We’re very excited to be attending Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) next week in beautiful Toronto, Canada.
As a long-standing Gold Microsoft Partner, we’re heading to WPC to network with partners, share our knowledge, and learn about what new technologies are on the horizon. We’ll be sharing updates throughout the conference here on our blog, and across social media.
This year, we are sponsoring award-winning Scottish business journalist Bill Magee to report from WPC. Our own Business Development Manager, Brian Douglas, will be there too – if you’re at WPC and would like to network with us, please drop us a line.
Inspiration, innovation, action
At the heart of each of the three days is a vision keynote – one themed on each topic of inspiration, innovation and action. The vision keynotes offer a chance to hear Microsoft’s corporate vision, direct from the corporation’s senior leaders, including CEO Satya Nadella.
The Cloud is likely to remain the hot topic this year, with Office 365 going from strength to strength, plus the introduction of the integrated cloud platform Dynamics 365 announced this week.
Expect to hear about the march towards the cloud, big data and the growth of powerful business intelligence tools. There might be coverage of the surge in artificial intelligence bots – like Microsoft’s own Cortana and Tay – and we may even learn more about Microsoft’s plans for their recent mega-acquisition, LinkedIn.
Follow online
You don’t have to travel to Toronto to experience the conference: Microsoft will be sharing videos of the vision keynotes each day on the WPC site. And we’ll have our own exclusive updates and blog posts throughout the conference, covering some of the announcements most relevant to companies who want to collaborate, share and use information better.
Follow us on Twitter and on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date.
Three sessions worth attending
There are thousands of sessions to choose from at WPC this year. Here are three we think will be worth watching out for:
The future of Microsoft SharePoint is now: How we are reinventing content collaboration
Microsoft’s “Father of SharePoint”, Jeff Teper, shares cloud-first innovations that will empower people and organizations to discover, share, and collaborate on content from anywhere, on virtually any device.
The power of predictive analytics: How Microsoft IT is using data analytics to improve sales, marketing, and finance
Brad Sutton of Microsoft explains how Microsoft IT is driving new capabilities in data analytics within its own enterprise sales, marketing, and finance systems, using Azure Machine Learning, Azure SQL Database, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and Power BI.
Security in a cloud-first, mobile-first world
The cloud offers huge opportunities to businesses, but also introduces new security challenges to address. Microsoft’s cloud platforms are gaining a reputation for security, and in this session Microsoft experts Ann Johnson and Ryan McGee will look at new approaches to protect against, detect, and respond to threats in the cloud.