Reporting by Gursimran Kaur in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva
A view shows a Microsoft logo at Microsoft offices in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris, France, January 25, 2023. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights
Aug 17 (Reuters) - Microsoft (MSFT.O) is planning to start selling a new version of Databricks software that helps customers make AI apps for their businesses, The Information reported on Thursday, citing people with direct knowledge of the plan.
Databricks - a data analytics platform that uses artificial intelligence, which Microsoft would sell through its Azure cloud-server unit - helps companies make AI models from scratch or repurpose open-source models as an alternative to licensing OpenAI's proprietary ones, the report added.
Microsoft and Databricks did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
In July, Microsoft laid out an aggressive spending plan to meet demand for its AI services.
The company has started integrating AI functionality across its products such as Azure, Microsoft 365, GitHub and several developer tools.
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In a North Shore building that once warehoused Heinz condiments, Microsoft engineers are building infrastructure that stores a precious commodity: data.
The product today isn’t necessarily physical, like a ketchup bottle, but for big companies, having large-scale, high-performing data storage is “their livelihood,” according to Ron Bianchini, distinguished engineer at Microsoft.
Microsoft’s office, in a five-story brick building on River Avenue on the North Shore, is home to Azure Managed Lustre, a cloud-based, parallel file system for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads.
Lustre itself was an open-source file system developed about 20 years ago by Carnegie Mellon University. Among the early adopters of the massive system are the Department of Energy National Laboratories, including the Los Alamos’ Cielo supercomputer.
The North Shore project integrates the Lustre file system into its offerings with the aim to make it easier for companies to use.
This means clients like Petronas, the Malaysian petroleum giant, can crunch the sonar information that maps out the sea floor to determine the best places to drill.
It’s part of Switzerland-based weather intelligence company Meteomatics technology that collects information from drones, sensors and other gathering points to provide commercial weather forecasting and power output forecasting for wind, solar and hydro companies. Meteomatics is another Lustre client.
It’s not the only player in the field. Amazon Web Services developed its own FSx for Lustre.
Azure Managed Lustre was released for general availability in July. The company expects to see growth, especially as more companies use generative AI and the need for massive storage expands.
The leader behind Microsoft’s project is Bianchini, a serial entrepreneur who has founded several companies, including Avere Systems, a Pittsburgh-based startup that produces computer data storage and data management infrastructure, in 2008. It was acquired by Microsoft in 2018.
After integrating Avere into Microsoft, the company tapped the Pittsburgh team to integrate the open-source Lustre technology, Bianchini said.
Getting the system to general availability status is “extremely exciting,” said Brian Barbisch, principal software engineering manager.
“We created something from scratch and assembled a team together,” Barbisch said. “In the beginning, when you’re a small team, your job titles are erased. You’re starting from scratch, and you’re just doing the next hard thing that comes up, the next thing that needs to be done.”
Bianchini said the work of the universities like Carnegie Mellon, University of Pittsburgh and Penn State in creating an expertise in data storage has helped make the region a hub for the technology. The effort to create that goes back about 40 years, when the National Science Foundation recognized the work being done in the field locally.
“In the ’80s, the NSF granted a data storage center of excellence at CMU.”
“It was a clear recognition that this region has strong intellectual property expertise in data storage,” said Bianchini, who is a CMU graduate, former professor and current board member.
Among the early clients is Duke Clinical Research Institute.
“I think the work that we’re enabling in areas like cancer research, energy exploration — it’s being able to enable that in small companies or large companies that maybe not would have not been able to do this before,” said Brian Lepore, principal program manager. “It’s global and we’re doing it from Pittsburgh.”
Henry Baltazar, a research director with S&P Global Market Intelligence, noted that the demand for high-performance, cloud-based applications has been growing in accurate years, especially as AI and machine learning has become more widely adopted.
“I think that’s why Microsoft is going into a technology such as Lustre — to be able to address some of those new markets that they weren’t really looking at as much in the past,” Baltazar said.
The original Lustre file system “is very well known, but it can be very difficult to manage. With new use cases coming out, especially as we think about things like AI and machine learning, we need those types of performance capabilities now,” Baltazar said. “It’s not just for the rocket scientists or defense contractors. It’s a sign that the need for that technology is moving down the stack.”
