microsoft Mesh enables presence and shared experiences from anywhere – on any device – through mixed reality applications. 

Additionally, he talks about the democratization of AI and what is happening there, both good and bad.

Episode Links:

Episode Transcript
Datafloq
Datafloq on Twitter
Quantum computing at Microsoft
Azure Quatum
Q# and the Quantum Development Kit

Guests:

Dr. Mark van Rijmenam is the Digital Speaker. 

He focuses on the Future of Work and how to build the organization of tomorrow using emerging technologies that include big data analytics, blockchain, the Internet of Things, tokenomics, and Artificial Intelligence.

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter. Visit his website at thedigitalspeaker.com.

Dr. van Rijmenam has also authored and co-authored several books. Check them out!

• Think Bigger - Developing a Successful Big Data Strategy for Your Business
• Co-author of the book Blockchain: Transforming Your Business and Our World
• The Organisation of Tomorrow (discusses how AI, blockchain, and big data turn every business into a data organization.)

Host:

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we talk about high-performance computing (HPC). HPC is important in many industries and lets us work with data at scale, operate on large media files, work with large AI and ML workloads, and run big batches of worker jobs.

Tim Carroll, Director for HPC & AI for Research at Microsoft, and Evan Burness, Principal Program Manager for HPC & Big Compute in Microsoft Azure tell us what high-performance computing is and why it’s unique, how it is being used in the industry today, benefits of the new HPC VM over what people have used in the past on Azure, and for people who are not using HPC today, how they can get it up and running!

Episode Links:

Episode Transcript
Microsoft Azure HPC
Azure HPC by industry
More performance and choice with new Azure HBv3 virtual machines for HPC

Guests:

Evan Burness is the Principal Program Manager for HPC & Big Compute in Microsoft Azure.

Follow him on LinkedIn.

Tim Carroll is the Director for HPC & AI for Research. He is also a HPC Global Black Belt at Microsoft.

Follow him on LinkedIn.

Hosts:

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Most organizations producing software are moving their workloads to the cloud. In doing so they are typically choosing between 3 modes of cloud service, especially regarding their product architecture. The 3 main models for cloud offerings are IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Moving solutions to the cloud, or building a cloud-native solution, requires rethinking how we sell and distribute our software. Cloud-first sales models can be very different than traditional sales pipelines. Today we are focusing on Software-as-a-Service applications as a vehicle for selling cloud-based solutions. Our guest, Ercenk Keresteci explains that SaaS applications are the de-facto model for companies licensing their software.

Episode Links:

Episode Transcript

What is SaaS?

Publish solutions on the Azure Marketplace

Clients for different programming languages and samples

Guest:

Ercenk Keresteci is a Microsoft Principal Architect with a focus on manufacturing and the Internet of Things. He has a specific focus on these industries while helping partners onboard their solutions onto the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace.

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Host:

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Kohei Kurihara, co-founder of Privacy by Design Lab and President of the Tokyo chapter of the Government Blockchain Association, helps us understand the difference between public and private blockchain and talks about how blockchain can be used in data privacy scenarios, how blockchain fits into the larger IT ecosystem, and which industries are taking up blockchain today.

Additionally, David Houlding, Director of Healthcare Experiences at Microsoft tells us what investments in blockchain he is seeing particularly around data privacy.

Episode Links:

Episode Transcript

Microsoft Azure Blockchain Solutions

Azure Blockchain Service

Azure Blockchain Workbench

Government Blockchain Association

Guests:

Kohei Kurihara is the co-founder of Privacy by Design Lab and has deep experience with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. He is the president of the Tokyo chapter of the Government Blockchain Association.

Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

David Houlding is Director of Healthcare Experiences at Microsoft. He has 26+ years of experience in healthcare spanning provider, payer, pharmaceutical, and life sciences segments worldwide, he also has deep experience and expertise in cloud computing, privacy, security, compliance, blockchain, and AI / ML. Responsibilities include leading an expert team and program to accelerate key healthcare partners of Microsoft with Azure, Marketplace, and GTM jumpstart (co-marketing, and co-selling) to help them grow worldwide.

Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Host

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Acknowledging the pandemic in the UK is presenting some unique challenges. Andrew Busby, the founder of Retail Reflections and co-founder of SafePrem, talks about how is the pandemic is impacting retail in the UK and across the world and the digital technologies and trends retailers are specifically using that are really making a difference right now.

We also discuss how Microsoft is taking part in some of the technologies or trends Andrew describes, and what Microsoft and other retailers are seeing in the retail space in response to COVID challenges.

Episode Links

Episode Transcript

Andrew’s Articles

SafePrem

Behind the Mask Podcast

SafePrem Blog

SafePrem on Twitter

Microsoft in Retail

Retail Trends Playbook for 2021

Azure Machine Learning

Azure Digital Twins

Azure Synapse Analytics

Azure Marketplace

AppSource

Guest

Andrew Busby is the founder of Retail Reflections and co-founder of SafePrem. Andrew is a Top 20 global retail influencer, Forbes contributor, IBM Futurist, keynote speaker, retail writer & analyst.

Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter. 

Host

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we talk about making data-driven decisions using DataVisor with Jamshed Patel, Vice President of Solution Engineering. Nick Leimer, Principal Industry Lead in Microsoft Azure for Insurance, explains how seeing more fraud-based solutions in the insurance industry means moving to real-time analysis, alerting, and remediation with DataVisor.

While we’re seeing early adopters embrace technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to help drive their businesses forward with autonomous systems, the uptake is much slower than one might expect. 

The number of companies willing to turn over their operations to a real-time-system vs. a report-analyze-act sort of model is surprisingly small.

Some organizations have taken the approach of capturing all kinds of data in hopes they will glean insights after capturing anything and everything they can get their hands on. 

Jamsheed explains how using this technique has panned out for companies trying to find insights from their data estates or data lakes and shares interesting data sources he looks at to make determinations about threat vectors and real-time remediation.

Episode Links

Episode Transcript

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

DataVisor.com

DataVisor on LinkedIn and Twitter

Azure Marketplace

AppSource

Guests

Jamshed Patel is Vice President of Solution Engineering at DataVisor. DataVisor is a Microsoft partner and makes powerful and comprehensive fraud and risk solutions for various industries.

Follow him on LinkedIn.

Nick Leimer is Principal Industry Lead in Microsoft Azure for Insurance.

Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter. 

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic affected healthcare so rapidly in 2020 and whether these changes will stick in years to come.

David Houlding, Director of Healthcare Experiences on the Microsoft Industry Experiences team, describes some of Microsoft’s current major initiatives around Healthcare like investing in AI.

Our guests, Irma Rastegayeva and Evan Kirstel of eViRa Health talk about what interesting technology and trends are in healthcare right now, as well as how technology can best serve healthcare to be more agile in serving current strains in the healthcare system, and how we, as consumers, are now using wearables like Fitbits and Apple Watches to take in-home monitoring of our own health to the next level.

Episode Links

Transcript

eViRa Health

Follow eViRa Health on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Microsoft Health

Azure Marketplace

AppSource

Partner Center: how to get started. 

HealthcareIndExp@Microsoft.com

Azure Marketplace

AppSource

Guests

Irma Rastegayevais a former Googler, software engineer, and technical manager, turned Digital Storyteller and Coach for clients in healthcare, life sciences & health tech. She is particularly focused on the patient journey.

Follow her on  Twitter or LinkedIn.

Evan Kirstel a tech influencer and evangelist with 30 years of experience in enterprise sales, alliances, and business development. He brings a unique perspective to remote work, social, mobile, and the voice/video/web collaboration market and cloud technology.

Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

David Houldingis the Director of Healthcare Experiences on the Microsoft Industry Experiences team. He has extensive experience in healthcare and related technologies, most recently cloud, blockchain, and AI.

Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, Alan Chhabra, SVP of Partners and SVP of Asia Sales at MongoDB, talks about MongoDB, a high-performance database best suited for Big Data applications and Agile software development practices. It offers a flexible data model, elastic scalability, and high performance. Microsoft Azure is one of the best places to run MongoDB workloads securely and efficiently.

Alan discusses trends to be watched in the non-relational database space, MongoDB for website development, as well as the many other uses of the platform, how their experience has been from his side in offering MongoDB Atlas on Azure, and how he sees the future of MongoDB evolving within Azure.

Episode Links

Show Transcript

MongoDB Website

Automated MongoDB Service on Microsoft Azure

Follow MongoDB on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Guest

Alan Chhabrais responsible for Worldwide Partners as well as running Asia Sales at MongoDB.

He is a frequent speaker at industry events where he regularly leads discussions on how cloud computing, IoT, and big data can help CIOs meet their business objectives.

Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, Dr. Louise Beaumont talks about the idea of exploiting disruption: the most meaningful and promising disrupting trends or technologies she is watching, as well as how open and accessible data changes the landscape of financial services, and the technologies driving change around data usage.

She also discusses the concept of open banking and its goal to provide services we didn’t know we needed, but now can’t live without, and the value of industry vertical marketplaces.

Episode Links

Banking Industry Home - For various articles and papers.

Capital Markets Home - Among other things, you’ll find a great e-book on Enabling the capital markets firm of the future.

Financial Services Blog

Guest

Dr. Louise Beaumont has a soft spot in her heart for true innovation and disruption in financial services. She works with legislators and regulators to drive positive disruption with established organizations to cope with disruption, and with start-ups to exploit disruption. As such, she has a rounded perspective on FinTech’s future and the smart, open and accessible data required to fuel it.

Follow her on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

This episode is about the newly announced Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare which is now available! We delve into the capabilities of this industry-vertical cloud and get a sense of why industry clouds are starting to emerge with Microsoft’s Jenn Roth and John Doyle.

