Inspire 2023: Microsoft debuts support for new, extended cloud services

Microsoft kicked off its annual Inspire 2023 conference on July 18, sharing product announcements and trends with attendees. The joint announcement of Azure Migrate and Azure Innovate was central to Microsoft’s Azure updates at the event, but it was hardly the only Azure announcement.

Alysa Taylor, CVP for Azure and Industry at Microsoft shared details about some of the key Azure developments at the event.

Building and modernizing apps around AI was Microsoft's call to action for partners. According to Taylor, the company is introducing other capabilities that support the channel like Vector Search in Azure Cognitive Search, now available in preview. Cognitive Search aids in hybrid retrieval, reranking, and pure vector search. Customers can ingest documents for knowledge mining with Azure AI Document Intelligence or leverage the Whisper Model translate and transcribe audio content.

With many customers currently using Windows Server and SQL Server, Microsoft is preparing for the end of support for Windows Server 2012/R2 in October by providing extended security updates with Azure Arc. With similar goals in-mind, Microsoft introduced Azure Boost, a system that shifts virtualization processes typically performed by the OS and hypervisor to next-generation hardware infrastructure.