Common myths (and facts) about open source

For some companies, the idea of adopting open-source software doesn't seem viable. There are many myths about open source, but the truth is that it can facilitate security, be easy to maintain and integrate, and scale to whatever heights you require. Sign up to stay connected on using Microsoft Azure DevOps with GitHub and Visual Studio, and we can help you unravel the myths and facts about open source.

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Why You Need an Open Source Software Strategy

Collaboration helps drive innovation, which is why open-source software is the future of digital technology. In 2020, there were more than 1.9 billion global open-source contributions. When facing a new technological challenge, open source can be the key to unlocking new opportunities—but it's critical to have a

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How AI is finding patterns and anomalies in your data

From autonomous vehicles, predictive analytics applications, and facial recognition, to chatbots, virtual assistants, cognitive automation, and fraud detection, the use cases for AI span dozens of industries. Regardless of the AI application, though, these use cases all have a common aspect. After implementing thousands of AI projects, experts have come to realize that despite all of the diversity in applications, AI use cases fall into one or more of seven common patterns. One of them—the pattern-matching pattern—has allowed machines to digest large amounts of data to identify patterns, anomalies, and outliers in the data, so organizations can unearth previously undiscovered insights in their datasets. In this article, you'll learn how pattern-matching is being put to use in today's organizations to prevent fraud, find the best job candidates, manage inventories in times of crisis, and empower data scientists with new perspectives on how to improve critical processes.

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What is digital transformation? A necessary disruption

Digital transformation, accelerated during the pandemic, is redefining the way companies use technology, people, and processes to apply new business models and discover new revenue streams—while striving to meet constant changes in customer expectations surrounding products and services. The digital transformation consists of five basic steps, starting with the alignment of objectives with business goals. Emerging technology and revamped processes are important for digital transformation—but nothing is more important than having staff with the right sets of skills. From software engineers to data scientists and UX designers, each plays a key role in the success of digital transformation within a company. Review the five steps for digital transformation, find real-world examples, and see which pitfalls you'll need to avoid.

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Move and modernize your Microsoft workloads with Azure

Hand in hand with digital transformation, cloud technology has seen outstanding growth. Because of the rapid pace of adoption, it has overtaken traditional on-premises hardware. Given the cloud's huge potential across industries, verticals such as manufacturing, railways, banking, retail, education, and healthcare are switching to cloud services to optimize their reach and performance and increase their flexibility. But moving to the cloud is a strategic move, and it requires organizations to make careful internal analysis in choosing the features that will allow them to get the most out of their cloud migration. By reading this infographic, you'll learn more about the most important benefits and features of Microsoft Azure. You'll also discover how the Microsoft cloud is helping businesses enjoy unparalleled cost savings, easily plan migrations, avoid the complexity of multivendor support, and modernize existing cloud applications.

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Risk management best practices

Part of the natural landscape of every business is risk—some level of uncertainty that comes from not knowing how events will unfold as you and your team innovate. However, understanding risk management best practices can help anticipate potential issues and develop a plan. From securing cloud-based options to identifying cyber threats and other financial crimes, risk management is crucial in building business agility. Review our latest infographic to learn what you can do to minimize risks and reduce your exposure across key aspects of your business.

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One of the main challenges that modern researchers encounter centers on the size of their datasets. As research projects become increasingly more digital, the vast volumes of data that research generates demands enormous raw computing power, for both storage and computational capacity, which most organizations simply didn't have access to. Cloud technology and artificial intelligence (AI) address this need, allowing researchers to free themselves from the constraints of their physical hardware. Cloud-based approaches can also boost the speed and efficiency of publishing, increasing the impact of research publications. Subscribe now to learn more about the data management and automation capabilities of the Microsoft cloud and how they're enabling breakthrough research projects around the world.

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Essential Key Performance Indicators for Small and Mid-Size Business

Industries, customers, and markets change. Even where and how we work is changing rapidly. As are, no doubt, your business strategies, goals, objectives, services, and products. The ability to quickly diversify, scale, and change your business models is a competitive advantage in any market. Understanding your customers' opinions, attitudes, and emotional connections to your brand is called brand sentiment. This leading indicator can help inform how you're doing in terms of your customer experience, product quality, price competitiveness, and loyalty. Sign up to stay in touch and download the e-book "Essential Key Performance Indicators for Small and Mid-Size Business." See how easily and accurately you can measure business outcomes from brand sentiment, and let us know when you're ready to make a change.

