Azure Partner Pulse: August 2022

Announcing several new resources:

• New! AVD customer evidence
• New! AVD infographic: 5 reasons hybrid work is more effective with Azure Virtual Desktop
• New! AVD blog: What is desktop as a service (DaaS) and how can it help your organization?
• New! AVD on-demand webinar: Use the Power of Azure GPU VMs with Azure Virtual Desktop

Check out the session on ‘Advancing enterprise Linux application modernization on Azure’ from Microsoft Inspire that covers Arc enabled Kubernetes, Azure Hybrid Benefit and the opportunity for partners with Linux on Azure.

Be sure to check out ‘Grow revenue by accelerating customer adoption of Azure infrastructure’ from Inspire to learn more about the opportunity for partners for infrastructure migration and modernization as a whole and how to address each customer scenario with Azure solutions.

SQL Server 2012 reached end-of-support on July 12, 2022 and Windows Server 2012 will reach end-of-support on October 10, 2023. Leverage these dates as a key moment for customers to modernize, leading with migration or upgrading. For more information on end of support and customer options, check out the end-of-support website and this blog that outlines the opportunity for partners.

Azure continues to be the best cloud for SQL Server with more innovation and the best TCO for customers. In a recent benchmark, Azure SQL Managed Instance performed up to 5x faster and cost up to 93% less than AWS RDS.

SQL Server 2012 End of Support took place July 12. Customers can stay protected and save as much as 69% by migrating to Azure for free Extended Security Updates. Here are useful assets to help you position why Azure is the best destination for SQL Server 2012.

To help support your migration and modernization practices, Microsoft is expanding the Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP). We’re now investing significantly more to support your largest SQL Server migration and modernization projects—up to 2.5 times larger based on project eligibility. This investment will help with your migration in two ways: partner assistance with planning and moving your workloads, and Azure credits that offset transition costs during your move to Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure SQL Database. Learn more.

Resources:

• See Azure Data & AI sessions at Microsoft Inspire
• See how udaan uses SQL Database to open new business opportunities and learn how Lenovo is using SQL ledger to track its manufacturing and supply chain.
• Encourage customers to download SQL Server 2022 public preview.

Azure is the best destination for open-source databases, providing excellent value for migrations, from managed PostgreSQL and MySQL to distributed NoSQL database with Azure Cosmos DB. Underpinning our open-source databases are full management capabilities, intelligent security and compliance features, and limitless scale.

Resources:

• See Azure Data & AI sessions at Microsoft Inspire
• Learn how to eliminate cost, increase operational savings, and improve business agility when migrating to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Read the report.
• See how Belgian retailer Delhaize implemented electronic shelf labels (ELS) based on Azure Database for MySQL.
• Leverage the NoSQL Migration L100 deck
• The Database Migration Assistant (DMA) v1 for Azure Cosmos DB API for MongoDB is now available to assist customers through the pre-migration steps from on-premises MongoDB or Atlas to Azure Cosmos DB.
• In this new customer story, see why Allego chose Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server to scale growth of their EV business.

We launched a series of new services supporting our SAP customers. In addition to the Azure Center for SAP solutions (preview), check out the Azure Monitor for SAP solutions (preview) and WAF for SAP (preview), along with recent product announcements we made at Sapphire.

Secondly, we released a new MS Learn Module: Improve SAP seller productivity with Microsoft Teams and Power Platform. This module was developed for business users, solution architects, and technology managers alike with the learning objectives of understanding how to integrate applications from SAP with the Microsoft 365 applications and enabling productivity and collaboration in the SAP Sales and Service Core Teams app to support sales by building Power Automate flows. Please review the module and invite your team to get skilled up!

Last but not least, we’re excited to share the Wall Street Journal thought leadership customer story, “The Transformation of the CFO.” The story is centered around Standard Chartered, and the role of the bank’s CFO as a change agent driving the digital transformation. Please feel free to share it with your customers and let us know of any feedback.