Stephanie Ritenbaugh is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Stephanie at sritenbaugh@triblive.com.
Microsoft Entra API-Driven Provisioning Preview Eases HR App Integrations
The API works with system-of-record solutions.
Microsoft on Wednesday announced a preview of "Microsoft Entra API-driven provisioning," which promises to ease HR data sharing with Microsoft's identity and access management solutions.
Specifically, the Entra API-driven provisioning works with so-called "system-of-record" software information, such as data from human resources (HR) applications. For instance, Microsoft's announcement included the following testimonial from partner SmartHR on the benefits of Entra API-driven provisioning:
With API-driven provisioning, our customers can link employee information in SmartHR with Microsoft Entra ID. This will reduce the time and effort required to manage accounts as employees join, move, or leave the company.
Microsoft already has its Microsoft Graph API, but its use requires that the shared data be in OData format, per Microsoft's FAQ on API-driven inbound provisioning. In contrast, Entra API-driven provisioning uses "standard SCIM schema attributes to abstract schema differences across systems and provide a consistent mapping experience," the announcement explained.
SCIM, or System for Cross-domain Identity Management, is a standard and a REST- and JSON-based protocol for transmitting identity data that's used to automate user provisioning processes, according to a description by identity services company Okta.
Entra API-driven provisioning works with "any system of record." Organizations can use any automation tool to "retrieve workforce data from the system of record and ingest it into Azure AD," Microsoft explained in this Microsoft document.
The document also suggested that IT departments would have "full control" over the data processing associated with Entra API-driven provisioning:
The IT admin has full control on how the data is processed and transformed with attribute mappings. Once the workforce data is available in Azure AD, the IT admin can configure appropriate joiner-mover-leaver business processes using Lifecycle Workflows.
Lifecycle Workflows is used to automate the assignment and management of access rights, and it also has monitoring capabilities for when user attributes change. Lifecycle Workflows is part of Microsoft Entra ID Governance, a product that Microsoft commercially released in June.
The Entra API-driven provisioning preview can import data from "sources like CSV files and SQL staging tables using the automation tool of your choice," Microsoft noted. It can automatically provision both "cloud-only users and hybrid users" using "any trusted source."
The preview makes it easy for organizations to automate the user lifecycle, suggested Alex Simons, corporate vice president of product management for the Microsoft Identity and Network Access Division.
"With our new inbound provisioning API, it's straightforward to provision users from cloud or on-premises HR systems," he stated in an Aug. 23 Twitter post.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.
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Microsoft wants its computers to stop blowing through so much energy.
The company filed a patent application for a "sustainability-aware" system for device behavior management. The system would determine the actions taken by a computing device by considering their impact on the energy grid.
Microsoft's system first obtains what it calls "sustainability information" associated with an energy grid, such as how carbon-intense the action will be at a given time, and a variety of environmental factors, such as weather, temperature, and energy demand on the grid. It also collects and stores historical sustainability information.
With this information (and in some examples using an AI model), it churns out a sustainability forecast, and uses that forecast to manage device functionality by holding off on performing certain actions until they'd have a "comparatively lower environmental impact." The system also takes into account the tasks that need to be done and their priority when deciding what actions to put off. Microsoft said this avoids energy consumption during peak times which would have a higher environmental impact.
In practice, this could show up on the user end as a task scheduler requesting to put off downloads, software updates, backups or charging a device's battery. The sustainability forecast is updated periodically, and may change if the location of your device or IP address changes.
Along with reducing strain on the grid, Microsoft said its tech can manage behavior in a way that lengthens hardware lifespan, thereby avoiding e-waste and reducing carbon emitted in the manufacturing of a new device.
Microsoft is no stranger to environmental goals. On the patent side, the company filed an application for a carbon capture system that works to reduce emissions from its data centers. And carbon capture tech is just a piece of the company's ambitious goal to go carbon-negative by 2030, and remove the equivalent of its historical emissions by 2050.
While the patent details delaying actions such as downloading, charging and system updates that are typically associated with personal computers, inventions in patents are often intended to cover a far wider scope than the examples within them. With that in mind, Microsoft's tech could be put into practice in data centers, said Dr. Dan Stein, founder and director of climate giving consultancy Giving Green.
