Recap: European Azure Tour & Cloud Roadshow

[Brad Anderson]

First published on CloudBlogs on Mar 02, 2016
I just spent the last six days in Frankfurt (Azure Tour) and London (Cloud Roadshow) keynoting both events and meeting with over a dozen customers – and it was amazing . The customers I met with have (combined) close to 2 million employees, and it was incredible to see how the cloud and mobility are changing the way they do their work.  One of my biggest takeaways from all of these meetings is that organizations are dramatically changing the way they look at Enterprise Mobility – they expect it to be a central part of their ongoing growth. It’s amazing to consider that, all these years into the smartphone revolution, many organizations are just now starting to really use mobility to empower their people.  The companies that are using the cloud and mobility to truly transform their businesses will be the market leaders in their categories and segments in the future. This maturing perspective on Enterprise Mobility comes at a time when the number of mobility vendors is diminishing via consolidation.  Microsoft is investing in the end-to-end scenarios across Office 365 and the Enterprise Mobility Suite – and these scenarios are key to the iconic and empowering work environment you can deliver to your users using the things you already know, trust, and regularly use ( e.g. Windows, Office, Outlook, ConfigMgr, etc.). In the Frankfurt and London keynotes, I discussed a couple of organizations and how they are using Office 365 and EMS.  Included below are a couple details about four European customers that have faced and solved challenges that are common to organizations all over the world.  It’s worth a couple of minutes to read their stories and view the quick videos about them:

• Kew Botanical Gardens Every organization has some archival material, but Kew Botanical Gardens has over 200 years of information in storage from around the world – including specimens collected by Livingstone and Darwin!  At any given moment they have 1,000 individuals around the globe collecting data on specimens that needs to be rapidly transmitted back for ongoing collaborate and communication with other researchers.  And, with over 2 centuries of materal, this data has to be secure and protected.  This is where Office 365 comes in.  Kew is using every aspect of Office 365 – OneDrive for Business, Yammer, Skype for Business, etc. – to empower their users to be productive anytime and anywhere. You can read and watch the case study here .
• Marks and Spencers (M&S) M&S has been in business since 1884 and they wanted to transform their systems to really embrace their growing digital mindset.  To do this, they turned to Office 365.  With Office 365, their employees were able to use the tools they were already familiar with – but now they were delivered from the cloud.  This helped M&S to change the mindset of the company “to view work as an ‘activity’ rather than a place.”  Skype for Business, Yammer, and OneDrive for Business are all changing the ways M&S works! You can read the case study and learn more here .
• Godiva Godiva has been making chocolates for more than 8 decades and they are constantly searching for how they deliver “the ultimate chocolate experience.”  Chocolate is huge business:  Last year, more than $20B was spent on chocolate – just in the United States!  I’m willing to admit that I certainly contributed some of that. J  Just as the Godiva chefs are constantly innovating, the IT team needed to do some innovations of their own to make the workforce more efficient and effective.  To do this, Godiva deployed Office 365 and the Enterprise Mobility Suite – a move that they say delivers a flexible and affordable platform for Enterprise Mobility. You can watch the case study and learn more here .
• Natural Resources Wales Office 365 has changed how Natural Resources Wales operates by introducing modern collaboration and communication capabilities.  This is a remarkable story about how this technology can fundamentally change how an organization works with OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business, Sharepoint, OneNote, and Yammer.  By using EMS and Office 365, they estimate they’ve reduced monthly IT costs by over £18,000 ($25,350 USD). You can read and watch the case study here .

Office 365 and EMS provide what users want and what IT wants

This combination of security and usability puts you in a position to address the challenges of modern IT in a realistic way. Any piece of enterprise technology related to mobility must have an automatic security element woven into it.  In light of how incredibly sophisticated our era’s cyberattacks have become, every organization needs a solution that is integrated end-to-end to combat these persistent attacks.  Overlooking the importance of having an integrated, end-to-end solution that can meet these threats puts you in a precarious position. This huge challenge is an area where Microsoft customers really shine:  Our ability to draw insight from our massive pools of telemetry/data, our hyper-scale cloud operation, our ownership of the Office apps, and our leadership in the mobility management market – this combination of factors is why only Microsoft can provide the end-to-end sophistication to offer the best possible protection. To be clear: No one else can offer this broad spectrum of technical strength and user empowerment.  Microsoft is in the unique position to deliver advanced solutions on the products that we have built and you use every day.  There is simply no comparison for having Windows and Office in your DNA.

The reason so many thousands of organizations are thriving with EMS boils down to three big areas we’ve focused on to help our users do more:

1. Identity-driven Security This is a unique skill that only Microsoft can offer.  It is simply unavailable elsewhere – and we are incredible proud of what we’re offering here.
2. Managed Mobile Productivity This is the powerful, one-and-only integrated combination of EMS and Office 365.  The deep management of the Office mobile apps that’s only possible with EMS protects corporate data on mobile devices without intruding on personal content.
3. Data Protection Only EMS can make Office docs self-protecting by building identity right into the files themselves – meaning the data in those files is secure no matter where they go.

As someone who travels everywhere with four devices (smartphone, 2 tablets, and my Surface Pro), the one thing that is consistent across all four is that my corporate identity (and the apps, data, and documents associated with it) is seamlessly present on each one.  Its’ an incredible user experience – and only possible with EMS and Office 365.