azuremarketplace

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).

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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.

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.

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.