The new 12,600-square-foot facility wowed the attendees during the February grand opening with its inspiring atmosphere and facility tours. Guests discovered multiple venues including the Envisioning Center, Interactive Center, Accenture/Avanade Solution Showcase (featuring one of their industry solutions: Digital Store of the Future) and Microsoft Aware demonstration (Threat Detection and Analytics solution for Public Safety).

Hands-on Azure Machine Learning

The goal of MTC Houston – one of almost 40 centers around the globe – is to showcase how the Microsoft mobile-first, cloud-first platform delivers on our three main ambitions: re-invent productivity, build the intelligent cloud and invent more personal computing.

Especially for Oil & Gas industry, the MTC Houston offers deep insights into compelling solutions such as Azure Machine Learning for predictive analytics, where advanced notice of equipment failure drives more cost-effective maintenance activities and more productive operations. For remote collaboration and troubleshooting, Skype for Business and Office 365 set new standards for enhanced productivity, while Microsoft Dynamics automates and streamlines business processes, such as tracking service requests and providing feedback to predictive analytics models.

In-depth Insights into Partner Solutions

The Houston MTC also features partner solutions designed for the energy industry, including a hardhat-mounted camera from Bartec for hands-free video streaming; an oil well monitoring solution from Baker Hughes providing real-time production KPIs to drive optimal operations; and a Rockwell Automation solution providing intelligent views from sensor data colleced in the field via Azure IoT Suite.

From a theater venue for envisioning common scenarios, to customized sessions such as strategy briefings, proof-of-concept workshops and architectural design sessions, customers experience the latest capabilities in cloud productivity, mobility, truste computing and other business critical needs.

As Nick Kritikos, national director of Microsoft Technology Centers in North America, said: “It literally is a technology toy box, where customers can come in and touch it and see how it works. It’s not just a PowerPoint presentation or a bunch of talking. Customers can roll up their sleeves and do it themselves, so they can develop their own understanding.”

Experience Cloud, Mobile and Social Solutions

So, take advantage of MTC’s to explore your technology future with rich, interactive and immersive experiences, seeing first-hand how Microsoft and partner technologies address your most difficult challenges.  Future-proof your technology investments with:

Strategy Briefings: Tailored product and technology drill-downs, delivering a clear and actionable picture of how Microsoft and partner technologies can help you reach your business goals.
Architecture Design Sessions: Custom session with architectural guidance, consultation on preferred practices and risk analysis
Proof-of-Concept: Multi-week in-depth workshop to transfer knowledge and prove out customized solutions
Workshops: Hands-on immersive experience from Business Intelligence and Big Data to Productivity and Collaboration, all enabled by the Azure Hybrid Cloud platform.

The post Houston Microsoft Technology Center of Excellence for Oil and Gas appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is not a hype. Millions of everyday devices from parking meters, fridges, home thermostats to cars will soon be connected or are already connected to the cloud. In equal speed, the pharmaceutical and medical devices industries step into a radical change. Manufacturing plants across the world increasingly use sensors on the manufacturing floor, connected machines and pumps allow to predict failures and required maintenance and pave the way to network with global logistics and trade routes down to individual patients therapies, medical devices and monitoring systems for human vital functions.

The result: By aggregating and analyzing data from this ‘Internet of Things’ – translating information into knowledge – one can enhance predictability, take proactive measures and ensure the decisive difference in business decisions and drastically improve patient outcomes.

Always be a byte ahead in Innovation
In the life sciences and medical devices industries IoT makes the difference between acting and reacting, to be a step ahead or behind – in terms of new business models, additional opportunities and transformation to a closer patient interaction

IoT will not only lead to new approaches of drug development as well as the design and capabilities of medical devices. The almost direct back coupling between manufacturing and patient experience based on IoT will drive a fundamental change in relationships between scientific research, pharmaceutical industry, medical experts and patients and other stakeholders. Barriers will fall in both directions: Better-informed and discerning patients expect and therefore are open to new service models and communication channels. On the other side pharmaceutical manufacturers undergo a substantial business transformation due to the massive data flood from internal and external systems, need to enhance their responsiveness and take the chance and challenge to develop innovative revenue sources.

