Microsoft | Cloud To Innovate Quickly And Cheaply

A few months ago, we went to the Microsoft offices to interview  Ana Alonso, director of the company’s Large Companies and Partners division, and thus be able to talk with her about Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, and the importance of the Cloud for companies. Business.

Microsoft’s values ​​are values ​​of diversity, inclusion, customer focus, growth mindset, and belief in talent. Ana Alonso’s values ​​are not very different. “You cannot work in a company if your values ​​are not aligned with it”.

Ana Alonso has been in the technology sector for 20 years. She is a Telecommunications Engineer and started giving technical support at HP, the American multinational. She held her first Team Management position when she was two years old. 

Today, he has an extensive professional background in the technology sector, where he has held different positions related to the management of professional services and the development of technological solutions for large organizations. Prior to her joining Microsoft, the director was part of large companies such as Hewlett-Packard for more than seven years and Sun Microsystems, where she was Director of Professional Services for Southern Europe, managing a team of more than 350 people. 

The Importance Of Talent For Microsoft

One of the biggest challenges of digital transformation in companies is talent. And both Microsoft employees and all the companies that work in its partner ecosystem bring a lot of talent to companies so that they can help them with digital transformation. 

Microsoft’s differential value is the mixture of three things:

• Technology.
• A clear purpose of helping companies.
• The talent of the Microsoft ecosystem.

Microsoft, work daily to position its cloud, Azure, as number 1, based on different strategies.  and based on that, adapt a product that is increasingly more suitable to your needs.

With which, in the first place it is essential to have an understanding and orientation towards the industries and secondly, to work on security, privacy and trust”. The third pillar is clearly a talent. “Having profiles of people who can really add value and work with companies in their transformation,” Ana Alonso points out.

Digital Transformation In Certain Companies Or Technologies

Keep in mind that Microsoft was born in the analog age and many of its competitors were born in the digital age. This fact, for Ana Alonso, is good, although she admits that it has also been difficult. 

That is never easy, the change, the transformation, the adaptation, the competition but I think it has been very good. Doing it has allowed us to empathize a lot with the companies that are doing it right now, and that allows us to sit down with a client and understand that a company that has been around for 100 years suddenly finds itself with digital transformation and you have to see how it does it, how he faces it, what kind of challenges he has, what situations he has to think about… 

I think that in that sense it has been very good because we have lived in our flesh what many companies are experiencing and it allows us to provide them with a better service that in the end is our vocation ”.

Cloud

Although Microsoft is a multinational technology company, its differential value is not the technology itself, but the purpose with which it proposes technology. Cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure have become an increasingly valuable resource for businesses of all sizes. 

From the smallest, which thus saves the high cost (financial and in resources) of managing and administering their own infrastructure, to large corporations whose IT needs are constantly changing, and need dynamic and reliable resources with which to satisfy said needs. demand. It is not surprising that large companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM, among others, have been competing in this market for years.

According to Ana Alonso, the greatest asset of the Cloud for companies is the ease of innovating in an agile and cheaper way. If we think about all the disruptions that have occurred in the market lately, the Cloud has been a great enabler, since it has allowed breaking the entry barriers that many companies had to acquire technological assets. In this way, you can go to a Cloud technology provider and rent a certain service for days, hours, months… 

This ability to put technology in the hands of companies in a much cheaper way, for a limited period, without a high commitment, is the greatest asset of the Cloud, and that is what has promoted the use of Artificial Intelligence.