New customer stories: NOVA Chemicals, Wolverine Worldwide, Luminous, Woolworths

Watch the Azure Hybrid, Multicloud, and Edge Day, available on-demand, and check out our related blogs:

• Discover how you can innovate anywhere with Azure Arc
• Wolverine Worldwide and its portfolio of popular brands tap the hybrid cloud to be fleeter of foot in reaching customers

At Inspire, this year, Azure Arc was featured in the Infra breakout and an on-demand session showcasing how partners can move their hybrid business forward with Azure Arc. In addition, we launched the Azure Arc Boost Program.

Resources:

• Azure Arc customer stories
• New customer stories: Greggs, John Deere, Millennium bcp, Wolverine Worldwide

We released a new Digital and App Innovation landing page which will contain the top resources accessed in GearUp, App Innovation story, Thought Leadership, links to hands-on experiences and industry demos. This page will contain key Dig & App Innovation updates moving forward.

At Microsoft Inspire, the App Innovation team presented Drive digital and application innovation with Microsoft Azure. Speakers included Ashmi Chokshi, Alvaro Celis, Ali Powell, and Naga Surendran.

The first annual Microsoft Power Platform Conference will be held September 20-22 in Orlando, Florida. Register today for an amazing in-person event, with keynotes, sessions, breakouts and more—all dedicated to Microsoft Power Platform products.

We announced several developer and operator enhancements to Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Functions, Azure Container Apps and Azure Static Web Apps in June. At Inspire, the Drive digital and application innovation with Microsoft Azure session highlighted how partners and customers can benefit by increasing developer velocity with GitHub, building intelligent cloud native apps, and modernizing existing apps.

Resources:
• Share the 30DaysOfSWA for a structured Azure Static Web Apps onboarding for your customers.

We released a public preview of agentless migration for ASP.NET web apps to Azure App Service using Azure Migrate. Customers can now not only assess but also migrate large-scale .NET web apps running on Windows OS in a VMware datacenter environment to Azure App Service code. We uploaded new demos to deploy Node.js web apps to Azure App Service in a new series of 6 videos. In these demos, Natalia Venditto and Jason Freeberg walk developers through various aspects of the service to build mission-critical solutions.

WordPress on Azure App Service will soon be generally available in Azure Marketplace. The newly managed service is more performant, more cost-effective, and faster to deploy than previous offerings.

Resources:

• Microsoft joins the Jakarta EE and MicroProfile Working Groups at Eclipse Foundation – Announcement Blog

In June we held a virtual event to discuss the Responsible AI (RAI) Standard and share our learnings with customers and partners around the world. In addition, to better align to the Standard, we announced a new Limited Access policy and customers now need to apply for access to use facial recognition operations in Azure Face API, Computer Vision, and Video Indexer. Check out the article in the New York Times: Microsoft Plans to Eliminate Face Analysis Tools in Push for ‘Responsible A.I.’

Call to Action: visit our Responsible AI site for more information about responsible AI policies, practices and tools.

Resources:

• Microsoft on the Issues blog and video
• Azure blog: Responsible AI Investments and safeguards for facial recognition

New Azure Enablement Show videos are available now! Check out the Assess your cloud environment with the Azure Landing Zone Review video to learn what you can get out of the assessment and the Introduction to the Arc-enabled Kubernetes landing zone accelerator video to find out how the landing zone accelerator can help!

Well-Architected released three new assessments in July: WAF for SAP, Go-Live for pre-production scenarios, and Reliability and Operational Excellence for Azure Stack. Go to the Microsoft Assessments Portal for details.

New! Azure Customer Enablement Offers Directory on Azure for Partners!
Accentuate and monetize your WAF and CAF knowledge by offering workshops. Customers, partners, and Microsoft’s field use this page to find these workshops to help accelerate their opportunities. If your organization has an Azure Specialization, you can add your own tile to this directory. Contact your partner development manager or partner technical specialist to get started.

Azure Advisor has released tag filtering so customers can get recommendations and scores scoped to a workload, environment, or team using resource tag filters. Highlights include:

• Filter recommendations and calculate scores using tags you have already assigned to Azure resources, resource groups and subscriptions.
• Identify cost saving opportunities by team
• Compare scores for workloads to optimize in criticality-order

For more information, visit the Advisor webpage and documentation.