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Bertrandt's HARRI is a self-driving success, thanks to Microsoft Azure

What drives a self-driving car? A tremendous flood of data. To make Bertrandt's Level 4 self-driving car project HARRI a reality, far too much data was needed than could be stored onboard the vehicle itself. It required Microsoft Azure Services to provide access to volumes of mapping data for an autonomous vehicle. Azure DevOps facilitated the efficient coordination of work between developers and ops —and the QA needed to develop such exacting software.

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ANU: Storing the human genome

Thanks to cloud technology, researchers can take advantage of faster, more advanced and more scalable resources that enable them to perform tasks that they can't manage using in-house resources. The cloud also enables scientists to quickly run tests across a variety of platforms and virtual machines with different specifications, which can aid rapid prototyping, interoperability testing, and performance testing. A cloud solution can also provide researchers with ways to augment their existing resources by handling peaks in demand and reducing competition for local resources, when multiple teams are working toward an upcoming deadline. By reducing dependence on on-site computing, research projects can increase efficiency and scalability, and deliver greater results faster. Watch this video to learn how Australian National University (ANU) is using Microsoft Azure to help decode more than 7 billion base pairs of DNA in the human genome and take its research further than ever before.

Kenyan company improves food quality from farm to fork with Microsoft cloud solutions

Farmer's Choice has been delivering quality meat products to Kenyan tables for the last 40 years. The customer-oriented company uses advanced technologies with the existing agriculture ecosystem to enhance productivity, ensure food safety and quality, and reduce waste. Its commitment to sustainable farming practices began with the adoption of collaborative Microsoft 365 solutions. Next, the organization extended its cloud portfolio to include Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Dynamics 365 and is now stepping up its services with Microsoft Power Apps.

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Automate code-to-cloud workflows with a seamlessly integrated DevOps platform

With the ability to commit changes and quickly deploy them to the cloud using tools such as GitHub Actions and Microsoft Azure Pipelines for CI/CD, developer teams gain agility in deploying and maintaining their apps. Cloud adoption has transformed the way teams are building, deploying, and operating applications. Together with the use of DevOps ideals and tools, they now have a greater opportunity to improve their practices and better serve their customers. Sign up to say connected—we can help you learn more about how to use Azure DevOps with GitHub and Visual Studio to build your next great solution

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Connect your business to drive productivity and profits

Many businesses fall into common traps: • siloed data • poor pricing decisions • unsecured data • inability to pivot or keep up with faster-moving competitors With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, you can connect operations across your business and supercharge your growth. Legacy systems can't always manage the complexity of a growing business. Incomplete data and tedious reporting can create blind spots that lead to faulty decision-making. With Dynamics 365, you can create a single source of truth by seamlessly sharing data across every line of business, helping your employees work faster and smarter. See some of the reasons 92% of ERP adopters report success, and some of the risks for lagging behind, in this detailed infographic.

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Why your business should be based on the recurring revenue model

It's possible to build a successful business on one-off sales, but it's difficult and not always sustainable. If you're thinking about starting your own business or taking the one you currently have to a new level, then you really need to consider the recurring revenue model. Whether you're in the business of software, content creation, physical products, or productized services, the recurring revenue model is based on predictable revenues occurring at regular intervals—and that might just be the secret to success.

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Microsoft Aims To Simplify Cloud Native Development With The Dapr Project

Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) enables developers to build portable microservices applications, whether writing new code or migrating existing code. It's an open-source project that simplifies building cloud-native applications using all programming languages and developer frameworks. Dapr is based on containers, integrates well with Kubernetes, and does the plumbing and heavy lifting involved in developing a modern, highly distributed-application— so developers can focus on what they really want to: business logic and migrating legacy code. They can lean on Dapr to provide their applications with the required scale, resiliency, and elasticity of cloud-native architectures.

