Enterprise Priorities and Roadmap for 2016

Contributing analysts: Wes Miller, Don Retallack, Rob Sanfilippo, Andrew Snodgrass, Joshua Trupin

Microsoft-hosted cloud services and products for mobile devices will continue to dominate the company’s enterprise strategy in 2016. While 2015 saw major updates to e-mail and collaboration applications, 2016 updates will focus on platform: Windows Server, SQL Server, Azure services, and Windows 10. By understanding the company’s enterprise priorities and technology roadmap for this year, organizations can avoid short-term surprises and see trends that could affect their long-term plans.

Priorities: Cloud and Mobile

Microsoft’s enterprise business and technology investments continue to center on two main areas:

Cloud. Microsoft hosts its own applications and customer applications in its data centers as several families of services. Azure services enable customers to rent virtual machine computing, storage, and networking infrastructure and to run server applications on a Microsoft-managed platform in Microsoft data centers. Office 365 services offer e-mail and other collaboration and business intelligence (BI) applications. Services licensed with the Enterprise Mobility Suite, such as Azure Active Directory (AD), Azure Rights Management, and Intune, provide single sign-on and identity management for users and security and configuration infrastructure for mobile devices and PCs.