One example for a medical IT pioneer is the global IT firm Wipro
They developed a remote monitoring platform that provides real-time mobile access to patient health data – focused on supporting doctors better manage high-risk pregnancies. The solution combines a scalable, cloud-based information system with a lightweight, wearable sensing device that collects and transmits real-time health data back to their doctor, who can access it at any time in the hospital or remotely on a tablet PC. Hospitals can also use the Wipro AssureHealth platform to monitor cardiac and chronic disease patients at home, freeing up limited hospital resources.

Un”byte”able business models for IOT Thus, valuable business models with IoT applications are only limited by our excellence to improve. Let us have a look at some scenarios:

Real-Time Production Monitoring
Visualize and analyze real-time production data to improve quality, minimize downtime and optimize operational scheduling according to market demand.

Improved Clinical Trials
Ensure patient adherence to following clinical trial regiments by tracking when they take their doses and remind them when they forget to take them in time. This will also reduce turn-over rates among participating patients.

Better Tracking and Tracing
Counterfeit products, in particular in emerging markets, greatly impacts life science companies leading to lost revenue. Such counterfeits also carry huge health risk and could negatively impact company brand. Establishing effective track-and-trace techniques using IoT goes a long way to solving these issues.

Expanded Business Models and New Services
Life science companies look for new opportunities coming from non-drug related services based on vast amounts of data collected allowing them to advise patients and alert families or healthcare providers among other things to deliver additional services or gain more insides for better support.

Improved Product Development
Feeding telemetry data collected in near real-time from devices to discover and fix previously unknown issues with the medical devices and ensure timely firmware updates. The collected data could also be used to improve the design of future devices, or offer new services to end users, such as predictive maintenance.

“Byte” your competition
This list could be continued endlessly but shows, that every part of the value chain in life sciences, pharmaceutical and medical devices industry can benefit from IoT. Therefore, it is also unquestioned that smart IoT applications will be the next significant differentiator in this competitive market. I guess we do not have to wait long seeing forward thinking players and pioneers with IoT solutions ready for the market. The necessary IT infrastructure already exists and proves its value in practice. Come back next week to the Process Manufacturing & Resources blog page to read “Never lose a byte in life – part 2“.

The post Never lose a byte in life – part 1 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

The state of ultimate performance, where every action, every decision, leads seamlessly, fluidly to the next – since the 1970’s, this has a name: “flow”. It was the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who coined the term with his psychological study after literally going all over the world asking people about the times in their life when they felt their best and performed their best.

With rising complexity in manufacturing, process dependencies, resource management and distributed teams, the idea of “flow” got a new dimension for collaboration. In today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world, a fundamental step for “fluid” working environments has been achieved with Office 365. Now, Microsoft has completed the next crucial step with the release of Office 2016 to reinvent productivity and business process.

With the universal presence of Microsoft Office 365 across devices and departments from R&D to production plants to finance and administration, the capabilities within Office 2016 for collaboration and business intelligence will improve the nature of work for each individual and the overall enterprise.

Enhanced cross-departmental intelligence and collaboration

To realize the full potential of both individual and team productivity, Venture, a global technology provider, recently evaluated Microsoft Office 2016. The objective was to improve collaborative processes from production to finance and retire third-party tools. With its contract manufacturing business, Venture’s manufacturing employees rely heavily on the Office suite for planning, tracking and cross-departmental reporting. The same is true for the accounting, purchasing and IT teams. “With the coauthoring capabilities in Office 2016, our different teams will be able to generate and review documents far more quickly,“ said Peifeng Qiu, senior manager IT department from Venture. “And by using the improved BI capabilities within Office 2016, our finance employees can create more informative reports.”

