Microsoft Inspire 2018: Enterprise-level solutions for the midmarket

Just time for a very quick blog after another full-on day yesterday.

We were out in the evening with the team from Auvik; we’re in discussions with the business about adopting its network monitoring solution and the conversation was very positive.

Well, apart from when we started to talk about the potential disaster that a network outage could cause for businesses who are adopting a cloud-based strategy.

It’s clear that the network is becoming increasingly important and it’s equally clear that the migration to the cloud is moving at a pace.

All of the stories we’ve heard are about the cloud and whilst there weren’t any major announcements yesterday, it’s clear that Microsoft is ploughing a huge amount of resources and investment into its platforms. Microsoft has installed 4,000m of cable across the Atlantic, invested £58bn in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the number of Fortune 500 customers is growing rapidly.

At an enterprise level, the move to the cloud is well-established and it’s interesting to see that competitors in the enterprise ERP space such as SAP are choosing the Microsoft cloud.

On the subject of Fortune 500, it was interesting to hear that 52% of business that featured in 2000 are no longer in existence. It looks like a pretty clear case of move on or get well and truly left behind.

There’s been a consistent theme, and something that has been a core pillar for TSG for many years, of enterprise-level solutions becoming increasingly affordable for small and medium-sized organisations. And cloud solutions such as Office 365 have the potential to accelerate that.

The message seems clear. It’s not a case of if, but when.

Time to head off to hear from Satya. Let’s see what lies ahead.

Check out our day 3 video roundup: