Microsoft is helping companies and businesses track carbon emissions

The Microsoft update is all about helping companies track carbon emissions. Microsoft’s Azure solution gathers real-time carbon emissions data from the WattTime API or Application Programming Interface as well as from the global weather data. The software giant is doing its part to make the world pollution free through offering organizations a platform that is environment-friendly. It’s called the ‘Smart Energy Azure Demonstration’, which could help businesses track energy emissions almost on a real-time basis.

MICROSOFT OFFERS A GREEN PLATFORM

The green platform is available on the Cloud Computing service Azure that uses tech from WattTime, which is a US-based organization that brings clean energy to IoT and buildings that users data from power grid operators all throughout the country and enable companies to keep tabs on their carbon emissions. The partnership of Microsoft office with WattTime provide power users the freedom to opt when and potentially to where they want electricity to come from. Customers for the first time could determine the carbon footprint of the power generator, which would be tapped when flipping on a switch. This enables customers to optimize where and when they use power to lower emissions. This visualizes data in time, demonstrating the ability of collecting related data pieces to one place to enable automation to act on the conclusions gathered from it.

USING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TO BOOST ENERGY EFFICIENCY

The environmental strategy of Microsoft is based on three themes, namely, using IT to boost energy efficiency, accelerate research breakthroughs and demonstrate responsible environmental leadership. Society these days has the opportunity of using software for eliminating more greenhouse gas emissions every year than released currently to hasten tech breakthroughs, which enable the transition to a more energy-efficient and cleaner economy. The investment focuses on reducing energy use from information technology.

With energy efficient gains, the IT landscape could significantly increase computing productivity with no need to increase the amount of energy consumed by computers. Microsoft would work with other leading firms to utilize software for driving considerable energy efficiency gains in everything, from transportation, buildings to energy grids and manufacturing. Furthermore, Microsoft is developing solutions that help organizations as well as governments track carbon emission easily.

RESEARCH BREAKTHROUGHS ACCELERATION

Microsoft works with leading scientists to widen the boundaries of the knowledge of the planet. Furthermore, they are also working to build technologies, tools and models to accelerate scientific comprehension on a worldwide scale. The efforts include:

1. Allowing fundamental science advances. Microsoft is working with a scientific community for monitoring environmental conditions and to develop computational tools and methods to aid scientists analyze and correlate data across research efforts.

2. Provide the scientific community access to computing power. The tech giant would work with leading scientists worldwide for access to research, facilities, collaboration tools and computing power to help advance the scientific research.

3. Model the impact of climate change. Microsoft helps create advanced modeling technologies, which help boost the understanding of local and global climate changes as well as the consequences on the environment of human activity on ecosystems and species.

Reportedly, Microsoft is testing the program in various regions in the United States, but provided Greenbiz with an example only from Princeton University. Princeton uses a combination of energy sources that include the Princeton Energy Plant to provide steam, electricity and chilled water for powering, heating and cooling the buildings on the campus. Furthermore, the university used to determine the energy requirements using information on supply, cost and data on carbon emission what was months old. Now, Princeton would be able to make better determinations of energy use with more updated information on their carbon dioxide emissions.

THE WATTTIME TECHNOLOGY

The technology of WattTime aims to make it easier even for an average person to better regulate and reduce carbon footprint. For organizations, information typically was available on a yearly average. Today, companies using Microsoft Azure can get updated emissions information every five minutes. A demo is available on GitHub, together with an explanation, which breaks down the workings of the technology. The demo solution showcases how data from various web-based APIs could be mined, visualized and acted on in an Azure solution. The solution gathers carbon emission in real time from the WattTime API, global weather data and weather forecasts coming from the Wunderground API. Then it visualizes data to enable a user to understand the relationship between the two.

Now, there are more windows wherein there are more opportunities for low-emissions, low-cost electricity. Organizations would know better when to target energy consumptions. Setup for the program needs help from software experts who are using Microsoft Azure. This is where the GitHub demonstration comes in.

Read more information: http://www.btvi.in/article/read/technology/28010/how-microsoft-cloud-helps-companies-track-carbon-emissions

Microsoft announce extensive commitment for Apache Spark

Recently, Microsoft announced that it had made serious commitments for the open source Apache spark cloud-based framework, launching many new deals and offerings. Open source technology trend emerged in Microsoft since Satya Nadela CEO of Microsoft took over the company. This announcement was made at spark summit developer’s conference 2016 by Microsoft at San Francisco. It also announced that on-premises version of R Server Hadoop (which uses the increasingly popular open source R language for big data analytics and modeling) is now powered by Spark. The R refers to programming language and statistical computing and predictive analysis.

Moreover, Microsoft declared that R Server for HDInsight (basically the cloud-based form of R Server) is leaving a review later this late spring and Spark for Azure HDInsight is currently on and large accessible with support for Spark management from Hortonworks. Power BI, Microsoft's suite of business knowledge tools, will now additionally bolster Spark Streaming to permit clients to push continuous information from Spark directly into Power BI.