Healthcare is in transition. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated healthcare technology from nice to haves to imperatives. Jenn and John talk about what the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is, why healthcare data is so difficult to manage and how the Cloud for Healthcare helps, the capabilities the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare offers to healthcare customers and partners compared to the standard Azure cloud, and whether or not Microsoft is looking at creating additional industry clouds.

Episode Links

Transcript

Cloud for Healthcare Home | More resources to explore

Microsoft Healthcare Industry Home

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare Services Partners’ Capabilities Guide

Microsoft’s Healthcare Industry Blog

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is transforming the healthcare journey by Tom McGuinness

Partnering to reimagine better experiences and better care for patients by Scott Rollins

Microsoft as Undisputed AI Leader in healthcare

Guests

John Doyle is a director within the worldwide commercial business industry team at Microsoft. He is responsible for the development of business strategy and partnerships across the healthcare industry, globally. John engages with industry customers and partners, developing strategies and repeatable technology solutions that harness the power of the cloud and AI to drive innovation and industry transformation.

Follow him on LinkedIn.

Jenn Roth is the Global Product Marketing Director for the Healthcare in the Microsoft Cloud Group. Jenn joined Microsoft 2 years ago after 20+ years working in healthcare and Med Tech industries. She excels when given opportunities to lead healthcare strategy development and enhance customer experience about our company, products, and services.

Follow her on LinkedIn.

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we discuss trends and technologies influencing and supporting the financial services industry with special guest, Nasir Zubairi, CEO of the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (LHoFT), a public/private sector initiative to drive fintech and digitalization for Luxembourg's financial services industry.

Nasir shares with us innovations that the LHoFT has given their customers and its overall mission and purpose, Luxembourg as a global financial center, financial Inclusion and its relationship to the blockchain, how blockchain is being used in Financial Technology aka Fintech, current technologies used in Fintech and what the future holds, the emerging role of data and statistical analysis in Fintech, and if he sees AI as a promising aide here.

We also talk about how technology providers like Microsoft are playing a role in Fintech’s digital transformation, and what the emergence of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) means for the industry.

Episode Links

The LHoFT – Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (Twitter / LinkedIn)

Banking Industry Home - Here, you’ll find various articles and papers.

Capital Markets Home - Among other things, you’ll find a great e-book on enabling the capital markets firm of the future.

Financial Services blog

Guest

Nasir Zubairi is CEO of the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (or LHoFT), a public/private sector initiative to drive fintech and digitalization for Luxembourg's financial services industry.

Follow Nasir on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we talked about retail and consumer goods with a focus on eCommerce and the fast-paced change the industry is seeing with our guests, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis Jason Goldberg, and Principal Industry Lead for Retail & CPG at Microsoft Sahir Anand. 

We talk about Microsoft’s retail and consumer goods strategies, interesting technologies or trends in retail right now, the urgency for businesses to change investment priorities considering the pandemic and the strain it has put on them, and new delivery models such as last-mile home delivery and the implications for retailers.

Episode Links

Retail and Consumer Good Home

Retail Trends Playbook e-book

Guests

Jason Goldberg is Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis. He was voted one of retail’s top global influencers by Vend four years in a row, and in 2017 he was inducted into the National Retail Federation’s “The List” of people shaping the future of retail.

Jason has a podcast of his own, the retail-focused Jason and Scot show. The home for the podcast is jasonandscot.com and it’s the top-rated iTunes podcast for eCommerce.

Follow Jason on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out his blog at retailgeek.com.

Sahir Anand is the Principal Industry Lead for Retail & CPG at Microsoft.

In his 20-year career, Sahir has focused on building experience and expertise within retail and consumer goods industries and now works with the Cloud & AI Industry Experiences team at Microsoft.

Follow Sahir on LinkedIn.

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We talked about Microsoft initiatives, solutions, and technologies in the energy sector with Darryl Willis. Darryl is the Vice President of Energy at Microsoft and he is responsible for driving digital transformation all around the world for companies within oil & gas, mining, renewables, and power & utilities.

We’re all aware that energy sustainability is an important topic, and in this episode, we talk about what Microsoft is doing in this area to improve our own sustainability and highlight the great work of our customers and partners.

The Energy Transition is real and is underway and it is being accelerated by the COVID19 pandemic. The Oil and Gas Industry has been delt a one / two punch…. oversupply driven by technological success, mainly in the Onshore USA associated with things like horizontal drilling (and hydraulic fracturing) which has contributed to global oversupply. This combined with demand destruction that has occurred as a result of much of the world sheltering in place during the early months of the pandemic means that as a result, for the first time ever, oil prices went negative in April 2020!  

These cost pressures have created new digital transformation opportunities as oil and gas companies seek cost reductions.  And despite cost-cutting measures, much of the industry is moving more aggressively towards low-carbon and no-carbon sources of energy (by 2050 or sooner).

Darryl shares some things in the forefront of the energy sector right now (i.e: trends and technologies), how AI is impacting the energy sector, and how Microsoft is helping to realize the vision of helping everyone in the world gain access to affordable heat, light, and mobility. 

Episode Links

Microsoft demonstrates how to increase green energy in Ireland one rooftop at a time

AGL transforms 200+ applications, goes all in on cloud, and sets up for sustained success

Vattenfall and Microsoft pilot world’s first hourly matching (24/7) of renewable energy

ENGIE brings AI to renewable energy platform, helps decarbonize energy production with Azure

Microsoft for Energy
Microsoft Ignite Event – Judson / Shell video

Microsoft Transform Blog

Shell

Northern Lights

Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (book)

BP Energy Outlook (good stats energy)

Energy Industry Inspire recording

IEA reports

Jason Zander IHS fireside chat recording

Microsoft Sustainability Calculator

Guest

Darryl Willis, Vice President of Energy at Microsoft, is responsible for driving digital transformation for companies within the oil & gas, mining, renewables, and power & utility verticals globally. Darryl helps companies thrive using innovative Microsoft and partner solutions that enable operational efficiency, improve productivity, and uncover new business models that will ultimately accelerate the energy transition.

Check out Darryl's Wikipedia page and follow Darryl on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, James Mastan of Audienz talks about The Business Transformation Playbook for the Azure Marketplace how to effectively go-to-market from the perspective of sales, marketing, operations, and other non-technical factors. 

When organizations decide to sell their solutions through the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, it isn’t unusual for them to start by thinking about the technology behind the solution. There are many types of solutions in the marketplace and this can be a natural place to start focusing.

However, when our team engages with a potential marketplace partner such as Audienz, we start with a business conversation because we have come to understand that the success of a solution depends heavily on factors outside of the technology involved.

Episode Links

Audienz Marketing
Practice Areas
Email marketplace@audienz.com

Guest

James Mastan

A business and marketing leader focused on data and performance-driven, collaborative, entrepreneurial marketing and product strategies excelling at driving high ROI and tangible business results.

Follow James on LinkedIn.

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

This episode explores amazing technologies and techniques that add tremendous value to organizations looking for new and better ways to bring product to market and discusses simulations of real-world situations in the Azure cloud.

Andy Byers, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Ansys, talks about product simulation priorities: more demand for compute, closing the loop between operations and engineering design, and autonomous simulation.

He also shares how working with Microsoft solves for the computing power needed to run simulations, what integrating their products into the Microsoft Azure Marketplace as sellable offerings means for Ansys as a software vendor, and how their partnership with Microsoft has been beneficial to them thus far.

Show Transcript

Guests

Andy Byers has always been energized by learning modern technologies and has an impact across many fields in his role as Director of Strategic Partnerships at Ansys.

In this role, he helps architect and drive strategic alliances between Ansys and others organizations to unlock new engineering capabilities for shared customers.

Follow Andy on LinkedIn.

Diego Tamburini is the Principal Industry Lead for Azure Manufacturing in the Microsoft Industry Experience team, where he focuses on developing technical content to help manufacturing companies and software developers deliver their solutions on Azure, at scale. 

He also champions partners who deliver manufacturing solutions using Azure.

Follow Diego on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In our first panel episode, Sahir Anand hosts Microsoft partners to discuss effective digital experiences that are driving ecommerce systems and the supply chain. We hear from our panel of thought leaders about how retailers are successfully acting with agility, especially in the coming holiday season.

In addition, the conversation covers how Azure Cognitive Services and AI are playing a larger role in delivering personal experiences to customers. Customer behaviors are changing rapidly in this time of COVID-19 and the panel discusses how to best create the customer’s journey to make their experiences most effective.

Further, panelists share success stories about their customers who have successfully navigated this new normal of retail experiences. Finally, panelists discuss their partnerships with Microsoft and how they have benefited their customers with rapid innovation.

Show Transcript

Guests

Justin Anovick - Chief Product Officer at Episerver

Follow Justin on LinkedIn and Twitter

JoAnn Martin - VP Industry Strategy and Market Development at Blue Yonder

Follow JoAnn on LinkedIn

Anjali Yakkundi - Product Marketing & Product Strategy Leader at Aprimo

Follow Anjali on LinkedIn and Twitter

Tal Rotman - VP Global Partnerships and Alliances at Namogoo

Follow Tal on LinkedIn

Hosts

Sahir Anand is the Principal Industry Lead for Microsoft Azure Cloud+AI in Retail & CPG. Follow Sahir on Linked in.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode we discuss how Azure and our partner ecosystem supports the media and communications industries including current applicable trends and technologies. And some of the tech is pretty amazing. 

We cover the Azure services media and communications organizations find most valuable and the outcomes experienced by several partners and customers who have used them.

This episode mainly focuses on the Media & Entertainment industry.

SHOW LINKS

• Microsoft Media and Communications website
• Microsoft Media and Entertainment Summit
• Microsoft Media Blog
• Digital Media Solutions
• Azure Media Services
• Intelligent Telecommunications
• Transcript

GUESTS

Bob De Haven

General Manager, Media and Communications Industries

Bob leads Microsoft’s growing voice in the media, entertainment, & telecommunications industry, providing customers with solutions that make a lasting impact, differentiate them in the marketplace, and transform their long-term success.

