Announcing general availability of Office 365 from local datacenters in South Korea

Datacenter korea - managed solutionAnnouncing general availability of Office 365 from local datacenters in South Korea

As written on blogs.office.com
Today, as part of our deep and continued commitment to make Office 365 the most trusted cloud service for productivity, we are announcing the general availability of Office 365 from our new cloud datacenters in Seoul and Busan, South Korea. We are pleased to be the first global cloud productivity provider offering customer data residency in South Korea.
Since October 2014, we have expanded our global cloud footprint and opened new datacenter regions in Japan, Australia, India, Canada, U.K. and now South Korea. In addition to the same highly secured productivity capabilities already enjoyed by Office 365 customers all over the world, these new datacenter regions add local data residency, failover and disaster recovery to help effectively address the legal and regulatory needs of customers in industries like banking, public sector and healthcare.
To learn more about Office 365 and our security and compliance capabilities, please visit our website and the Office 365 Trust Center.

 

 

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Companies in Korea and India choose Microsoft Azure to fuel their digital transformation

korea and india choose azure - managed solution

Companies in Korea and India choose Microsoft Azure to fuel their digital transformation

As written on blogs.microsoft.com
Driven by strong customer demand for cloud computing, we continue to invest to deliver an intelligent, global and trusted cloud for our customers. In India, Flipkart – the country’s leading marketplace – and Tata Motors, as well as Korean companies LG Electronics, Asan Medical Center and Samsung Electronics, are all leveraging the scalability, availability and resiliency of the Microsoft cloud to enable their digital transformation.
I’m pleased to share that Azure is generally available from two new cloud regions in Korea, part of 38 Azure regions announced across the globe – more than any major cloud provider. With 13 of those regions in Asia, customers across the region can take advantage of the Azure cloud platform’s global scale, reliability and advanced intelligent services. They can also benefit from local datacenters to achieve higher performance and support their requirements for data location and replication.
In Korea, hundreds of companies are adopting local Azure services across industries including finance, manufacturing, retail, health care, gaming and telecommunications. For example, LG Electronics is sending real-time data and leveraging the scalability of virtual machines to gain insights and better serve thousands of customers. Asan Medical Center is driving an immense big-data collaboration with millions of anonymized clinical notes to provide industry and academia with opportunities to analyze medical data using Microsoft’s hybrid cloud as a critical foundation.
Other Korean companies are leveraging the global scale of the cloud to power Internet of Things (IoT) solutions including Samsung Electronics, which is using its remote energy reduction solution, S-Net Cloud, to monitor energy use and deliver efficiencies to save its customers up to 30 percent in energy costs.
In September of 2015, we opened datacenter regions in India, providing the massive computing power of the Microsoft cloud to fuel growth and innovation. Earlier this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Flipkart has adopted Azure as its exclusive public cloud platform to enable its continued growth and expansion, and to scale quickly and to stay resilient, especially during peak seasons. The move marks a first step in a broad collaboration between the two companies to provide 100 million Flipkart customers with the best online shopping experience. Flipkart will use Azure Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics capabilities to optimize merchandising, advertising, marketing and customer service. This partnership comes on the heels of our cloud collaboration with Tata Motors – India’s leading auto manufacturer – to provide connected driving experiences with Azure.

 

As Silicon Valley chills, Europe’s tech gets hotter

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]As Silicon Valley chills, Europe’s tech gets hotter - managed solution

