Microsoft 2012 Annual Report Download - page 3

Services for the Enterprise
Fantastic devices and services for end users will drive our enterprise businesses forward given the increasing influence
employees have in the technology they use at work – a trend commonly referred to as the Consumerization of IT. It’s one
more reason Microsoft is committed to delivering devices and services that people love and businesses need.
Today, businesses face a number of important opportunities and challenges. Enterprise IT departments are tasked with
deploying technology that drives the business strategy forward. They decide what solutions will make employees more
productive, collaborative and satisfied. They work to unlock business insights from a world of data. At the same time they
must manage and secure corporate information that employees access across a growing number of personal and
corporate devices.
To address these opportunities, businesses turn to Microsoft. They count on our world-class business applications like
Microsoft Dynamics, Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and our business intelligence solutions. They rely on our
technology to manage employee corporate identity and to protect their corporate data. And, increasingly, businesses of all
sizes are looking to Microsoft to realize the benefits of the cloud.
Helping businesses move to the cloud is one of our largest opportunities. All the online services people use today – both
from Microsoft and other companies – run on servers in datacenters around the globe. The volume of Internet services
used will continue to grow as people connect to the Internet from more devices for more purposes – fueling incredible
opportunity in our server business. Unique to Microsoft, we continue to design and deliver world-class cloud solutions that
allow our customers to move to the cloud on their terms. For example, a company can choose to deploy Office or
Microsoft Dynamics on premises, as a cloud service or a combination of both. With Windows Server 2012, Windows
Azure and System Center infrastructure, businesses can deploy applications in their own datacenter, a partner’s
datacenter or in Microsoft’s datacenter with common security, management and administration across all environments,
with ultimate flexibility and scale. Our business customers tell us these capabilities are critical to harnessing the power of
the cloud so they can reach new levels of efficiency and tap new areas of growth.
Our Future: Big Opportunity
There’s a remarkable amount of opportunity ahead for Microsoft in both the next year and the next decade. As we enter
this new era, there are several distinct areas of technology that we are focused on driving forward – all of which start to
show up in the devices and services launching this year. Leading the industry in these areas over the long term will
translate to sustained growth well into the future. These focus areas include:
• Developing new form factors that have increasingly natural ways to use them including touch, gestures and
speech.
• Making technology more intuitive and able to act on our behalf instead of at our command with machine
learning.
• Building and running cloud services in ways that unleash incredible new experiences and opportunities for
businesses and individuals.
• Firmly establishing one platform, Windows, across the PC, tablet, phone, server and cloud to drive a thriving
ecosystem of developers, unify the cross-device user experience, and increase agility when bringing new
advancements to market.
• Delivering new scenarios with life-changing improvements in how people learn, work, play and interact with
one another.
We are uniquely positioned to lead in these areas given the breadth of our devices and services portfolio, as well as our
large, global partner and customer base and the growing Windows ecosystem.