He leads Microsoft’s primary strategists with a visionary perspective for media, entertainment, & telco, combining the company mission & principles to act as a champion of digital transformation for industry customers.

Bob on LinkedIn
Bob’s Industry Blog

Jennifer Cooper

Director of Business Strategy, Media and Communications Industries

Jennifer Cooper is an experienced Digital Strategy and Business Development executive with demonstrated track record and history of working in Cloud, SaaS, Consumer Applications & Enterprise software. Deep expertise in Media, Communications, Advertising, Commerce and related industries. Strong Operating, Sales and Marketing leader. 

Jennifer on LinkedIn

HOSTS

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

This episode is for anyone looking to take their business to the next level by becoming a Microsoft partner, or for existing partners who want to make the most of their benefits. We’re joined by Casey McGee, Vice President for ISV Partner Strategy at Microsoft, who focuses exclusively on our thriving partner ecosystem.

Casey shares ways to partner with Microsoft, the benefits this opens up, and the attributes of a great partnership. And, of course, we cover other topics along the way. 

Show Links

• Partner with Microsoft
• Microsoft Inspire, the conference for Microsoft Partners
• The five attributes of successful Microsoft partners
• Habitat for Humanity
• Transcript

Guest

Casey McGee

 Vice President for ISV Partner Strategy at Microsoft

In partnership with our Partner Ecosystem, I help Microsoft realize our Mission of Helping Every Person and Every Organization on the Planet Achieve More.

Today, I lead Microsoft's Partner Development in the US focusing on driving cloud growth and company transformation with ISVs, Industry Partners, and Private Equity Firms.

I was previously the Chief of Staff for the President and EVP of Microsoft's Global Sales Marketing and Operations based in Paris France. I was responsible for business planning, governance, overall business rhythm, employee and external communications and contributed to Microsoft's most strategic Business Development efforts. 

Follow Casey on LinkedIn

Microsoft US Partners on Twitter

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

This episode examines Microsoft Team and other productivity tools with a special focus on remote work. The conversation includes the value of our partner ecosystem and how they have added tremendous value to Microsoft’s productivity suite of tools.

Learn how Microsoft Teams has become a platform for life, work, and learning. Hear the story of Teams and its use in the NFL Draft.Many customers and use cases are explored around the state of the art in online communications. Learn how to become a partner yourself and add your add-ins and ideas to the platform.

Guest Information

Jared Spataro is Corporate Vice President for Modern Work at Microsoft with a special focus on emerging trends and technologies. He is responsible for product marketing, business management, and go-to-market programs for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and next generation productivity products. 

Follow Jared.

Jared’s Blog | LinkedIn | Twitter

Show Links

• Microsoft 365 Blog
• Microsoft 365 
• Microsoft Teams Blog
• AppSource 
• Azure Marketplace
• Transcript

Your Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Meet the next generation of technologists and the Microsoft programs that support them. Jennifer Ritzinger and Pablo Veramendi talk with us about the developers you want for your next round of interns! Skilled students are building sophisticated solutions serving many industries and in this conversation we discuss how Microsoft is supporting them.

Show Links

• Microsoft benefits for students
• Imagine Cup Home
• Imagine Cup on Twitter
• Programming with Python | Python for Beginners
• Microsoft’s Student Ambassador Program
• Microsoft Learn for Students
• Microsoft Imagine Academy
• Microsoft Learn on Twitter
• Azure for Students
• Student Developer Blog
• Microsoft Education 
• Hollo Team
• Show Transcript

Guests

Jennifer Ritzinger

Senior Director, Developer & Platform Evangelism

Jennifer leads a team responsible for Microsoft’s Tier 1 technical customer events for both IT Professionals and Developers, including BUILD, PDC & MIX. Oversees keynote & content strategy, brand, marketing & demand generation, digital development, plus business responsibility.

Follow Jennifer on LinkedIn

Pablo Veramendi

Pablo is passionate about building meaningful communities and thriving on creatively leveraging technology to develop innovative solutions and help others believe and achieve what is possible.

Follow Pablo on LinkedIn

Follow Pablo on Twitter at @IAmPablo
 

The ways companies are managing data is rapidly changing. New patterns and technologies focused on data management are emerging to help. Join Todd Singleton, General Manager of Solutions in the Azure Data Group at Microsoft, to hear how Microsoft is bringing solutions to help with the explosion of data.

In this episode we discuss how to gain insights that can fundamentally change your business. Further, we talk about with the value of Data Lakes. Finally, a very topical subject: We touch on the use of data in the pursuit of social justice. 

Show Links

• A list of Azure Analytics Services
• Azure Analysis Services
• Azure Data Lake Analytics 
• Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
• Azure Stream Analytics
• Azure Synapse Analytics
• HDInsight

Episode Transcript

Show Guest 

Todd is the General Manager of Solutions in the Azure Data Group at Microsoft.

He has twenty years of entrepreneurial leadership experience in high growth, technology-driven markets. He is adept in understanding the pains of enterprise customers, designing solutions to deliver impactful business outcomes, and operationalizing the delivery of those solutions at scale.

Follow Todd on LinkedIn

Your Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has taken off in a huge way and is impacting industries far beyond the traditional use cases. In this episode we discuss modern IoT solutions and capabilities including managing large scale IoT implementations, Microsoft-specific devices, using Azure IoT services, IoT on the edge, developing IoT solutions, and even running containerized services on the edge.This episode will jumpstart your IoT initiatives and give you a comprehensive picture of Azure IoT.

Show Links

• Azure IoT
• Azure IoT for specific industries
• IoT Technical Community
• Azure IoT courses and certifications at Microsoft Learn
• IoT Guidance on GitHub
• IoT cloud solution accelerators
• Azure Marketplace
• AppSource Marketplace
• Transcript

Guests

Sam George - Corporate Vice President of Azure IoT at Microsoft

Sam is responsible for Azure IoT Central, Azure Digital Twins, Azure IoT Hub, Azure IoT Edge, Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service, Azure Maps, Azure Time Series Insights, Industrial IoT & Manufacturing, Automotive / Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, Smart Buildings, Smart Energy. Additional responsibilities include IoT business strategy and results for IoT in Azure, IoT product offerings and roadmap, developer facing features, integration with other Azure services, partner and field enablement and more.

IoT is an incredibly exciting and innovative area of computing and I'm proud to a be part of this massive transformation.

Follow Sam on LinkedIn

Jeff Cornwell - IoT Business Development, Microsoft Cloud Marketplace

Established business development, partnerships, product and strategy leader with proven success in driving growth and scale for consumer and commercial experiences across emerging platforms. 15+ years of experience structuring and negotiating high-impact deals from source to execution, developing productive and lasting partnerships.

Follow Jeff on LinkedIn

In this final episode of a 2-part series on Azure Storage and DataLake, Vamshi Kommineni shares some things with us of interest to any technology decision maker. We discuss what backup, recovery, disaster planning, failover, governance, and other factors look like regarding storage solutions. Further we dive deep into customer use cases and stories that illustrate the value and flexibility of the storage solutions, and even touch upon the role of storage in high-performance computing scenarios.

Show Links

Azure Storage Solutions

Azure Files

Azure Blob Storage

Azure Data Lake

Azure Disk Storage

Azure Archive Storage

Contact the product team at azurestoragefeedback@microsoft.com

Guest

Vamshidhar Kommineni

Principal PM Manager for Azure Storage at Microsoft

Vamshi and his team is focus on Azure Storage, Data Lake, as well as some other technologies. He is responsible for business strategy and growth along with industry relationships like Media and Entertainment, Automotive, Healthcare, and more.

Find Vamshi on LinkedIn

In this first of a 2-part series, Vamshi Kommineni takes us through Azure Storage and Data Lake from the perspective of industry use cases and relevant capabilities. Not only do we learn about the different capabilities of these services, but we also cover discuss their use at hyper-scale and what that can mean for customers. Vamshi shares several customer stories that highlight the technology’s evolution and usage as well as highlighting some common usage patterns.

Transcript

Show Links

Azure Storage Solutions

Azure Files

Azure Blob Storage

Azure Data Lake

Azure Disk Storage

Azure Archive Storage

Guest

Vamshidhar Kommineni

Principal PM Manager for Azure Storage at Microsoft

Vamshi and his team is focus on Azure Storage, Data Lake, as well as some other technologies. He is responsible for business strategy and growth along with industry relationships like Media and Entertainment, Automotive, Healthcare, and more.

Find Vamshi on LinkedIn

In this episode we hear how Microsoft and its partners are focused on helping financial services organizations meet the demands of today. Specifically, the guests discuss how Microsoft is helping with the COVID-19 situation, including things like fraud detection and enabling employees.

Additional topics include how Microsoft is empowering customers with high performance computing and large data volumes to help update legacy risk models to factor in today’s new risks. Further, we hear about the power of Microsoft’s three clouds that underlies the ecosystem of Microsoft and partner solutions.

Show Links

[Transcript]

• Blog Post: Agility, continuity, and risk management for financial services 
• Blog Post: Business continuity in financial services
• Microsoft Financial Services Industry Blog
• Microsoft in Banking and Capital Markets
• Microsoft in Insurance
• Azure for Financial Services
• M365 for Financial Services

Guests

Bill Borden

Corporate Vice President for Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft

Bill leads development and execution of Microsoft’s global financial services strategy, including the prioritization of banking, capital markets and insurance industry solutions and their alignment to Microsoft’s worldwide digital platform and partner ecosystem.

