Microsoft CEO woos business leaders with PCs, productivity and cloud

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says his company is focusing on three interconnected areas to help its business customers adapt and thrive in digital transformation.

Speaking during Microsoft’s Envision conference in New Orleans this week, Nadella attempted to woo enterprise customers with its three pronged strategy: personal computing ubiquity, productivity in business processes, and unbeatable cloud infrastructure.

Described as Microsoft’s first event solely dedicated to business leaders, Nadella himself claimed on stage: “We’ve done many conferences, but nothing like this one.”

The pure enterprise targeting comes a week after Microsoft’s Build developer conference, where Microsoft revealed it would be partnering with Canonical to offer Linux on Windows.

“It is clear that technology is playing an increasing role in everything that we do. We’re talking about how technology can truly shape growth, how we can use technology to change and disrupt the landscape of the industries that we participate in,” he said in a keynote that featured NASA astronaut Captain Scott Kelly.

Nadella said that despite device convergence and cloud computing, personal computing is here to stay, whether that’s on a laptop, desktop or a smartphone.

“In years to come, as part of our lives, we’re going to have more computing, not less,” he said.

“There’s going to be ubiquitous computing all around us. What will matter is the mobility of the human experience across all of this. Your applications, your data, and your needs to transcend all of this computing. That’s’ what we’ve set out to do with Windows 10.

“With all of this technology abundance, what is still scarce is human attention.”

Nadella added that Microsoft has a goal of reinventing business productivity to enable customers to reclaim their time, and deploy customer focus on the things that matter the most.

Microsoft’s third selling point is its Azure cloud infrastructure, said Nadella.

“We think that in this new age data is the currency, we want you to be able to take the data assets that you have, and convert it into intelligence and intelligent action and insight, that’s really the purpose of all of this cloud infrastructure,” he explained.

“These are are the three interconnected ambitions that we have.”

His keynote came on the day Microsoft announced a partnership with car manufacturer Toyota to create a “carmaker’s data science hub” to push research in connected cars.

Toyota’s new company, called Toyota Connected, will use Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to provide a hybrid solution for everything Toyota Connected creates.

“We’ve all been talking about big data for a long time, but we are at a unique point in history where the technology is catching up with what we hope to achieve by delivering new services and capabilities into the vehicle,” said Zack Hicks, CEO of Toyota Connected.