These declarations mark what Microsoft calls "a broad responsibility for Spark to power Microsoft's huge information and analytics offerings." These offerings incorporate Power BI and R Server, additionally the Cortana Intelligence Suite, which consolidates some of Microsoft's huge information and investigation management under a solitary umbrella that likewise highlights various machine learning devices. 

Microsoft, and in addition Google, Baidu, Amazon, Databricks and others, will highlight noticeably at the Spark Summit in San Francisco in a later week. Microsoft guarantees to share more data about its dedication to Spark at the occasion, as well.

Microsoft Elastic Database Pools Extend Azure SQL Capabilities

Microsoft launched a performance tool option known as Azure SQL Database elastic pool option. This option features automatic scalability of cloud databases up and down according to the required condition. The announcement of the Microsoft Azure SQL database elastic pools were made last year at the Microsoft Build conference and its general release hits the market last week.

The enterprises are targeted by this new Azure feature that is a cost-effective option available which reduces cost arise due to over-provisioning of resources when anticipating spikes in application usage. This feature also improves the application performance when there are not enough database resources available. Microsoft Azure SQL partner group program manager, Tracy Daugherty wrote, “Each elastic database in the pool gets the resources it needs when it needs it, and eliminates the complexity of managing the performance of individual databases”.

He further wrote, “You can control the performance assigned to a pool, add or remove elastic databases on demand, and define the performance of elastic databases without affecting the overall cost of the pool. This means you don’t have to worry about managing the usage of individual databases.” This auto scalability option can be used according to the customer requirement.

Last year, Microsoft released its Premium Azure CDN tied to Verizon’s infrastructure. In the last week, Microsoft declared that they plan to expand opportunity to the customers streaming with Azure CDN from Akamai, which is already in preview phase from last year. A content delivery network is functioned by the Akamai, which includes 200,000+ servers in 120 countries.

The partner director of Azure CDN services and Microsoft Azure Media, Sudheer Sirivara said, “By joining forces with both Verizon and Akamai, Azure CDN creates new opportunities for our customers to achieve more with the power of the cloud – enabling them to select the right CDN for the regions in which they operate, as well as load balance across CDNs.”

Microsoft’s list of releases includes another name, Recovery Services, launched last week as an infrastructure management solution for its Azure Resource Manager. This facilitates its admins to deploy, track and manage the cloud resource together rather than individually. The recovery services can be used to both combine and automate the cloud and on premise backups. The release list is concluded with the Azure Test Drives service which is now live that allows the user to test the solutions which require test data or configuration on the Azure Virtual machine.

The bond between Microsoft and SAP touches the universe

Microsoft and SAP have been buddies for a considerable length of time and years, and today at the SAP Sapphire client gathering in Orlando, the two organization's CEOs, Satya Nadella and Bill McDermott declared that, they were taking the relationship to another level with more profound cloud incorporation between the two organizations.

The arrangement will empower SAP clients to run HANA, the organization's in-memory database item on Microsoft's Azure cloud. The two organizations declared an arrangement two or three years prior to permit clients to assemble HANA applications, exploiting the flexible assets which Azure (and undoubtedly any cloud) gives, yet this declaration makes that another stride, empowering clients to get to Azure security and administration abilities that have been reinforced since that past understanding was reported.

HANA likewise keeps running on AWS, however Microsoft was mindful so as to separate the two with Azure offering the capacity to handle bigger measures of information and RAM, which can prove to be useful when you're preparing enormous information loads. 

Likewise, there will be a more broad connection between SAP items, for example, Concur, SuccessFactors and Ariba and Office 365 to bring correspondences, coordinated effort, calendaring and the majority of the devices in Office 365 more specifically into the SAP tool set and the vice versa.

The arrangement bodes well given that the two organizations both have profound binds to the venture and share a typical arrangement of vast clients with comparable needs. It permits them to every play to their qualities without truly contending with each other.

The declaration goes ahead the heels of SAP's arrangement with Apple that the organization trumpeted only a few weeks prior to convey iOS to SAP clients. It likewise demonstrates a deliberate exertion on SAP's part to extend its business sector achieve utilizing associations as influence, R Ray Wang, primary at Constellation Research told TechCrunch. 

"SAP's been changing their methodology around organizations. they've taken an ideal opportunity to see what clients are occupied with and are working out organizations that adjust back to client's introduce base and business necessities," Wang clarified.

For Microsoft, it's around a stage play. "In the mean time, we are likewise seeing a restored Microsoft concentrated on stages. Satya needs to be the unbiased supplier to however many business application merchants as could reasonably be expected," he said.

This organization gives another approach to unite two organizations that as of now have a long history. The items and capacities reported today will be accessible some time in the second from last quarter of this current year.