Bill on LinkedIn

Bill Borden's Blog

Nick Leimer

Principal Industry Lead for Azure for Insurance in the Microsoft Industry Experiences Team

Nick recruits partners, ISVs, start-ups, and other influential organizations in the insurance industry to accelerate adoption of the Microsoft Cloud+ AI platforms. One of his core missions is to amplify how our Microsoft cloud solutions meet the business enabling needs across the globe through speaking at conferences, authoring blogs, use cases, whitepapers, and social media posts.

Nick on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Karen Bailey

Financial Services Lead for Banking, Capital Markets and Insurance on the Microsoft Industry Experiences team.

Karen is a passionate Business Technology leader with over 25 years of diverse experiences working to develop strategies for Digital Transformation focused on opti-channel, customer-centric and hyper-personalized experiences aligning Technology Solutions to Go-to Market Strategies, Operational Needs, Growth and Profitably strategies and sector imperatives.

Karen on LinkedIn

Çağlayan Arkan, Microsoft’s Vice President and Global Sales Lead for the Manufacturing Industry at Microsoft, joins in this episode to talk about how Microsoft is engaging manufacturing and the supply chain. The discussion covers the current situation for manufacturers during in the current COVID-19 pandemic and how Microsoft is reaching out to customers and partners. 

Further, Diego Tamburini, Principal Industry Lead in Azure for Manufacturing joins in to dive deeper on Microsoft’s partner ecosystem and how companies can join in that conversation.

Other topics covered include current and emerging trends and technology for the following pillars:

• Workforce transformation
• Engaging customers in new ways
• Building more agile factories
• Creating more resilient Supply chains
• Unlocking innovation and delivering new services

Show Links

[Transcript]

The Future Computed: AI in manufacturing

Manufacturing Industry site: COVID Webinar series links

Microsoft Industry Digital Forum: Exploring the current manufacturing environment in light of COVID-19

Microsoft Industry Digital Forum: Stories and Solutions Creating Manufacturing and Supply Chain Resiliency

Microsoft Industry Digital Forum: Re-FACTORY-ing Stories and Solutions Enabling Agile Production

Guests

Çağlayan Arkan

Vice President, Global Sales Lead, Manufacturing Industry at Microsoft

As Vice President, Manufacturing Industry at Microsoft, Çağlayan Arkan is responsible for managing the digital transformation for manufacturing companies across high-tech and electronics, industrial equipment, aerospace, and chemicals/agrochemicals globally, as well as guiding growth and compete strategies for Microsoft in these verticals worldwide.

Çağlayan is passionate about empowering customers to position themselves as first movers or fast followers in today’s disruptive era. By supporting organizations with new technology-led capabilities, strategies and insights that will fundamentally reinvent their products, services and business models, Çağlayan and his team are helping businesses drive sustained growth, agile innovation and operational excellence.

Prior to his current role, Çağlayan held several leadership roles at Microsoft and Siemens, successfully spearheading new strategic growth, market penetration and business development initiatives

• LinkedIn
• Blog
• Twitter: @Caglayan_Arkan

Diego Tamburini

Principal Industry Lead - Azure for Manufacturing

Diego builds the best ecosystem of software partners developing manufacturing solutions on Azure and helping them be successful.

• LinkedIn
• Twitter: @DiegoTamburini

Retail has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Shelley Bransten, Karen Garrette, and Sahir Anand join David and Paul to discuss how retailers are responding to the current crisis along with what to expect during and after recovery.

We introduce the Microsoft for Retail team and how it works with partners and customers to solve the biggest retail problems and move the state of the industry forward with digital technologies. In addition we hear how Microsoft is helping the largest employment segment in the world navigate the COVID-19 crisis.

Finally, we hear where Microsoft is investing in the technologies serving the future of the industry.

Show Links

[Transcript]

• Microsoft for Retail
• Project Zap, Retail Matchmaking Tool
• McKinsey Covid Resource Center
• The Kroger Blueprint
• Walgreens’s Boot Alliance

Guests

Shelley Bransten
Corporate Vice President, WW Retail & Consumer Goods Industries, Microsoft

Shelley grew up in retail. She is a passionate advocate for customers and works tirelessly to ensure retailers are set up for success across their digital transformation efforts. At Microsoft, Shelley leads the thought leadership, go-to-market and solution approach to address retailers’ most important growth opportunities.

Shelley on LinkedIn

Karen Garrette
World Wide Retail Strategy Lead at Microsoft

Having worked in a variety of roles from presales to consultancy, Karen has the depth and breadth of experience and deep technical understanding that allows her to translate the feature and function set into customer solutions to win against the competition.

Karen on LinkedIn

Sahir Anand
Principal, Industry Lead – Microsoft Azure Cloud+AI for Retail & CPG at Microsoft

Over the years, Sahir has published several industry reports, blogs, whitepapers, and videos focused on retail and CPG industry business and technology areas. He is an avid speaker at industry events.

Sahir on LinkedIn

Our Microsoft for Health panel looks forward to the future of healthcare. As healthcare responds to the current COVID-19 crisis, it is accelerating its adoption of technologies that would have taken years to implement before the current need for change.

The panel discusses how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is impacting healthcare today and in the future. Hear how Microsoft's AI/ML technologies and the Azure cloud are being brought to bear to empower people to work differently.

Not only are these technologies helping the current situation, but partners are providing the next generation of medicine today. Learn how Healthcare will be forever changed by the technology solutions currently being introduced today.

Transcript

Show Notes

• Microsoft for Healthcare
• Microsoft Industry Health Blog
• Microsoft 365 and healthcare
• Microsoft for Healthcare on LinkedIn

Microsoft’s Covid-19 Response

• Patient outreach & triage (Healthcare bot, PlasmaBot)
• Track allocation of resources & supplies - Protecting People Everywhere
• Communication for crisis management
• Deliver & manage continuous care (Virtual Visits)
• Dissemination of accurate information (COVID Open Research Dataset (CORD19), Contact Tracing)

Supporting your healthcare organization and community during crises

• Complimentary 6-month Office 365 E1 to help connect employees during COVID-19 response
• Enabling the NHS to continue delivering frontline healthcare
• GE Healthcare is extending its longtime collaboration with Microsoft to launch a cloud-based COVID-19 patient monitoring software for health systems
• Learn about Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot service that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help respond to patient inquiries
• Build a crisis management site to connect people and information
• Use this preconfigured template to rapidly share information across facilities and collect employee updates with Power Apps Crisis Management template
• Quickly optimize Office 365 traffic for remote staff and reduce the load on your infrastructure 
• Balancing cloud services continuity for crucial health and safety organizations
• Work remotely, stay secure—tips for CISOs

Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
Uses of AI for health include the work to fight COVID-19 is already underway. A handful of key partnerships include the following.

The  COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, a private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, for which Microsoft is providing researchers access to the world’s most powerful computing resources, which can significantly speed the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus. Around the world, Microsoft’s research scientists, spanning computer science, biology, medicine and public health, are collaborating on projects in the consortium

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a global health research organization at the University of Washington School of Medicine, is releasing a set of COVID-19 data visualizations and forecasts that the White House, FEMA, governors and hospital administrators have started using to mobilize resources

The Washington State Department of Health is working on a new dashboard that aims to increase timeliness, accuracy and speed of data reporting to the public. The dashboard relies on data reported by local health jurisdictions, healthcare facilities and labs

Folding@home, a global organization that uses distributed computing is researching COVID-19 proteins that could help with designing therapeutics

The Sepsis Center of Research Excellence (SCORE-UW), part of the University of Washington’s Department of Medicine, is a global collaboration between a network of hospitals, industry, blood banks, universities and funding partners. Using clinical data, radiologic imaging and other patient biomarker responses, SCORE-UW is developing novel algorithms to predict, and improve, healthcare and socioeconomic outcomes of COVID-19 positive patients

Take, the Brazilian leader in chatbots and the smart contacts market, developed a bot to bring official and credible information to the public and connect potential patients to medical teams to avoid overloading Brazilian hospitals

Guests

Gareth Hall

Senior Director - Microsoft WorldWide Health Solutions

Gareth leads the team driving the worldwide solutions strategy for the Microsoft Health business, focused on working with Microsoft product teams and partners to build solutions on the Microsoft cloud platforms (Azure, Dynamics 365 and Office 365).

LinkedIn

John Doyle

Director, Cloud & AI, Microsoft Healthcare

As a Director within the worldwide commercial business industry team at Microsoft, John Doyle is responsible for the development of business strategy and partnerships across the healthcare industry, globally. John, engages with industry customers and partners, developing strategies and repeatable technology solutions that harness the power of cloud and AI to drive innovation and industry transformation.

LinkedIn

David Houlding

David is the Director of Healthcare experiences on Microsoft Industry Experiences team. He has extensive experience in working with partners for healthcare in applicable technologies, most lately the cloud, blockchain, and AI.

LinkedIn
Twitter

Microsoft for Healthcare is working hard to help healthcare throughout the COVID-19 crisis and to plan for what comes after the pandemic. Our guests discuss how Microsoft is responding to the current COVID-19 crisis as well as their mission in healthcare and the future of the industry.

Our guests describe how they work with partners to find the right capabilities enabled by Microsoft solutions. Additionally, we discuss several Microsoft healthcare-focused products in use today. Learn how Microsoft technologies are being used to solve real world problems related not only to the current pandemic, but other important healthcare problems.

The panel discusses the partnerships occurring between competitors to combat COVID-19. Learn about Microsoft partner solutions available to help "flatten the curve" during this crisis.