As Silicon Valley chills, Europe’s tech gets hotter

By Mattias Ljungman as written on techcrunch.com
We are accustomed to hearing that European tech is perpetually in Silicon Valley’s shadow. Now there have been suggestions that the local tech scene is starting to feel Silicon Valley’s valuation woes.
If true, this should raise alarm bells, because if European technology startups struggle to raise money from wary investors, it could hit the brakes on Europe’s budding digital economy just as the EU begins ramping up its tech industry, preparing for a digital single market.
However, the data paints a more nuanced picture, one showing that, in the main, Europe is not as susceptible to the impact from a U.S. tech downturn, because it has now laid the foundations — talent, mentors, angel investors, local VCs, incubators, accelerators and communities — that are propelling Europe on its own, separate investment cycle.
The data about Series A funds raised, capital invested and $100+ million exits, gathered from Dow Jones VentureSource, CB Insights and S&P Capital IQ, shows that in relative terms, Europe is now starting to fire on all cylinders, much like Silicon Valley did in 2013.
Silicon Valley is indeed undergoing a chill, while tech in Europe is growing, purposefully, confidently and across a broad front of geographical hubs and industries. Currently, France is leading Europe in investments so far this year.
CB Insights shows that the absolute number of funding rounds for early-stage companies — what’s called Series A rounds — in the U.S. appear to have peaked in 2014 (2015 was down from 2014 by -4 percent).
We have the opportunity to both learn from the successes in the U.S. and pre-empt some of their issues.
Series A rounds are important because they are one of the best indicators of the health of an ecosystem in producing a solid pipeline of companies that have gained sufficient traction to raise an institutional round from venture capitalists.
In Europe, Series A investments only really started to ramp from 2014, and the number of local companies hitting this funding milestone continues to rise. 2015 was a record year for Europe — up 12 percent from the year before. In January and February so far this year, A rounds are up 38 percent year-over-year (versus 19 percent up in the U.S.).
Generally speaking, venture investing in tech companies in the U.S. has been volatile, with a large uptick in funds raised by venture capitalists since 2012, and big spikes in 2014 and 2015, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.
In Europe, we’ve yet to see any big jumps or dips in VC funding.
According to CB Insights, $100+ million exits — when startups are acquired by larger firms or IPO — started to ramp in the U.S. from 2011 onwards, reaching an eight-year high of 122 exits in 2014, but then declining again in 2015 to 83.
In Europe, the ramp in $100+ million exits only really kicked in from 2014 (18 exits), and reached a new high of 26 exits in 2015.
None of this is to say that the gung-ho spirit of Silicon Valley has dampened and that Europe has magically thrown off its yoke of conservatism. U.S. startups are still raising money, although, for some, the valuations are coming down to what some might say is a more realistic level.
European institutional investors — with some exceptions such as in the Nordics — could still step up their activity in late-stage funding, and a handful of activist EU data protection authorities are erecting barriers to the global free-flow of data. Investment pace in the Nordics is currently four times faster than just two years ago.
But tellingly, this year (so far), several fast-growing private tech firms in the U.S. have seen their valuations plummet. You can’t really argue with the numbers: For Silicon Valley, the hangover from heyday valuations has started. CB Insights has even created a Downround Tracker on companies that have raised money or exited at valuations lower than their earlier investment rounds. For now, it’s mostly populated by companies from the U.S. (83 percent of all companies on the list). This could, of course, spread to Europe, but so far the data does not show this to be the case.
Listed companies haven’t fared much better. The aggregate market cap of the 34 public Internet Software & Services companies that have IPO’d in the U.S. since January 1, 2013 was trading at 42 percent below their aggregate first-day market cap on March 16 this year, according to S&P Capital IQ. Here too, Europe has not seen the same impact. The 25 public Internet stocks that have listed in Europe in that same time period have been much more resilient, and are trading 9 percent above their initial first-day aggregate market cap.
Given all of the above, it seems that a more informed way to think about whether or not Europe will be caught in Silicon Valley’s downturn is to understand that the Valley has been on fire since 2008, and Europe has only really got going in the last three years.
So does Europe’s trajectory mean that we’re heading for the same kind of correction just a few years down the line? Not necessarily. Due to the relative scarcity of capital in Europe when compared with the glut in the Valley, Europe’s tech industry has also had less hype — and hopefully the conditions for more sustainable, long-term successes.
We have the opportunity to both learn from the successes in the U.S. and pre-empt some of their issues. That’s a great position to be in.

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