Microsoft named a leader in Forrester’s Notebook-based Predictive Analytics & Machine Learning Wave

by Contributed | Sep 29, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Forrester Research recently released their Wave report for Notebook-based Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning. Microsoft Azure is named a leader in this Wave, receiving the highest score possible in the ability to execute criteria and rated highest in the strategy category. You can download a complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave™ for Notebook-based Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning Solutions, Q3 2020 report here. In this post we’ll look at why Forrester rated Microsoft Azure as a leader.

Forrester evaluated Azure Machine Learning, recognizing its ‘full suite of enterprise PAML capabilities, from centralized model registries to hyperparameter tuning and modular model training and deployment pipelines.’ Forrester gave Azure Machine Learning the highest possible score in 13 evaluation metrics, the most in the report.

Let’s take a closer look at the capabilities that Azure Machine Learning features:

1. Collaboration and productivity – Azure Machine Learning offers customers a collaborative workspace with a dedicated notebook-based machine learning experience along with integrated compute (CPU and GPU) environments with support for all open source tools, frameworks and libraries. The Azure Machine Learning SDK, offered for both Python and R, also makes it simple to for people using tools like Jupyter, VS Code or any other notebook environment/IDE, to collaborate and reap the benefits of Azure Machine Learning. This makes data scientists productive from day 1.

2. Comprehensive coverage of the ML lifecycle – Azure Machine Learning helps with every step of the ML lifecycle. From data preparation and modelling, through to deployment and monitoring, every aspect of machine learning is carefully optimized with features like data labelling, hyperdrive, pipelines, drift monitoring and responsible ML toolkits. Azure Machine Learning also brings optimizers for popular frameworks and libraries to ensure that the training process runs optimally.

3. Enterprise readiness – Azure Machine Learning is a service that enables operationalization of ML models irrespective of how stringent the criteria is. Offering a best-in-class MLOps experience, Azure Machine Learning is equipped to help implement a robust deployment pipeline with automated monitoring and retraining capabilities. Azure Machine Learning also offers the security and governance features like private link, customer managed keys, VNet, and role-based access control (RBAC).  

4. Ecosystem – Azure Machine Learning is part of growing ecosystem of services with Azure’s Data & AI offerings. It integrates natively with services like Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Databricks and Power BI, to offer customers the flexibility to leverage the engine of their choice, like Apache Spark™ and/or SQL, for data wrangling and model scoring. It also brings a strong partner ecosystem and a dedicated certification accompanied by self-paced learning courses on Microsoft Learn and Udacity.

We feel Azure Machine Learning is the best environment for any organization that is building an ML practice with a code-first approach. Be it with notebooks or IDEs, the Azure Machine Learning Studio and the accompanying SDK, makes the Azure Machine Learning capabilities omnipresent across developers and data scientists tools and offers the best way to do secure, managed and scalable data science.

Although we doubled down on a lot of the notebook-based capabilities, Azure Machine Learning offers even more to the developer data scientist and/or citizen data scientist community. Capabilities like automated ML and designer, which we’ve recently made generally available, offer an experience where users can build machine learning models without knowing the intricacies of how frameworks and algorithms work. They can let the platform do the heavy lifting for them.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. With Azure Machine Learning we’re trying to accomplish this for the data science community.

Recapping Ignite with the five biggest Visio updates

by Contributed | Sep 29, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Visio was well-represented at this year’s first-ever all-digital Microsoft Ignite. We hosted six sessions that covered a variety of product topics, from recently released features to our vision for the coming months.

Of everything we discussed, there are five updates we’re particularly excited about. We’ve (briefly) recapped those here and will post additional details for each on Tech Community in the coming days. But if you’re anxious for those details sooner, check out the associated Ignite sessions videos linked below.

Data Visualizer add-in general availability

Among all our announcements at Ignite, the biggest was that the Data Visualizer add-in for Excel is now generally available to everyone. As a quick refresher, Data Visualizer lets you convert Excel process map data into Visio diagrams. This announcement comes on the heels of several updates, including a new ribbon button, three new add-in templates, single sign-on integration, support for additional languages, and centralized deployment. You can read all about these in our announcement blog. We also dedicated an entire Ignite session to this release, which you can watch here.

Data Visualizer add-in templates

Self-service purchase

IT has long been responsible for purchasing Visio on behalf of its users. With self-service purchase, you, a user, can purchase Visio on your own from the Visio website or inside the app (if you’re using a trial version). All you need is a credit card and managed Azure Active Directory account. If you’re an admin, you’ll be notified of all self-service Visio purchases for continued visibility into user apps. Learn more about self-service purchase from this Ignite session.

Visio in Atlassian Confluence

In partnership with Atlassian, we recently made it possible to embed Visio diagrams into Confluence pages, which are team workspaces a lot like SharePoint. This is our first-ever non-Microsoft integration for Visio—and we couldn’t be more excited. Using the OneDrive for Business add-on for Confluence, any Visio file stored on OneDrive for Business or SharePoint can be embedded directly in Confluence pages. Once embedded, the file can be edited in a new tab. You can learn more about this integration in this Ignite session.

Visio for the web enhancements

This past year has seen a boatload of updates to Visio for the web. Some of these enhanced the canvas experience, like duplicating pages and exporting diagrams as an image, while others introduced more templates and shapes, like those for entity relationship diagrams (ERDs) and Azure. All in all, we recapped more than a dozen enhancements during our Visio for the web Ignite session. We’ll go into more details about the canvas improvements specifically in an upcoming blog post—so stay tuned.

Crow’s Foot entity relationship diagram

Amazon Web Services (AWS) shapes: coming soon!

The title says it all: we’re bringing hundreds of AWS shapes and stencils to Visio for the web. For companies that run on AWS, this will enable IT teams to accurately represent their cloud infrastructures—much like Azure shapes do for companies that run on Microsoft. (Speaking of Azure, we recently refreshed more than 250 Azure shapes in Visio for the web to better align with the Microsoft Fluid design. You can read about that update in our announcement blog post.) The AWS release, which will rollout in the coming weeks, will include around 300 shapes and 27 stencils. We covered this update in our Visio for the web Ignite session.

These five updates are just a sample of everything we covered at Ignite. If you want the full rundown, or if you missed the conference, check out all our session videos. The links to each are below.

• Visio – now and beyond (link)
• Create data-driven diagrams with Excel and Visio (link)
• Enable visual, real-time collaboration in Microsoft Teams using Visio (link)
• Design and automate business processes using Microsoft Power Automate, Excel and Visio (link)
• Make data-driven decisions with Power BI and Visio (link)
• Web-based diagramming: design, share and collaborate with Visio for the web (link)

Remember, we’ll be posting more detailed blogs about each of the five updates above this week and next here on our Tech Community Blogs site, so keep checking back. And as always, continue leaving us your feedback and ideas on our UserVoice site. Your comments inspire us every day, and this year’s Ignite was a testament to that.