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How AI will change the way we work in 2020

Thanks to AI, business applications will soon be able to answer complex questions, help users navigate interfaces, and enable cloud vendors to reduce support from personnel to manage their loads. AI is also being used in various software applications to help decision-makers identify and automate repetitive tasks, improving employee productivity. Increased understanding of how to better implement AI in business applications likely will lead to the emergence of new features, such as natural-language processing (NLP), that can help managers interact in more-intuitive ways with AI-powered apps. In this article, you'll learn about the innovative features powered by AI and machine learning (ML) that you can expect to see in business applications in the next five years.

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GitHub Actions for Azure

With GitHub you can deliver software faster and more securely by combining the practices and tools that support the largest developer community in the world with seamlessly integrated Microsoft Azure products and services. From automating code-to-cloud workflows to accelerating developer velocity, GitHub and Azure combine the best tools to create your next great solution. Sign up to stay connected—we'll help you learn more about using Azure DevOps with GitHub and Visual Studio from Microsoft.

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Cloud migration essentials

In recent years, the global business landscape has witnessed a significant increase in cloud adoption. This has created significant value over traditional datacenters via greater scalability, cost-efficiency, and other performance improvements. Yet cloud migration requires careful planning. For a migration to be successful, it's important for the business to come up with a strategy that also covers the end cloud environment, training, and—most importantly—the readiness of workloads and applications. In this eBook, you'll discover the key preliminary steps to consider in evaluating a cloud migration, as well as the various approaches for rehosting, refactoring, rearchitecting, and rebuilding your workloads for the cloud. You'll also learn about some useful tools that you can use to accelerate your migration project and get tips to help you ensure post-migration success by using Microsoft Azure.

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Deliver software faster and more securely with the world's leading developer platform

Microsoft Visual Studio, coupled with GitHub and Azure DevOps, helps you achieve your goals with the freedom and flexibility to build, manage, and deploy your applications anywhere—with speed and security. Use your preferred languages, frameworks, and infrastructure, even your own datacenter and other clouds, to solve challenges large and small. Sign up to say connected—we'll help you learn more about Azure DevOps with GitHub and Visual Studio from Microsoft to build your next great solution.

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For modern organizations to truly take advantage of digital transformation, they need to be able to obtain, process, and extract insights from as much data as possible. This often puts a strain on businesses' IT departments as they struggle to update legacy software and equipment to better handle the massive amounts of information available. Fortunately, the cloud has allowed businesses to move away from outdated technology and opened new opportunities for innovation. Subscribe now to learn how the cloud, AI, and the data management capabilities of Microsoft Azure are driving increased efficiency at today's leading businesses and organizations.

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How Microsoft helped HB Concepts automate and streamline its operations

HB Concepts is a female-led distribution company based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that has sole distribution rights of LPG endermologie, the global brand fighting for natural beauty. The company supplies more than 200 clients with a full range of equipment, offering popular European treatments and cosmetics for spas, hospitals, hotels, and wellness centers. To manage inventory and deliver quality customer service, the company implemented an ERP solution using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

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Adapt faster—gain flexibility to create adjustable financial and operating models

The world today moves fast, and you need the flexibility to adapt quickly to disruption, the competition, and daily challenges. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central connects teams across finance, sales, service, and operations so you can monitor insights and pivot when needed. Sign up to stay connected. We can help you get the most from your ERP.

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Australian National University: The DNA of data and AI

Data is vital to scientific research. Without the ability to quickly process and analyze large amounts of data, breakthroughs and publications take longer. This increases administrative tasks and can even lead to projects going over budget. To avoid these pitfalls, modern researchers have begun turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-based technology, which enable the researchers to avoid the time and expense of setting up and configuring servers, leaving them to focus on their scientific goals. In this video, you'll see how researchers at Australian National University (ANU) conduct cutting-edge genome research by using Microsoft Azure to commission a data science virtual machine that allows them to instantly process large amounts of data. You'll also learn how, thanks to the data management capabilities of Azure, ANU is now able to use unprecedented volumes of data and new analytical frameworks to decrease admin time and maximize the university's research capabilities.

thyssenkrupp Steel Europe forges a modern way of working with Microsoft 365

GitHub can be a great resource for quickly building a templated solution. Case in point: thyssenkrupp Steel Europe developed their Company Communicator app for Microsoft Teams using an open-source Teams app template from GitHub. Now executives can share company information and other news with employees and even host virtual town hall events—which proved invaluable in keeping hundreds of workers connected during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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