Microsoft – How We Plan To Stay At The Top

The recent Microsoft Convergence event in Atlanta, Georgia, was the ideal opportunity for the computing giant to show off just how it is helping individuals and organisations around the world.

With over thousands of attendees and partners on show, it’s clear that Microsoft products are enabling businesses to prosper across a range of sectors, but just how does it stay on top?

‘Continuous evolution’

Kirill Tatarinov, executive vice president of Microsoft’s business solutions group, (pictured left) believes the answer can come from how the company designs its products in a ‘people-centric’ manner.

“This is the approach of how we build technology – we analyse roles and what people do in those roles – we study business processes, and every step of the way, we create business processes that will be applicable to them,” he told TechWeekEurope at a briefing in Convergence.

“This is not something new – we’ve been doing this for about five or six years now, and I would say that it’s been continuous evolution – but now that investment is starting to pay off in a very major way.”

The company has been at the forefront of business technology for so long that the challenge now has evolved more towards ensuring it stays there, especially in the face of huge competition.

“Microsoft is so focused now on leadership – more than ever before, in helping organisations to reinvent productivity and help them reinvent business processes, and do it in a complete and consistent fashion.”

“It’s unbeatable in the market – no-one else has the scale of the depth or the breadth and ability to deliver it at a scale with partner ecosystem – that’s what makes us unique.

“It’s not about one individual product – it’s about Microsoft solving customer needs, end to end.”

Coming up

“It is about return on investment, and demonstrating what (businesses) are going to be able to get through this technology,” Tatarinov continued. “We have a sufficient body of evidence that shows how the latest technologies improve productivity, reduce cost, and how quickly people get a return on their investment.

“It’s a known fact that the younger workers want the most modern tools when they come to work – millennials expect modern technology.”

Microsoft is well placed to offer this latest technology too, Tatarinov believes, with new editions of Office and Windows set to be released soon.

“Office is the broadest technology for individual productivity,” he added, highlighting new technologies including OneNote and Skype for Business, demonstrated during the conference keynote.

“For a popular product like Office, with every release you have to raise the bar so much to encourage people to move on and upgrade to the latest one. Now we have all of the signals from how people use the products…and will now enable people to do thing very quickly, and more intuitively.

Step ahead

When asked by TechWeekEurope just how Microsoft can continue being a business leader, Tatarinov again remarked to this continual investment in new technologies.

“In the world of rapid innovation, innovation is what keeps you one step ahead,” he said. “Continuous investment in innovation, investment in research – whether its applied or forward-looking – frankly what we’re able to do, with our scale, is very difficult for anyone else to match.”

“But more importantly, its how we do it as one organisation, covering the breadth of customer bases, being able to leverage everything that we do for consumers, and apply it to the world of businesses.

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