This week we saw a big announcement that gets us further on our hybrid cloud journey--one where cloud strategies will also include edge and hybrid investments and companies can extend compute and AI (artificial intelligence) to the edge of the network. Microsoft introduces Azure Percept at its Ignite digital conference this week, which is a platform with added security for creating Azure AI technologies and solutions on the edge. The end-to-end edge AI platform includes hardware accelerators integrated with Azure AI and IoT (Internet of Things) services and pre-built AI models--for vision capabilities including object detection, shelf analytics, vehicle analytics, and audio capabilities like voice control and anomaly detection--and solution management to help go from prototype to production in minutes. This is big news especially as companies and partners look to digital transformation with great fervor. The goal of the Azure Percept platform is to simplify the process of developing, training, and deploying edge AI solutions, making it easier for more customers to take advantage of these kinds of offerings, according to Moe Tanabian, Microsoft vice president and GM of the Azure edge and devices group.

Elevators that respond to voice commands, cameras that notify store managers when to restock shelves and video streams that keep tabs on everything from cash register lines to parking space availability. These are a few of the millions of scenarios becoming possible thanks to a combination of artificial intelligence and computing on the edge. Standalone edge devices can take advantage of AI tools for things like translating text or recognizing images without having to constantly access cloud computing capabilities. At its Ignite digital conference, Microsoft unveiled the public preview of Azure Percept, a platform of hardware and services that aims to simplify the ways in which customers can use Azure AI technologies on the edge – including taking advantage of Azure cloud offerings such as device management, AI model development and analytics. Roanne Sones, corporate vice president of Microsoft's edge and platform group, said the goal of the new offering is to give customers a single, end-to-end system, from the hardware to the AI capabilities, that "just works" without requiring a lot of technical know-how.

This week at Microsoft Ignite, a number of new developments to Azure were in focus. While there were dozens of updates to the world's second-largest public cloud, data was once again in the spotlight. The company made a series of announcements to enable users to extract more value from the exponential increase in data. Satya Nadella, in his Ignite keynote, provided a new visionary direction, or at least a new way of expressing the company's cloud endeavors. In short, the Microsoft cloud is evolving to further embrace edge, privacy, security, AI, and developers (both coders and no coders), and to serve as an engine of job creation. On the surface, this shift appears subtle.