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Microsoft CEO Talks AI, Security, Teams, Azure At Ignite 2022

‘Azure is the only cloud that supports all organizations and all workloads, from enterprises to startups to highly regulated industries,’ Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says in his Ignite keynote this week.

Without naming names, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used his Ignite 2022 keynote address to tout the tech giant’s cloud offerings as better than competitors, with “more cost effective” data, enterprise applications and cybersecurity capabilities, recommending against users cobbling together a series of third-party services.

“Moving to Azure enables cost and operational efficiencies, and we want to help you leverage these savings to accelerate your own innovation,” Nadella said this week. “Azure is the only cloud that supports all organizations and all workloads, from enterprises to startups to highly regulated industries. Azure is the world‘s computer.”

Microsoft held Ignite 2022 online this week with a small in-person element. The company used the event to unveil innovations around security – including a new Defender for DevOps offering – and the Teams collaboration application that has opened up major opportunities for partners, with customers even enlisting Teams as a phone system and demanding Teams-enabled hardware for conference rooms.


Nadella’s warnings against users cobbling together third-party offerings instead of using products from Microsoft comes as rivals such as CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz continue to put down the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant’s cybersecurity offerings, in particular, as suboptimal.

Kurtz repeated his criticisms of Microsoft’s security stack this week at CRN parent The Channel Company’s XChange Best of Breed conference in Atlanta.

Among other things, Kurtz attributed certain breaches to Microsoft products, compared the software behemoth’s total security offerings to a “leaky lifeboat” and called its authentication architecture “a mess.”

For his part, Nadella called the Microsoft security stack “a better option – a natively integrated security solution that is supported by a vibrant partner ecosystem” compared to “multiple disconnected solutions from disparate sources that don‘t integrate well and leave gaps.”

With the Microsoft 365 suite of applications – which includes Teams, Word, Excel and PowerPoint – users “can save more than 60 percent compared to a patchwork of solutions,” Nadella said. The recently unveiled Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform offers analytics services “up to 59 percent less than any other cloud analytics out there,” he continued.

And when it comes to public clouds, “for inferencing, Azure is more cost effective than other clouds, delivering up to 2x the performance per dollar. In Azure, we also offer the best tools across the machine learning lifecycle from data preparation to model management.”