Highlights from Microsoft Build 2017 (MSFT)

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May 15, 2017 3:02 PM

Microsoft announced a slew of updates on its products and services at its annual Build 2017 developer conference last week

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Microsoft announced a slew of updates on its products and services at its annual Build 2017 developer conference last week. Here’s a roundup of some of the most notable highlights:

An overarching theme of the Build 2017 conference was interoperability between platforms and devices. The company is ceding the device market in lieu of controlling what’s going on inside the devices. This is being chased on multiple fronts, such as through Continuum, which allows smartphones to act as PC processors when plugged in to a monitor and keyboard; Universal Windows Platform, which allows developers to build one app that can work across Microsoft devices, including PC, Xbox, and HoloLens; and the Intelligent Cloud platform, which utilizes Azure cloud and Cortana to tie platforms and devices together.

Cloud computing — on-demand, internet-based computing services — has been successfully applied to many computing functions in recent years.

From consumer-facing, web-based productivity apps like Google Docs to enterprise database management suites, the tools businesses rely on are increasingly moving to the cloud.

But developing a cloud strategy is no easy task. Public cloud solutions will likely come to dominate the market over the next decade, but business constraints, such as security concerns and the limitations of existing infrastructure, make it difficult for companies to fully adopt the public cloud right now.

That means that hybrid clouds,in which multiple cloud implementations (including public and private) are connected,will remain popular for the time being, at least until these constraints are addressed. The tech giants that dominate the IaaS market — Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Google — are constantly expanding their offerings to address current business constraints as they compete for market share.

Christina Anzalone, senior research analyst at BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on cloud computing that evaluates the current business considerations for the various cloud solutions and provides an outlook on the state of the market.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

In full, the report:

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