Nadella sees Azure as the world’s computer
Summary
Addressing public sector delegates at the company’s Government Leadership Summit 2019, CEO Satya Nadella discussed how demand for software engineers and developers was increasing at a phenomenal rate. According to Nadella, the number of software engineers that are being hired outside of the tech industry is growing by 11%, and the technology sector contributes 5% to GDP: “The rest of our GDP is being software-driven.” He used the event to showcase the growth of GitHub as a platform, not just for sharing code through its source code repository, but also for collaboration in the wider software developer community. Given the exponential growth in data, Azure provides the platform to make developers productive, which enables them to take advantage of new and emerging challenges. Microsoft has been a pioneer of AI, said Nadella, and offers a suite of tools and a platform to enable public sector organisations to develop new AI-powered software. “We have built out GPUs [graphics processing units] and FPGAs [field programmable gate arrays] to run sophisticated training jobs,” he said.