Microsoft's tech could hold off certain data center operations until times of day when clean energy is readily available, said Stein, whether it be from the energy grid or from its own sources of renewable energy. Given that data centers accounted for roughly 1.3% of energy consumption globally in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency, Microsoft keeping its own data centers in check in this way could help it make progress toward its broader goals.
"The idea is, if you could anticipate when there's going to be clean energy, and there are certain highly computational intensive tasks that you have a choice of when you're going to them, you would just do them at the right time," said Stein.
The question of how much this could help is still up in the air, said Stein, as some actions likely can't be delayed depending on safety and user demand times. However, Microsoft's filing is one example of a type of energy conservation that's being discussed and implemented far beyond tech companies, extending to household appliances, utilities and basically every other operation that uses up energy, said Stein.
"The energy nerds call it demand shaping," said Stein. "It's getting the demand to be when we have access to clean electricity."
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Microsoft Corp. is releasing a new version of Excel that will enable users to write and run Python code directly in the spreadsheet editor’s interface.
Stefan Kinnestrand, a general manager for product marketing at Microsoft, detailed the update in a blog post today. The Python support is currently available in public preview.
Excel includes data science features that can be used for tasks such as visualizing business information and finding the average value of customer purchases. According to Microsoft, the newly added Python support will extend those features. The programming language can be used to create more advanced data science workflows than those that Excel supports out of the box.
A worker could, for example, write a Python script that scans the data in an Excel spreadsheet and finds duplicate fields. Those fields can then be deleted to prevent them from lowering the accuracy of analyses. Furthermore, Python can be used to create data visualizations and train machine learning models.
“You can manipulate and explore data in Excel using Python plots and libraries, and then use Excel’s formulas, charts and PivotTables to further refine your insights,” Kinnestrand wrote.
Many of Python’s data science features are powered by Python modules. Those are prepackaged code components developed by the open-source community. Python modules usually have to be installed and configured manually by users, which can be a time-consuming process.
The new version of Excel skips that step. According to Microsoft, it runs on a version of Python called Anaconda Python that includes many popular data science modules in a preinstalled form. As a result, users don’t have to get any additional components or change settings to use Excel’s Python features.
One of the Python modules that Excel includes is Matplotlib. It allows users to run advanced statistical analyses on the data in a spreadsheet. Matplotlib supports several analysis methods including linear regression, which is commonly used in the enterprise to generate sales forecasts. Excel also supports seaborn, a module that can visualize the results of a Matplotlib-powered analysis in graphs.
Both Excel and Python are widely used in the enterprise. As a result, some data science teams already rely on Python scripts to analyze data in their spreadsheets. Until now, those scripts had to be written and run in a separate code editor, which required data scientists to regularly switch tabs.
Excel’s built-in Python support should simplify the workflow. According to Microsoft, users can add Python code to a spreadsheet without leaving the Excel interface. They must simply select a spreadsheet cell, type in their code with the prefix “=py” and specify the data on which the code should run.
Workers can import data into Excel for analysis using a set of built-in connections. Alternatively, they may use Microsoft’s Power Query tool for the task. The tool can not only import records into Excel from external applications but also change the data’s format to simplify processing.
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Newegg is having their College Techsentials sale, which features discounts on desktops, laptops, and everything else you need for class (plus some dorm entertainment gear). And right now, if you bundle a Microsoft 365 Personal license and a 12-month subscription of NordVPN, you can save $100.
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Microsoft 365 Personal is a bundle license for Microsoft Office suite of software: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive, and Outlook. You can get the software on up to 5 devices, making it easy to switch between projects or transfer files, and it's compatible with Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices. The only downside is that this license requires a yearly renewal, but Microsoft offers discounts for college students; all you need is your university email to verify your enrollment status to save 50 percent on renewals or new licenses. But if you want a one-time payment, you can check out this deal on the lifetime license for Microsoft 365 (though it's only for use on a single device).
If you thought that Microsoft wouldn’t capitalize on its AI opportunity for businesses, think again.
Microsoft will tell its corporate partners this week at Microsoft Inspire that it will charge a whopping $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-assisted features for its Microsoft 365 suite — double what it’s charging for Microsoft 365 by itself. Microsoft is also announcing a specialized version of Bing Chat for businesses, Bing Chat Enterprise, that will can be used to ask the AI questions about a company’s confidential information without it being leaked outside of corporate firewalls.