Transcript

Show Notes

• Microsoft for Healthcare
• Microsoft Industry Health Blog
• Microsoft 365 and healthcare
• Microsoft for Healthcare on LinkedIn
   

Microsoft’s Covid-19 Response

• Patient outreach & triage (Healthcare bot, PlasmaBot)
• Track allocation of resources & supplies - Protecting People Everywhere
• Communication for crisis management
• Deliver & manage continuous care (Virtual Visits)
• Dissemination of accurate information (COVID Open Research Dataset (CORD19), Contact Tracing)

Supporting your healthcare organization and community during crises

• Complimentary 6-month Office 365 E1 to help connect employees during COVID-19 response
• Enabling the NHS to continue delivering frontline healthcare
• GE Healthcare is extending its longtime collaboration with Microsoft to launch a cloud-based COVID-19 patient monitoring software for health systems
• Learn about Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot service that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help respond to patient inquiries
• Build a crisis management site to connect people and information
• Use this preconfigured template to rapidly share information across facilities and collect employee updates with Power Apps Crisis Management template
• Quickly optimize Office 365 traffic for remote staff and reduce the load on your infrastructure 
• Balancing cloud services continuity for crucial health and safety organizations
• Work remotely, stay secure—tips for CISOs

Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
Uses of AI for health include the work to fight COVID-19 is already underway. A handful of key partnerships include the following.

The  COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, a private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, for which Microsoft is providing researchers access to the world’s most powerful computing resources, which can significantly speed the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus. Around the world, Microsoft’s research scientists, spanning computer science, biology, medicine and public health, are collaborating on projects in the consortium

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a global health research organization at the University of Washington School of Medicine, is releasing a set of COVID-19 data visualizations and forecasts that the White House, FEMA, governors and hospital administrators have started using to mobilize resources

The Washington State Department of Health is working on a new dashboard that aims to increase timeliness, accuracy and speed of data reporting to the public. The dashboard relies on data reported by local health jurisdictions, healthcare facilities and labs

Folding@home, a global organization that uses distributed computing is researching COVID-19 proteins that could help with designing therapeutics

The Sepsis Center of Research Excellence (SCORE-UW), part of the University of Washington’s Department of Medicine, is a global collaboration between a network of hospitals, industry, blood banks, universities and funding partners. Using clinical data, radiologic imaging and other patient biomarker responses, SCORE-UW is developing novel algorithms to predict, and improve, healthcare and socioeconomic outcomes of COVID-19 positive patients

Take, the Brazilian leader in chatbots and the smart contacts market, developed a bot to bring official and credible information to the public and connect potential patients to medical teams to avoid overloading Brazilian hospitals

Guests

Gareth Hall

Senior Director - Microsoft WorldWide Health Solutions

Gareth leads the team driving the worldwide solutions strategy for the Microsoft Health business, focused on working with Microsoft product teams and partners to build solutions on the Microsoft cloud platforms (Azure, Dynamics 365 and Office 365).

LinkedIn

John Doyle

Director, Cloud & AI, Microsoft Healthcare

As a Director within the worldwide commercial business industry team at Microsoft, John Doyle is responsible for the development of business strategy and partnerships across the healthcare industry, globally. John, engages with industry customers and partners, developing strategies and repeatable technology solutions that harness the power of cloud and AI to drive innovation and industry transformation.

LinkedIn

David Houlding

David is the Director of Healthcare experiences on Microsoft Industry Experiences team. He has extensive experience in working with partners for healthcare in applicable technologies, most lately the cloud, blockchain, and AI.

LinkedIn
Twitter

Join us in this episode about the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, the way to buy and sell software from Microsoft partners. Publishers and buyers of Azure-based cloud software will be interested in this show, whether learning how to sell your solution or how to buy an offered solution.

The Microsoft Commercial Marketplace consists of two storefronts, the Azure Marketplace and AppSource. Join us on this episode to learn the differences and who will be interested in each.

• Microsoft AppSource
• Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Transcript

Jeana Jorgensen

As a leader in the Cloud Commercial Community organization at Microsoft, Jeana Jorgensen is an expert in the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace and the value Microsoft Azure customers and partners derive from it. She joins us on the podcast to discuss the use of the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, who should be interested, and how to get the greatest value from it as sellers or buyers of commercial software running on Microsoft Azure.

LinkedIn

Transcript

Uncrowd’s Friction/Reward Index, or FRi, platform answers retail's most fundamental question, “Why do customers choose retailer x over retailer y?” It then shows exactly how to win in more shopper missions, identify safe cost reductions, and optimize operations.

The Friction/Reward index is fundamentally about showing when and why a customer will prefer you to a rival. In the era of total and easy access to competing choices, knowing where you stand among those choices is your number one priority.

• Uncrowd online
• Uncrowd's offer on the Azure Marketplace

Guests

Richard Hammond

Richard is the Uncrowd’s CEO and the leading global expert on friction versus reward. He is the author of both Friction/Reward and Smart Retail.

Richard on LinkedIn
Uncrowd on LinkedIn

Transcript

Solix Technologies, Inc., is a leading big data application provider that empowers data-driven enterprises with optimized infrastructure, data security, and advanced analytics.

We discuss sources of our data explosion and how companies can benefit from this data by connecting silos of data together. And, the cultural change that comes with data-informed decisions.

SHOW LINKS

• SOLIXCloud.com
• Follow us on Twitter
• Join us on Facebook
• Follow us on LinkedIn

GUESTS

• Sai Gundavelli : Chief Executive Officer at Solix Technologies, Inc.
• John Ottman: Executive Chairman at Solix Technologies, Inc.
• Jim Lee: VP of Data Services
• Kalyan Manyam: Director of Cloud Products
• Paul Maher: General Manager of Microsoft's Industry Experiences Team

Transcript

Insurance is changing quickly these days and undergoing a digital transformation is not easy. Adding blockchain to the mix can change an entire architecture. When used appropriately, however, blockchain can become an indispensable tool for your ledger technology.

In this episode, we discuss the use of blockchain in insurance as well as how it applies to other industries such as banking and capital markets, healthcare and manufacturing.

Specifically, you will learn how companies are using Corda's smart contracts feature to create complex, logic-based, on-block content and events. Listen to how R3, with the open source Corda blockchain, is helping companies get started with blockchain today.

Show Links

• R3 on Azure: Launch of Corda Enterprise v3.1
• R3 website
• R3 on Azure: Strengthening our partnership
• Corda Enterprise Scale Deployment on Microsoft Azure

Ryan Rugg

Ryan is the Global Head of Insurance for R3 and leads the company's Insurance strategy to drive business growth. She is responsible for the strategic design, development, and commercialization across the ecosystem of blockchain innovation within the Insurance Industry.

In 2017, she launched the Center of Excellence for Insurers and Reinsurers in partnership with ACORD which is redefining the foundations of insurance by harnessing the power of collaborative networks, through the deployment of DLT within the financial services industry. 

Since then Corda, R3's blockchain platform has been the platform of choice for the insurance industry. Corda integrates and secures the entire stream of disparate data sources, while simultaneously ensuring transparency across an interconnected network of clients, brokers, insurers and other third parties.

Prior to R3 Ryan worked for Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan where she gained extensive experience in financial services covering a broad range of institutions including; insurance, hedge funds, banks and asset managers. Ryan started her career in Technology at Lehman Brothers, experiencing first-hand the inefficiencies in the legacy infrastructure which she is now working to solve. She has a double major in Computer Science and Finance.

Nick Leimer

Nick Leimer is the Principal Insurance Industry Lead for Azure. Nick brings 20+ years of experience bridging the business and IT gap in application development, operations, and infrastructure.

Before joining Microsoft, Nick was the Senior Director for Actuarial Compute at Manulife leading the migration of LAN based HPC Farms to the Azure environment for all of Asia; including all desktop Moody’s / GGY Axis users and data feeds.

Prior to Manulife, his career progressed through developing applications for Actuarial Valuation and Projection including components of ArcVal and Prophet, the Defined Benefit area with the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (BPGC), and leading life insurers, AIG and Manulife. 

Follow Nick on LinkedIn  and Twitter.

Transcript

In this episode, we speak with Marcy Larsen, Microsoft Industry Solutions Executive focused for Retail in Australia. She helps us understand how hyper-personalization is the future for successful retailers.

She shares how retailers balance the line of how personal can offers really be, without being off-putting to the customer. Marcy tells us about working with Microsoft to garner feedback and build services retailers want.

Also, Marcy offers insights into how retailers can take advantage of the data they already have.

Show Links

Read the use case that underlies this podcast episode and learn more from these other resources.

• See how Microsoft is helping grow intelligent retail
• Microsoft retail and consumer goods
• Power BI
• Azure Data Factory
• Azure HDInsight
• Azure Machine Learning Service
• Azure Machine Learning Studio

Marcy Larsen

Marcella Larsen leads Microsoft's Retail Industry focus to inspire digital transformation in consumer-facing industries for Australia. Marcella is responsible for managing platform agnostic cloud and cross channel focused growth strategies in the industries of Retail, Travel, Hospitality, and Consumer Goods. She oversees retail, travel, transport and consumer goods industry solutions, go to market strategies, partnerships, marketing, solution development, thought leadership and customer relations to ensure the full extent of Microsoft’s industry visions and value propositions are realized locally. Marcella brings almost 22 years of deep customer, vertical technology, sales and marketing experience to this role.

Marcella has a strong track record in developing and growing business, is results oriented, with a multidisciplinary approach for business planning. She is experienced in marketing, business development, supply chain operations, international trade, finance, and product management.

Transcript

Behavioral biometrics is an emerging topic in the security sector. Users are profiled in how they use specific applications. These patterns of usage establish something like a behavioral fingerprint, which can keep your assets secure.

Banks use biometrics to prevent fraud from websites and mobile applications. What if someone found your unlocked phone, went to your banking app and was able to transfer money? If the application is trained to your personal biometric behavioral print, this transaction can be flagged.

There are many other uses for behavioral biometrics we will discuss and continue to pay attention to its use across industries as the field grows.

Show Links

The BioCatch story

Frances Zelazny

Frances Zelanzy works closely with BioCatch's CEO to conceptualize and formulate strategic initiatives while on the marketing side, she establishes comprehensive marketing strategy, including brand positioning, messaging and execution.

