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Editors Note - this is a excellent partner/customer event in the Seattle area in a month. Please support the community (and yes- you can bring your toughest questions about Azure in small business, etc.) 

Your Business, Cloud Ready in 100 Days

I recently surveyed our community and discovered something amazing! Over 40 percent of the IT community we speak with has either a relationship or interest in creating an opportunity with local/county/regional governments. Our large response rate to the survey made this statistically valid (read “not fake news”) and we were pleasantly surprised. Which brings us to the point of this blog. Pursuing more government accounts means more money for MSPs, partners, resellers and consultants. It’s good Azure-based recurring revenue work.

Will the Starship bot be the future of takeout?
By Cici Zhang  January 27, 2017

Starship Technologies, co-founded by Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis of Skype fame, raised $17.2 million in January to build a fleet of six-wheeled delivery robots.

Microsoft researchers Shital Shah, Ashish Kapoor and Debadeepta Dey are leading development of the Aerial Informatics and Robotics Platform. Photography by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures.

Posted February 15, 2017 By Allison Linn

When most people with normal vision walk down the street, they can easily differentiate the things they must avoid – like trees, curbs and glass doors — from the things they don’t, such as shadows, reflections and clouds.

Defining Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is a cloud service launched in October 2008. In direct competition to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure comes out a more progressive and diverse cloud computing platform. Deploying different tools and frameworks, Azure provides cloud service to global clients. It focuses in three areas of cloud computing, remote monitoring, asset management and predictive maintenance.

In part one of this series, located HERE, we discovered what AWS offers. In this second installment, we discuss the advantages of using AWS. Let’s get started.

Advantages of using AWS:

AWS carries all the advantages that a conventional cloud-hosting platform provides, along with some unique aspects that make it an indispensable and unmatched tool for startups and SMBs. To paint you a realistic picture, in a survey carried out by Pacific Crest, 50% of the 300 SMBs reported AWS as their choice of cloud service. And this is not surprising considering the so many advantages AWS offers:

Janakiram MSV, Contributor

At CES 2017, Microsoft announced that it is building a platform to enable automobile manufacturers to deliver connected car experiences to customers. Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform is a set of services that is integrated with Azure, Cortana, Office 365, Power BI, and Skype.

Azure is Microsoft’s own offering of the integrated cloud services with a wide range of features that can empower you to build enterprise-class apps and platforms. As with any cloud-hosting service provider, Azure provides you the flexibility and agility to handle your fluctuating business demands, while the pay-per model ensures that you only pay for the resources you consume.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), having been around for a decade, is the market leader by miles in the cloud-based computing industry, providing the foundation and framework to power application developments, storage and data processing. However, growth figures, as reported by Synergy Research Group for 2016 (53%)

As seasoned IT professionals running a small-sized business, you probably must be aware of the advantages cloud-based platforms bring over in-house deployment of hardware.

Most of the small business and startups lack the budget and workforce to purchase, install, handle and maintain on-site data centers and servers. Cloud Computing has long been known as the solution for such businesses, where rather than deploying in-house IT hardware, the business model is deployed on the infrastructures hosted by a third-party. Most of these providers use a pay-per-use model and the

Microsoft announced on January 18 the availability of Clear Linux OS for Intel on Azure, which makes them the first public cloud provider to offer that. Linux users now have a foundation to experiment and create systems with the option to choose a much preferred and suitable bundle. Clear Linux also has the Docker container platform; a straightforward approach to bundle an application and its runtime conditions into a solitary compartment and provides runtime independence which empowers the container to keep running crosswise over various forms of the Linux Kernel.