Microsoft is clearly betting that enterprises will value Microsoft 365 Copilot enough that they’ll want to pay for the additional features Copilot offers, which vary by Office application. In fact, Microsoft isn’t even saying when Microsoft 365 Copilot will be available this week at its Inspire conference — just preparing those customers (specifically Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers) that they’ll have to pay a ton for the additional AI services.
First announced in March, Microsoft 365 Copilot continues to apply intelligence to enterprise data, the portion of Microsoft’s customer base most likely to want to invest in smarter decisions. For years, these smarts were reserved for PowerBI, bringing in third-party sources of data to let users and Microsoft analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their businesses.
Now, AI will be everywhere. We identified Microsoft 365 Copilot as Microsoft’s killer app, not only because of its AI capabilities but because how Microsoft 365 Copilot can change your everyday work day: allowing you to actually skip meetings, zip through your email, and author documents and presentations.
Microsoft
Microsoft clearly believes that businesses will pay up. Microsoft actually charges businesses about what consumers end up paying for Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 Apps for Business is the most comparable plan, and Microsoft charges $8.25 per user per month for the desktop versions of the Office apps plus a terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage. Microsoft 365 Business Standard ($12.50/user/mo) and Business Premium ($22/user/mo) cost more for additional data controls. Put another way, Microsoft is charging more per user per month for AI — double, in some cases! — than Office itself.
“The comparatively high price point for Microsoft 365 Copilot will likely mean that most early adopting customers will focus on equipping employee roles that have high-value use cases for generative AI, such as marketing, sales and customer service, rather than just roll it out enterprise-wide to all Microsoft 365 users,” said Jason Wong, a vice president and analyst at Gartner, in an email. “With all the hype for generative AI, organizations expect equal value in return.”
How much will Microsoft charge consumers for Microsoft 365?
What Microsoft hasn’t done, however, is disclose anything about what the company will charge everyday Windows users for adding AI to its consumer Microsoft 365 subscriptions. Microsoft currently charges $69.99 per year for Microsoft 365 Personal ($6.99 per month), and $99.99 per year (or $9.99 per month) for a Microsoft 365 Family Plan for between two to six people. If Microsoft plans to charge an additional $30/user/mo for Microsoft 365 Copilot, will consumers end up footing a similar bill?
We don’t know. A company representative replied that Microsoft has “nothing more to share” about what, if anything, it will charge consumers for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Microsoft
We do know, of course, that Microsoft loves subscriptions. Just this week, Microsoft revamped its Games with Gold program (which gave you free Xbox games) to rename it as Game Pass Core, which allows you access to a small subset of games within of the main Game Pass Ultimate subscription. Windows is the “socket” for subscriptions, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has said. Meanwhile, more and more Windows apps quietly hide subscriptions, and that’s before you arrive at Microsoft 365’s overt monthly payment. Microsoft wants you paying for Office, and probably AI, like your water bill — grumble all you want, but just put it on autopay and budget it in.
Introducing Bing Chat Enterprise
To sweeten the deal, Microsoft is adding the Bing Chat Enterprise to the same Microsoft 365 business plans that are receiving paid access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, but at no additional cost. What Microsoft is doing, however, is making Bing Chat Enterprise available to those businesses who do not want to pay for Microsoft 365 for an optional $5 per user, per month.
“Just like Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise is grounded in web data and provides complete, verifiable answers with citations, along with visual answers that include graphs, charts and images,” Microsoft said in a blog post. More importantly, the information a business customer enters is not sent into the Microsoft cloud, but remains protected.
On Windows, Windows Copilot is essentially a front door to Bing Chat on the Web, a somewhat unimpressive anticlimax to months of Microsoft hype. But it is free, at least for now, and Microsoft is adding a new feature: visual search. That’s a response to Google Bard, Google’s own AI engine, which added visual search last week.
In search, though, the race between Google and Microsoft is a tight one. Consumers will benefit as each company tries to entice you with free features. Google’s Workspace is fighting to increase its market share in the enterprise, but Microsoft clearly feels that Microsoft 365 has the upper hand — and will demand businesses pay for the additional AI capabilities. How the company eventually prices Microsoft 365 for consumers, though, will be a major tell in how it believes average users perceive Microsoft 365 versus Google Workspace. Right now, it looks like Microsoft expects you to open your wallet.