Follow Frances on LinkedIn.

Dekel Shavit

BioCatch VP of Operations & CISO

Dekel has more than 15 years of experience as a customer-oriented operations professional, building, managing and scaling Operations groups in highly-demanding technology companies.

Prior to joining BioCatch, Dekel led the Ops group at Leverate (a leading FinTech company) and was the Production Manager at DoubleVerify.

Follow Dekel on LinkedIn.

Howard Bush is a Principle Industry Lead for Azure for Banking and Capital Markets at Microsoft. He advocates for Microsoft Azure within the banking and capital markets industry.

Howard Bush

Howard Bush is a Principle Industry Lead for Azure for Banking and Capital Markets at Microsoft. He advocates for Microsoft Azure within the banking and capital markets industry. Howard works with customers to help them understand how cloud computing addresses the unique and changing needs of the industry. Howard describes himself as “a banker wrapped in IT clothing.” 

Follow Howard on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Transcript

FIS is an international company with offices all over the world. Generating new ideas from around the globe could be a logistical problem—not to mention differences in languages and cultures. But FIS has a hands-on way to get innovation to the forefront: a hackfest called InnovateIN48. Contestants get 48 hours to start and finish their solutions before having them judged.

This event has helped FIS innovate in key areas. And this year, FIS challenged contestants to solve a social, humanitarian, scientific or philanthropic challenge. The theme was “Innovation Empowering Hope.” Hear how they did it in the podcast.

67 finalists. 14 teams. 48 hours. That's the InnovateIN48 hackathon.

Show Links

• InnovateIN48 home page
• FIS

Mike Silverman

Mike Silverman is the Global Head of Enterprise Technology Strategy for FIS, a global leader in financial services technology. FIS focuses on retail and institutional banking, payments, asset and wealth management, risk and compliance, and outsourcing solutions.

Through the depth and breadth of our solutions portfolio, global capabilities and domain expertise, FIS serves more than 20,000 clients in over 130 countries. Headquartered in Jacksonville, Fla., FIS employs more than 52,000 people worldwide and holds leadership positions in payment processing, financial software and banking solutions. Providing software, services and outsourcing of the technology that empowers the financial world, FIS is a Fortune 500 company.

Follow Mike on LinkedIn.

Paul Maher

Paul Maher is the General Manager of the Industry Experiences team which is part of the Cloud and AI Engineering organization at Microsoft. Paul is a proven leader in the technology field, having extensive industry experience acquired across a variety of roles, with a passion for technology.

He is a strategic thinker, who can look at the big picture, or complex problems and distill into actionable output. Started career behind the code as a Software Engineer, through to most recently as General Manager at Microsoft. Skilled at leading, building and growing teams.

Follow Paul on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Howard Bush

Howard Bush is a Principle Industry Lead for Azure for Banking and Capital Markets at Microsoft. He advocates for Microsoft Azure within the banking and capital markets industry. Howard works with customers to help them understand how cloud computing addresses the unique and changing needs of the industry. Howard describes himself as “a banker wrapped in IT clothing.” 

Follow Howard on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Transcript

Rubikloud is an artificial intelligence (AI) company and has created a cloud-native, machine learning platform especially for retail. RubiKloud was founded in 2013 and is based in Toronto.

In this episode, Waleed Ayoub, Rubikloud's Chief Technical Officer takes us through their thinking on the addition of AI to retail, along with other insights into up and coming technology in retail. Further, this episode looks at the benefit Rubikloud has received by being a valued Microsoft partner.

Whether you are in the retail space or not, this is a great episode to just hear the possibilities of what AI might do to change the whole supply chain.

Show Links

Rubikloud

Microsoft Retail and Industry Goods Home

Waleed Ayoub

Waleed Ayoub is Chief Technology Officer at Rubikloud Technologies.

He is a product and technology leader with over a decade of hands-on experience empowering talented teams and building impactful enterprise SaaS products.

His experience spans a broad enterprise landscape, including banking, CPG retail, loyalty, telco, pharmacy and other specialty B2C domains. Waleed specializes in transforming data and machine learning from an operational afterthought to a revenue-generating asset with some of the world's largest enterprises.

At Rubikloud, Waleed is on a mission to bring "intelligent decision automation" to the enterprise. Prior to joining Rubikloud as their Chief Technology Officer, Waleed most recently ran the Customer & Advanced Analytics practice at Shoppers Drug Mart.

Waleed holds a Bachelor of Applied Science and Engineering with a specialization in Quantum Physics from the University of Toronto.

Follow Waleed on LinkedIn.

Transcript

In this episode, we speak with Kelly Goetsch, who is Chief Product Officer at commercetools. We touch on current and emerging trends in retail and hear how data-informed decisions can change a company culture. Further, discuss commercetools and their offering of APIs to retailers who are building their own eCommerce sites that live on commercetool's platform.

Our discussion covers how Azure allowed them to spool up their multi-tenant app quickly in containers using Azure Kubernetes Service. Looking forward into the future of retail, we hear about uses for AI and even augmented reality.

Show Links

• Commercetools website
• Azure Kubernetes Service

Kelly Goetsch

Kelly Goetsch is Chief Product Officer at commercetools. He came to commercetools from Oracle, where he led product management for their microservices initiatives.

Kelly is the author of 3 books about commerce.

He previously held senior-level product development and go-to-market responsibilities for key Oracle cloud products representing nine+ figures of revenue for Oracle. Prior to Oracle, he was a senior architect at ATG (acquired by Oracle), where he was instrumental to 31 large-scale ATG implementations. In his last years at ATG, he oversaw all of Walmart's implementations of ATG around the world.

Follow Kelly on LinkedIn.

David Starr

In addition to being the host of this podcast, David is a Principal Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft, focusing on healthcare. He loves creating with code and with large systems supporting scale.

He enjoys all aspects of developing, delivering and operating software systems. He is also passionate about the end-to-end process, methods and techniques, and the patterns and practices of high performing software development teams, using skills that transcend specific technology stacks.

Follow David on LinkedIn or Twitter

Transcript

From planning to streaming analytics, this episode looks at all phases of introducing IoT to a company. Just having the data is often not enough to make decisions. Insights must be gleaned from that data.

Joe Biron walks us through PTC's approach to full IoT adoption including everything from installation to organizational change.

Finally, we talk about the coming technologies that Joe is excited about.

Show Links

• PTC Manufacturing
• Learn more about PTC's strategic partnership with Microsoft and how together we’ve enabled enterprises to accelerate digital transformation. 

Joe Biron

Joe Biron is an experienced technology executive with a passion for imagining and implementing technology solutions for the grand challenges that businesses face. In his career he has been a software engineer, technology consultant, chief architect, product strategist, and team leader. For the past decade he had the good fortune to be part of the Internet of Things revolution, particularly the Industrial IoT, and looks forward to the stunning paradigm shift that is happening now!

As part of the PTC Office of the CTO, he looks after the intersection of our customer solutions, platforms, and the opportunities that the Internet of Things bring.

Follow Joe on LinkedIn

Diego Tamburrini

Diego Tamburini is the Principal Industry Lead for Azure Manufacturing in the Microsoft Industry Experience team, where he focuses on developing technical content to help manufacturing companies and software developers deliver their solutions on Azure, at scale.

He also champions partners who deliver manufacturing solutions using Azure.

Follow Diego on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Transcript

Nick Leimer shares changes occurring in the insurance industry and how companies are dealing with it. Specifically, we look at computing risk for regulatory compliance and how it might be a good match for Azure services, like Azure Batch or Azure High-Performance Computing.

Additionally, Nick explains some of the current and evolving industry regulations. Regulatory compliance is key to insurance companies and the discussion addresses this issue.

Show Links

• Azure Batch
• Azure CycleCloud for HPC scenarios

Nick Leimer

Nick Leimer is the Principal Insurance Industry Lead for Azure. Nick brings 20+ years of experience bridging the business and IT gap in application development, operations, and infrastructure.

Before joining Microsoft, Mr. Leimer was the Senior Director for Actuarial Compute at Manulife leading the migration of LAN based HPC Farms to the Azure environment for all of Asia; including all desktop Moody’s / GGY Axis users and data feeds.

Prior to Manulife, his career progressed through developing applications for Actuarial Valuation and Projection including components of ArcVal and Prophet, the Defined Benefit area with the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (BPGC), and leading life insurers, AIG and Manulife. 

Follow Nick on LinkedIn or Twitter.

David Starr

In addition to being the host of this podcast, David is a Principal Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft, focusing on healthcare. He loves creating with code and with large systems supporting scale.

He enjoys all aspects of developing, delivering and operating software systems. He is also passionate about the end-to-end process, methods and techniques, and the patterns and practices of high performing software development teams, using skills that transcend specific technology stacks. 

Follow David on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Healthcare IT veteran, David Houlding, chats with us about reducing costs in healthcare as part of an organization’s digital transformation and specifically, outlines the tools and techniques needed for these transformations to succeed. Additionally, we discuss core technologies of Azure and how they can help in the move to the cloud, ensuring regulatory compliance, security, and privacy.

David discusses how healthcare organizations are adopting cloud technologies and explore some non-exotic reasons to move to the cloud like data storage and security. Finally, we point to partners for the applications created on top of the Azure infrastructure.

Show Links

• Azure Backup
• Azure Compliance Manager
• Azure Key Vault
• Azure Security Center
• Azure Site Recovery
• Azure Stack
• Industry Certifications and Compliance
• Simplify your compliance journey

David Houlding

David is a Principal Healthcare Program Manager at Microsoft. He has 24+ years of experience in healthcare, cloud, privacy, security, compliance, blockchain, and artificial intelligence / machine learning. Responsibilities include cloud, privacy, security, compliance, blockchain, AI/ML thought leadership in the healthcare industry globally.