Resources:

• Cloud Adoption Framework page
• Well-Architected page

New Skilling web page
We now have a single webpage to easily discover ways to learn Azure skills – on Microsoft Learn, through events, and through curated role-based pathways.

Call to Action: Review the latest content on azure.com/learn!

Exam for Azure Support Engineer for Connectivity Specialty Certification is GA
We are excited to announce that Exam AZ-720: Troubleshooting Microsoft Azure Connectivity is now live and out of beta. This exam is required to earn the new the Microsoft Certified: Azure Support Engineer for Connectivity Specialty certification, which validates expertise in this area and offers the opportunity to prove your Azure connectivity troubleshooting skills.

Resources:

• Exam AZ-720 announcement blog.
• Explore the curated content to help prepare for the exam in the Microsoft Learn collection.

We had several major announcements around Azure IoT that launched at Embedded World 2022. We announced the GA of NXP Arm64 support for Windows IoT, the partnership with STMicroelectronics to build a security platform targeting MCU-based devices, the Public Preview of Rust on Azure Sphere, GA of Edge Secured-Core for Windows IoT, and a partnership to provide connectivity to resource-constrained devices leveraging LWM2M. You can read the main announcement blog on Azure by Moe Tanabian for more information and insights.

At Hanover Messe, Parag Ladha from Microsoft presented on the state of Industrial IoT, Hannover Messe 2022: Microsoft Exec on the State of Industrial IoT – IoT World Today.

Resources:

• New customer stories: City of Valencia, Monarc Sports, CAE Healthcare, Sandvik, Anchor Fasteners, Luminous, Acotel, Bosch and more.
• Read Azure IoT Tech Community blogs for the latest information around product releases, updates and articles from the Azure IoT team.
• Read the recent blog addressing the need for additional IT/OT security for manufacturers

AVS vSphere 7.0 roll out – We are excited to announce the completion of vSphere 7.0 Greenfield SDDC deployments with vCenter Server version 7.0 Update 3c and ESXi version 7.0 Update 3c. Brownfield upgrades will start in July for the remaining regions: South Central US, North Central US, West Europe, East US and South Africa North.

Azure NetApp Files for Azure VMware Solution is now available in preview. AVS customers can now scale storage independently from compute using Azure NetApp Files datastores, enabling them to run VMware-based storage-intensive workloads like SQL Server, general-purpose file servers, and others in Azure.

Resources:

• Add VMware Explore 2022 to your calendar.
• Check out the Azure NetApp Files preview details .
• Leverage The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure VMware Solution including Enterprise Scale Landing Zone.
• Share the latest customer case studies with your customers.
• Take the AVS Learn Path.

In June, we announced the general availability of the NC A100 v4 VM series virtual machines. These VMs, powered by NVIDIA A100 80GB Tensor Core PCIe GPUs and 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ Milan processors, improve the performance and cost-effectiveness of a variety of GPU performance-bound real world AI training and inferencing workloads.

In addition, in July we announced the general availability of the NVads A10 v5 VM series for visualization workloads in West Europe, South Central US, and West US3 regions. The NVads A10 v5 VM series enables a wide variety of graphics, video, and AI workloads, including virtual production and visual effects, engineering design and simulation, game development and streaming, virtual desktops/workstations and more.

Resources:

• Take the Azure High Performance Computing MSLearn Path
• Share the latest customer case studies with your customers

In Azure Networking in June, we published one Azure blog post Improve outbound connectivity with Azure Virtual Network NAT, as well as five Azure updates preview announcements: ExpressRoute IPv6 Support for Global Reach, Network Watcher packet capture support for virtual machine scale sets, Connection Monitor Support for virtual machine scale sets, Private link support in Azure Application Gateway, and ExpressRoute Direct and Circuit in different subscriptions. Finally, the Azure DNS product page has been updated with the new Azure DNS Private Resolver Preview offering.

In Azure Network Security, we published one Azure blog post on the new Azure Firewall capabilities as well as an Azure update post on the Public Preview of support for management of Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) policies in Azure Firewall Manager. We published two case studies – Dematic and Elvia - highlighting how our customers are enhancing their security using Azure network security services.

Resources:

• Watch the Azure Virtual Networks Webinar and Azure Front Door Ask-the-Expert recordings.