CRM Watchlist 2019: The big engines that could (Part 2B, Microsoft)
Summary
Satya Nadella said it well on the Q2 2019 earnings call (as reported in this excellent ZDNet post on the state of all the cloud providers by Larry Dignan) : This is not only his sincerely held belief but is the foundation of all things Microsoft from their other products Office 365 to more germane to the Watchlist, Dynamics 365 to their vision, mission and strategy. I watched CRM and CI powerhouse Brent Leary and enterprise tech guru Josh Greenbaum build simple working apps in about 25 minutes at a Microsoft Analyst Day in 2018. One very good example that I was lucky enough to see at Microsofts Analyst Forum in February 2019, was an AI for Sales demo from the product team which is led by the always amazing Dina Apostolou. As you will read shortly, they arent limiting their AI and machine learning efforts to product evolution or customer engagement initiatives – though they have ample examples of that. Smart and though starting out in a limited way – meaning between one Oracle data center (in Ashburn VA) and Azures U.S. Eastern node – there is lots of room for expansion.