He supports the healthcare industry by embracing the power of the cloud to provide better care for patients. From hospitals and insurers to pharmaceuticals and researchers, David links the industry to Microsoft technology to empower the healthcare industry and anticipate the healthcare needs of the future.

Find David on LinkedIn or Twitter.

David Starr

In addition to being the host of this podcast, David is a Principal Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft, focusing on healthcare. He loves creating with code and with large systems supporting scale.

He enjoys all aspects of developing, delivering and operating software systems. He is also passionate about the end-to-end process, methods and techniques, and the patterns and practices of high performing software development teams, using skills that transcend specific technology stacks. 

Follow David on LinkedIn or Twitter

Transcript

In this episode, we dive into IoT, High Performance Computing (HPC) and even delve into scaling strategies.

Diego Tamburini takes us deep into the digital transformation occurring in the manufacturing world. Along the way we discuss IoT, moving systems and data into Azure, and the interesting issues that can come up in time-series data.

Additionally, we even go deeply into some 3D printing for manufacturing and rendering jobs from standalone desktop applications.

Show Links

• Big Compute: HPC and Batch
• Azure Batch
• Manufacturing home page
• Azure for Manufacturing

Diego Tamburini

Diego Tamburini is the Principal Industry Lead for Azure Manufacturing in the Microsoft Industry Experience team, where he focuses on developing technical content to help manufacturing companies and software developers deliver their solutions on Azure, at scale.

He also champions partners who deliver manufacturing solutions using Azure.

Follow Diego on LinkedIn or Twitter.

David Starr

In addition to being the host of this podcast, David is a Principal Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft, focusing on healthcare. He loves creating with code and with large systems supporting scale.

He enjoys all aspects of developing, delivering and operating software systems. He is also passionate about the end-to-end process, methods and techniques, and the patterns and practices of high performing software development teams, using skills that transcend specific technology stacks. 

Follow David on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Transcript

In this episode, Howard Bush talks with us about enabling real-time transactions instead of the customary batch transactions that financial institutions use today. The discussion also covers the problem of providing real-time transactions and recommends a set of tools to help you get going faster in your organization's digital transformation.

SHOW LINKS

Useful tools and services in planning and performing your migration to Azure.

• Industry Experiences Team home page
• Azure AppSource
• Azure Database Migration Service
• API Management
• Azure Marketplace
• Azure Migration Center
• Banking in capital markets (blog post)
• Cloud-based API Management: Harnessing the Power of APIs 
• Security Center Site Recovery
• V2 Auth API

Howard Bush

Howard Bush is a Principle Industry Lead for Azure for Banking and Capital Markets at Microsoft. He advocates for Microsoft Azure within the banking and capital markets industry. Howard works with customers to help them understand how cloud computing addresses the unique and changing needs of the industry. Howard describes himself as “a banker wrapped in IT clothing.” 

Follow Howard on LinkedIn or Twitter.

David Starr

In addition to being the host of this podcast, David is a Principal Cloud Solutions architect at Microsoft, focusing on healthcare. He loves creating with code and with large systems supporting scale.

He enjoys all aspects of developing, delivering and operating software systems. He is also passionate about the end-to-end process, methods and techniques, and the patterns and practices of high performing software development teams, using skills that transcend specific technology stacks. 

Follow David on LinkedIn or Twitter

Transcript

Today we are talking about blockchain as a service and how it can be leveraged in manufacturing. With very real use cases and stories of success, we'll see how blockchain is affecting manufacturing in various ways today.

Joel Neidig

Joel is the Director of Research & Development for ITAMCO and is the CEO of SIMBA Chain and Blockchain as a Service Platform that runs on Microsoft Azure.

Follow Joel on LinkedIn.

Diego Tamburini

Diego is the Principal Industry Lead for Azure Manufacturing in the Microsoft Industry Experience team, where he focuses on developing technical content to help manufacturing companies and software developers deliver their solutions on Azure, at scale.

He also champions partners who deliver manufacturing solutions using Azure.

Follow Diego on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Transcript

This episode introduces containers for AI cognitive services.

There are some industries today limited in what they can do with AI. This is because all of the AI services that we've built are running in the cloud, because of regulatory reasons, sensitivity reasons or other reasons (data governance or performance) they're not able to actually call those services in the cloud.

Containers from Cognitive Services opens a whole new world of possibilities enabling customers to take advantage of the AI right in their own control, in their own context, within their own network. Basically on their own terms and in their own control.

Container support in Azure Cognitive Services allows developers to use the same rich APIs that are available in Azure, and enables flexibility in where to deploy and host the services that come with Docker containers. Container support is currently available in preview for a subset of Azure Cognitive Services, including parts of Computer Vision, Face, Text Analytics, and Language Understanding (LUIS).

Show Notes

• Getting started with Azure Cognitive Services in containers
• Bringing AI to the edge
• Container support in Azure Cognitive Services

Phani Mutyalais

Phani Mutyalais is a Senior Program Manager with the Applied AI team at Microsoft. He focuses on running container strategy and execution for Cognitive Services.

Phani has deep experience in building and running large scale platforms on public clouds and more recently with container platforms.

He is super passionate about Cloud, Containers, Machine Learning and AI technologies and is a continuous learner.

David Starr

In addition to being the host of this podcast, David is a Principal Cloud Solutions architect at Microsoft, focusing on healthcare. He loves creating with code and with large systems supporting scale.

He enjoys all aspects of developing, delivering and operating software systems. He is also passionate about the end-to-end process, methods and techniques, and the patterns and practices of high performing software development teams, using skills that transcend specific technology stacks. 

Find David on LinkedIn | or Twitter

Transcript

Jess Panni takes us through using Azure for two real-world machine learning scenarios in his projects for customers.

Jess shares insights learned from machine learning projects and the use of Machine Learning Studio to get actionable insights from the data produced.

Finally, he also ties machine learning iterations to agile software development and proposes that data science and agile teams can indeed co-exist.

Topics covered include the following.

• ML Studio
• Data Factory
• Power BI

Jess Panni

Jess has over 20 years’ experience helping companies succeed through the smart use of technology.

He has spent most of his career working for leading Microsoft partners across the UK and Australia and is now Principal at endjin,

At endjin, he works with clients to help them transform into modern, data-driven, cloud-first organizations.

Transcript

David Houlding, a Microsoft Principal Healthcare Program Manager, discusses topics such as Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning all within the context of healthcare. He also explains Microsoft's commitment to the health industry.

David Houlding

David is a Principal Healthcare Program Manager at Microsoft. He has 24+ years of experience in healthcare, cloud, privacy, security, compliance, blockchain, and artificial intelligence/machine learning. Responsibilities include cloud, privacy, security, compliance, blockchain, AI/ML thought leadership in the healthcare industry globally.

He supports the healthcare industry by embracing the power of the cloud to provide better care for patients. From hospitals and insurers to pharmaceuticals and researchers, David links the industry to Microsoft technology to empower the healthcare industry and anticipate the healthcare needs of the future.

Follow David on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Transcript

Manufacturing expert Diego Taburini discusses emerging and transformative technologies in manufacturing.

Diego Taburini

Diego is the Principal Industry Lead for Azure Manufacturing in the Microsoft Industry Experience team, where he focuses on developing technical content to help manufacturing companies and software developers deliver their solutions on Azure, at scale.

He also champions partners who deliver manufacturing solutions using Azure.

Follow Diego on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Transcript

This IoT episode ranges from oil and gas to Rasberry Pi, real-time streaming analytics and even Design Thinking.

Sameer Kalwani joins us to talk all things IoT including the cultural changes data-informed decision making has on organizations.

Sameer Kalwani

A passion for infrastructure inspired Sameer to found Element, where he oversees product strategy, design, and marketing. Previously, he was CTO & Head of Product at Piramal Sarvajal, an innovative water utility with distributed water treatment plants.

His patented solutions reduced Sarvajal’s O&M costs by >60% and consumer water price by 60x. His products have been recognized with Frost & Sullivan's Enabling Technology Award of the Year and as FastCo’s Top 10 Most Innovative Products. Earlier, Sameer consulted on IT M&A at Deloitte, managed product at Apcera, finance at Goldman Sachs, and manufacturing at Visteon. Sameer holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and BS in Cognitive Psychology from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He and his wife Ashi enjoy exploring regional cuisines.

Find Element on the web and follow them on LinkedIn.

Follow Sameer on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Diego Tamburini

Diego is the Principal Industry Lead for Azure Manufacturing in the Microsoft Industry Experience team, where he focuses on developing technical content to help manufacturing companies and software developers deliver their solutions on Azure, at scale.

He also champions partners who deliver manufacturing solutions using Azure.

Follow Diego on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Transcript

Product availability is a key ingredient to ensuring a great service experience. With consumers’ expectations of the ability to purchase products when, where and how they choose, both retailers and consumer goods companies must modernize their approach to managing and maximizing inventory to ensure shelves are fully stocked with the right balance of SKUs desired by consumers. In this episode, I am joined by 3 retail and consumer goods technology experts who talk with us today about how the retail and customer goods industry is using technology and transforming the way these industries are doing business.

In this episode we cover:

1. The business and technologies of retailers and consumer goods
2. Solutions created from that technology
3. How Microsoft Azure helped
   our Neal Analytics build a solution for their customers

Show Links

• Explore the Retail and consumer goods use case: Inventory optimization through SKU assortment + machine learning
• Try out the Neal Analytics SKU Assortment Optimization solution
• Follow Neal Analytics on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Greg Gomez

Greg is VP of Alliances and Industry Strategy at Neal Analytics, a Seattle-based consulting firm and Microsoft partner that helps companies drive digital transformation through the application of machine learning and AI.

Follow Greg on LinkedIn.

David McClellan

David is the Director of Portfolio and Strategy at Neal Analytics, who defines and builds the business solutions like SKU Max.

Follow David on LinkedIn.

