Azure Updates: ROI; OpenAI; Planetary Computer Pro

Omar Khan, Microsoft’s VP for Azure Infrastructure Marketing shared the results of an IDC Business Value Study. The study, commissioned by Microsoft, found that a 306% three-year return on investment with an 11-month payback on investment for companies that migrated their Ubuntu workloads from on-prem to Azure. 

IDC analysts developed a typical customer profile to model common experiences with business outcomes. Other takeaways from the consolidated data include a 35% lower three-year cost of operations, 63% faster deployment for new compute resources and 52% faster scalability for new business opportunities, 83% less unplanned downtime, and $30.63 million higher revenue for each organization annually. On average, customers saved $6500 per Azure VM each year.

Azure OpenAI Service Product Lead Steve Sweetman looked at how to maximize ROI with Azure OpenAI. Over 60,000 customers are adopting AI Foundry for foundational and reasoning models, as well as pricing and deployment options, he wrote. Azure OpenAI provides a variety of pricing models to meet the needs of different workloads like standard, provisioned, and batch. Standard is intended to support bursty and variable workloads, whereas provisioned is focused towards high-throughput, performance-sensitive workloads that need consistent throughput. Batch, in turn, is for large-scale jobs that may need asynchronous processing. Sweetman shared the example of Ontada, a McKesson company that has used the Batch API to transform 150 million oncology documents into structured insights using the provisioned option.