The experience of ultimate performance is universal

As discussed in a Time article, the characteristics of ultimate performance are universal: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spoke with experts – surgeons, chess players – and moved to the everyone else: Italian farmers, Chicago assembly line workers… regardless of culture, class, gender, age or level of modernization, everyone he spoke to described the same experience of “flow”.

The secret behind the state of “flow” has occupied scientists from academia and industry. For us it is the idea of a seamless, interconnected company, empowering employees to work together in a continuum, beyond functional and organizational boundaries, leveraging people, processes and systems to deliver business results. And it is this idea that inspires global enterprises to step forward into cultural change and fosters the journey of digital transformation.

Stimulate an innovation culture from R&D to sales, to customer experience, and back

For example, 3M deployed Office 365 ProPlus to more than 60,000 employees and nearly 6,000 mobile devices just four months after announcing their Office 365 initiative to the company. 3M has a culture of creative collaboration – to quote Stephen Magnuson, manager of IT Infrastructure End User Services at 3M: The next great idea can come from anywhere in the company and our organization is most successful when ideas can flow easily, whether that’s between our global R&D centers, or a salesperson sharing a customer process with others in the organization. Now, with Office 365, collaboration has a consistent and powerful environment, enabling 3M to replace all the disconnected standalone applications, which handicapped internal interaction as well as with customers, vendors and distributors. Furthermore, at 3M the devices now automatically perform Office updates from the cloud without IT involvement. IT can get out of the low-value business of delivering updates and focus on enabling users to get the most out of new features. And the fact that Office 365 ProPlus updates from both a functional and a security aspect was a big selling point for them.

Overcome barriers to connect people, knowledge and data

Caltex Australia Petroleum Pty Ltd started the program called Connect Caltex to leverage the business changes made possible with the introduction of Microsoft cloud services and Office 365. Now employees are erasing the physical and geographical boundaries of office-bound work environments to become more agile, mobile, and productive from any location. The IT department is better able to serve the needs of the business, reduce IT costs and improve business agility.

Mansfield Oil found new ways to bring data to employees more quickly and establish innovative work practices with the Microsoft technology platform. The company plans to incorporate enterprise social media in a sophisticated way by using a combination of Yammer enterprise social networking, Microsoft Power BI for Office 365, and other components to make both its people and data more productive. “Thanks to Office 365, we have done more to improve our capabilities in the last two years than most companies do in ten years,” said Hercu Rabsatt, Mansfield Oil Director of Infrastructure and Service Management.

So, I am excited to see how Office 2016 will take us closer to the ultimate state of productivity. As said in the Time article: One of the main reasons flow feels ‘flowy’ is because any brain structure that would hamper rapid-fire decision-making is literally shut off. Our daily working environment could fulfill the same… and wouldn’t that be revolutionary for all of us.

The post Reaching the “flow” state with collaboration appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Wiebe van der Horst runs IT at BASF, the world’s leading chemical company, like a collaborative team – which is likely one of the reasons he was named Germany’s CIO of the Year in 2014. Van der Horst believes “IT is not about technology, it’s about generating business value” and adopting Office 365 has been a “paradigm shift” in how the company works. He recently talked with Microsoft about the importance of human-centered change and business-centered technology, leadership, and the power of a “glass-half-full” outlook in modern IT. [link to our blog: Office Blogs Permalink]

BASF, the world’s No. 1 Chemical Company is leading, not following. This story is a remarkable Q&A profiling a leader that recognizes the value of broadening scope and thinking about a new approach to collaboration. Office 365 marks a change in the way BASF works and is ‘making a difference in how we do business.’

Evolving and converging technologies in a thought leadership company like BASF can bring significant improvements in, productivity, quality, safety, sustainability and reliability. In the challenging environment found in a global Chemical company, productivity across teams, geographies, and departments are vital in executing the business strategy. The right productivity platform and tools can help to streamline production processes, enable people to innovate faster, ensure compliance, and increase sales because they are accessible anytime, anywhere, and from any device.

The Connected Enterprise is around the corner, what is preventing you from leading like BASF?

The post CTO of world’s leading chemical company talks ‘business-centered technology’ appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.