Mariya Zorotovich

Mariya is a WW Industry Leader, Retail and Consumer Goods. She has more than 20 years of experience in retail leading strategies and initiatives across sales, operations, human resources, public relations, technology and product management.

Read Mariya's recent blog posts on how to address common retail and consumer goods use cases using Azure.

Follow Mariya on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Transcript

Nick Leimer from Microsoft brings us an astounding view into the digital transformation occurring inside the insurance industry.

Thanks to cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, advanced analytics capabilities and other transformative technologies, insurance companies can more accurately model risk, customize pricing and better meet the needs of a transforming marketplace and customers who want more from their insurers.

"InsurTech" organizations are using these and other technologies, marrying to the cloud to provide new and better services to their customers. Nick touches on IoT, AI, bot technologies, and real-time analytics.

Show Links

• Explore how to address common insurance use cases using Azure.

Nick Leimer

Nick Leimer is the Principal Insurance Industry Lead for Azure. Nick brings 20+ years of experience bridging the business and IT gap in application development, operations, and infrastructure. Before joining Microsoft, Mr. Leimer was the Senior Director for Actuarial Compute at Manulife leading the migration of LAN based HPC Farms to the Azure environment for all of Asia; including all desktop Moody’s / GGY Axis users and data feeds. Prior to Manulife, his career progressed through developing applications for Actuarial Valuation and Projection including components of ArcVal and Prophet, the Defined Benefit area with the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (BPGC), and leading life insurers, AIG and Manulife. 

Read Nick's recent blog posts on how to address common insurance use cases using Azure.

Follow Nick on LinkedIn or Twitter (@LeimerNick).

In this episode of the podcast, we visit with Hari Menon and Diego Tamburini about the intersection of IoT and artificial intelligence. Hari's company, Symphony Industrial AI, provides packaged AI enabled software solutions that optimize equipment and process performance for large industrial customers. These solutions use large volumes of real-time and batch data from equipment and processes in real time and apply AI/ML algorithms to predict failures and anomalies as well as optimize performance.

Show Links

• Download the Extracting actionable insights from IoT use case guide.
• Read how you can leverage Azure to build predictive maintenance solutions.
• Explore Azure IoT
• Visit Symphony Industrial AI to learn more about their services

Hari Menon

As CEO, Hari is responsible for product and market strategy for Symphony industrial AI.

Hari was most recently the CEO of a venture-backed Supply Chain SaaS company called Serus which was acquired by E2Open (NASDAQ: EOPN). Hari’s entrepreneurial experience includes co-founding and leading Tumri, a venture financed advertising software company that was acquired by Collective Media as well as co-founding two other software startups, Accordia (acquired by Bristlecone Inc.) and SixthDimension (acquired by Comverge Nasdaq: COMV). 

Prior to his startup experience, Hari spent 10 years in enterprise software and consulting companies including Aspect Development (i2 Technologies), Accenture and Consilium.

Hari holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.S. in industrial engineering and operations research from Oklahoma State University.

Diego Tamburini

Diego Tamburini the Principal Industry Lead for Azure Manufacturing in the Microsoft Industry Experience team, where he focuses on developing technical assets to help manufacturing companies and software developers deliver their manufacturing solutions on Azure, at scale.

He also champions partners who deliver manufacturing solutions using Azure.

Read Diego's recent blog posts on how to address common manufacturing use cases using Azure.

Follow Diego on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Transcript

Mariya Zorotovich talks with Vince Menzione about emerging and disruptive technologies in retail with a focus on Artificial Intelligence. Mariya shares about her role as a translator between retail and consumer goods customer needs and Microsoft’s technology agenda related to Azure and AI technology.

Further, organizations are using intelligent technologies to drive business in retail and consumer goods. Mariya recommends practical approaches to helping more traditional organizations truly transform in order to compete as this industry evolves.

Show Links

• Explore AI for retail
• Read Reasons why retail and consumer goods brands should address Artificial Intelligence today

Mariya Zorotovich

Mariya Zorotovich, WW Industry Leader, Retail and Consumer Goods.

Mariya Zorotovich has more than 20 years of experience in retail leading strategies and initiatives across sales, operations, human resources, public relations, technology and product management.

Before joining Microsoft in 2016, she led strategy and delivery of digital capabilities and new services to market at Nordstrom across physical and digital channels.

Mariya joined Microsoft as the US Retail CG Industry Solutions Executive focused on digital transformation at top Fortune 500 brands. Mariya is active in the Retail and CG community, currently serving on the Retail Tomorrow Board.

Read Mariya's recent blog posts on how to address common retail and consumer goods use cases using Azure.

Follow Mariya through LinkedIn or Twitter.

Transcript

Howard Bush explains the current industry climate and technology disruptions occurring in financial services. With so many technology options and services available to financial service companies, Howard explains the slow adoption of older organizations and the success of new FinTechs disrupting old ways of doing business.

Howard covers blockchain, AI adoption, fraud detection and prevention and covers why many financial institutions are starting their journey to "intelligent banking" with Microsoft using a hybrid approach to Azure.

Show Notes

• Read Howard's recent blog Lessons from big box retail about how banks can leverage modern retail experiences to provide their customers with new choices, speed, and tailored recommendations
• Explore common banking use cases that can be addressed with Azure.

Howard Bush

Howard Bush is a Principle Industry Lead for Azure for Banking and Capital Markets at Microsoft. He advocates for Microsoft Azure within the banking and capital markets industry. Howard works with customers to help them understand how cloud computing addresses the unique and changing needs of the industry.

Howard describes himself as “a banker wrapped in IT clothing.” 

Read Howard's recent blog posts on how to address common banking use cases using Azure.

Follow Howard on LinkedIn or Twitter as @HowardBush2.

Transcript

David Houlding and Gururaj Pandurangi take us on a journey through the technical advances AI (Artificial Intelligence) is bringing to Healthcare. This episode dispells common myths of AI and more importantly covers the promise of AI in healthcare's present and future.

AI holds major potential for healthcare, from predicting patient length of stay to diagnostic imaging, anti-fraud, and many more use cases. Learn how you can close the gap to your AI in healthcare solution by accelerating your initiative using free Microsoft Azure blueprints, including example code, test data, security, and compliance support that gets you 50-90% to your solution. This session is intended for healthcare provider, payer, pharmaceuticals, and life sciences organizations. Key roles include senior technical decision makers including CIO’s, CTO’s through IT Managers and Cloud Architects

Show Links

Links to items discussed in this episode.

• Download the Azure blueprint for AI in healthcare
• Clone, fork, or download the blueprint on GitHub
• Explore common healthcare use cases that can be addressed with Azure.
• Visit Avyan Consulting Corp

Gururaj Pandurangi

As a CEO and Founder of Avyan Consulting Corp (a Cloud Consulting Services) and Cloudneeti (ISV Cloud Workload Assurance ISV), Gururaj guides clients towards a business-focused and holistic approach to cloud adoption.

The teams he leads specializes in Digital Transformation through cloud-scale application design, DevOps & CI/CD, Analytics, Cybersecurity & Compliance, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Follow Gururaj on LinkedIn or Twitter.

David Houlding

David is a Principal Healthcare Program Manager at Microsoft. He has 24+ years of experience in healthcare, cloud, privacy, security, compliance, blockchain, and artificial intelligence/machine learning. Responsibilities include cloud, privacy, security, compliance, blockchain, AI/ML thought leadership in the healthcare industry globally.

David supports the healthcare industry by embracing the power of the cloud to provide better care for patients. From hospitals and insurers to pharmaceuticals and researchers, David links the industry to Microsoft technology to empower the healthcare industry and anticipate the healthcare needs of the future.

Read David Houlding’s recent blog posts on how to address common healthcare use cases using Azure.

Follow David on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Transcript

Paul Maher discusses the Industry Experiences team, why it was created, and how it can help your organization. In this episode, Paul introduces the team and explains why Microsoft is investing in industry vertical markets. He shares the industry-first vision and the disruptive and transformative technologies that are hot topics in industry today.

Show Links

• Explore using Azure to address common use cases in banking, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, and retail.

Paul Maher

Paul is a proven leader in the technology field, having extensive industry experience acquired across a variety of roles, with a passion for technology. He is a strategic thinker, who can look at the big picture, or complex problems and distill into actionable output. Started career behind the code as a Software Engineer, through to most recently as General Manager at Microsoft. Skilled at leading, building and growing teams.

You can follow Paul on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Transcript

Podcast host David Starr sets the stage for the podcast series. In this brief episode, David explains what the show is about and what types of content and guests to expect on future podcasts.

Show Links

• Explore using Azure to address common use cases in banking, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, and retail.

David Starr

David is a Principal Solutions Architect on the Industry Experiences team at Microsoft. He is a professional software craftsman committed to improving agility, collaboration, and technical excellence in software development teams. His is focused on Azure system architectures, founder of ElegantCode.com, served in numerous leadership roles, and been an early and consistent advocate for agile development.

Read David Starr’s recent blog posts on using Azure to build solutions for industry use cases.

You can follow David on LinkedIn or Twitter (@elegantcoder).

Transcript

Welcome to the Microsoft industry experiences team podcast in this series. You'll hear from leaders across various industries discussing the impact of digital disruption and innovation sharing how they've used Azure to transform their business.

I'm your host David Starr and I'm excited about the content we'll be bringing to you. The Azure industry experiences show focuses on real stories from those who have solved real and complex problems using Microsoft Azure will host of a variety of guests with our main focus being to answer the question how are you succeeding with Azure in your industry.

The industries we'll cover include banking and financial services, manufacturing, and retail healthcare life sciences and insurance. Although we may expand that list over time we'll be speaking with thought leaders technical decision makers system architects and others who've solved industry problems using Azure.

We look forward to conversations we'll bring you to help inform your technology decisions.