Ingram Micro Cloud Summit (Part I)

This past week I was lucky enough to attend the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit that was held at the JW Marriott in Phoenix Arizona. It was a three day event that covered many new products and services that are or will be shortly available for our customers. While Microsoft's cloud offerings were a main focus, new product lines that enhance Office's capabilities were also shown. In the sales area, Dun & Bradstreet is offering a service for $25/ month that provides access to their large company databases to enhance your sales contact collection as well as gathering financial ratings about your current or prospective clients. They charge you $0.75 per returned record that is changed against the $25 retainer that is charged each month. You can purchase larger amounts is your search needs are greater but they must be purchased in $25 increments. Their app uses Excel as its reporting medium and has seven different functions to choose from.

HPE announced some interesting new server offerings on WednesdayWednesday that could be very interesting. They are bringing several network functions together in a single box, including: Server, Firewall, Switch, Antivirus and more. Their intent is to bring this product to market as a HaaS (Hardware as a Service). While we are waiting for more information on this in the next couple of months I will be sure to give you more detail then.

 The Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace (IMCM) also announced that Azure directory services were being made available and Microsoft announced 'Project Madeira' during u very interesting demo. 

Microsoft's "Project Madeira," a new, cloud-based business application that's built on the company's Dynamics NAV platform, is now available as a public preview for U.S. organizations.

Expected to become generally available in the second half of 2016, Madeira is described by Microsoft as a multitenant, Software as a Service (SaaS) offering that runs out of the Azure public cloud.

Madeira integrates tightly with Office 365. One benefit of that is users performing business functions can reduce the time it takes them to jump back and forth from Office applications. For instance, Madeira "automatically identifies business context such as invoices and quote requests within Outlook, and presents the user with the tools and data needed to take immediate action -- all without leaving Outlook," wrote Perisic.

In fact, Project Madeira features are accessed primarily through Microsoft Outlook.To try out a preview of this product you can sign up for the preview here. 

there is so much more that I can talk about thisconference that I will try to let you know about in the next few days. See you soon!