IT Showcase Blog

Jun 28, 2017   |   Lukas Velush

Selling is all about face-to-face time with customers. You woo them, you bond with them, you talk straight with them, you cajole them, all in hopes of convincing them to buy into you and your platform. Microsoft is no different. Roughly half of the $85 billion the company makes each year rolls in when its 25,000 field sellers successfully pitch Microsoft and its products to enterprises across the globe. But life for those sellers hasn’t been as smooth as it should be, says Kurt Peterson, who leads the Microsoft IT Sales and Marketing team that provides and supports the tools...

Jun 26, 2017   |   Jessica Nunes-Ueno

I’m sure you’ve heard it before. Tech companies like Microsoft constantly pitching IT pros that our latest and greatest technology is going to solve all your problems. Or at the very least, make your lives easier. Do you even believe it anymore? Have you been told that so often that it no longer resonates? Unless the tech specifically addresses your challenges, works well with what you currently have, and doesn’t cost a lot to either implement or support long- and short-term, you’re probably not buying it. Literally and figuratively. The digital transformation is no longer a buzzword. Moving to the...

May 31, 2017   |   Brad Wright

There’s an old urban legend that says that when the first automobiles came out, they included whip holders. The idea was that people had always used whips to drive horses on their old buggies, so they’d probably want them for their new cars as well. Yes, it sounds ridiculous. But did you ever stop to wonder why Tesla puts radiator grills on their electric cars? Paradigm shifts create some funny behaviors. And this is only logical, as people look to capitalize on a promising yet unexplored new opportunity while keeping one foot grounded in the present. No where do I...

May 17, 2017   |   Bev Hess

One morning not long ago, the staff at a Microsoft Store arrived at work to find the place fouled by a stinking brown sludge. The lovely hardwood floors and pristine ceiling were wrecked by rancid cooking oil. Investigation revealed that a grease drain in a restaurant upstairs had failed overnight, sending the oozing mess down into the store. It took a swat team of hazardous waste cleanup specialists and a small army of builders to get us back into business. I know this all because it’s the kind of call that comes into the retail helpdesk at the Microsoft Stores...

May 9, 2017   |   Sarmila Basu

Ever wake up in an office with bright lights shining, high-tension music building to a crescendo, and you’re eerily all alone? If you answered “yes,” don’t worry, no one is going to get hurt today. This story has a hero, a data scientist who sweeps into the room, crunches some numbers, sprinkles a pinch of machine learning on the room, and suddenly everything is back to normal. Humorous, maybe, but not all that far from the truth when it comes to explaining what the data scientists on my team at Microsoft do day in and day out. Today I want...

May 4, 2017   |   Brad Wright

When Microsoft IT took on the challenge of moving our entire IT footprint to the cloud, I wasn’t surprised when a lot of people told me it couldn’t be done. But I was surprised at how the move turned many of our best engineers into the functional equivalent of teenagers. Changing the rules of the game from owning and running a datacenter, with fixed assets paid for as capital expense, to managing IT in the cloud, with a running meter, effectively disrupts practices that have been the norm for 30-plus years. And suddenly, you find engineers behaving in ways that...

Apr 5, 2017   |   Brad Wright

When I’m not doing IT, I like to go SCUBA diving. And for the last four years I’ve been diving a closed-circuit rebreather. These are special systems that recirculate the air you breathe during a dive, removing the carbon dioxide, adding oxygen, and using helium and nitrogen mixtures to balance out inert gases. Rebreather diving is transforming the SCUBA experience. It’s incredibly more efficient and it opens up new frontiers in deep diving. Done wrong, of course, it can be catastrophic. It is, in other words, a nice parallel to my experience in helping Microsoft IT move Microsoft to the...

Mar 28, 2017   |   Lukas Velush

It makes sense that Rick Ochs would save Microsoft millions of dollars. After all, he had decided he would work at the company at the tender age of eight, and then made it happen right out of high school. “My parents brought home an old 386, and, at the age of eight, I was already taking it apart,” says Ochs, speaking of a 32-bit microprocessor computer first introduced in 1985 (when Ochs was a year old). “I just fell in love, and so from a young age, I knew I wanted to work at Microsoft.” By the time he was...

Mar 22, 2017   |   Lukas Velush

Signing a contract with DocuSign was the easy part. Microsoft is going paperless, so hitching the company to DocuSign’s electronic signature service made a lot of sense (as did making a DocuSign application available to the more than 1 billion people who use Office 365). The more challenging bit came afterward, when Microsoft asked employees to move past paper. But interestingly, employees were largely willing to make the change, once they found out they could. The big job has been letting employees know that DocuSign is right there in Office 365, ready for them to use. “Getting it spun up...

Mar 15, 2017   |   Sarmila Basu

When you bring together a wildly diverse group of geniuses, the hard part isn’t finding work for them to do; it’s finding something that’s hard for them to solve, something so challenging that they get a little bit mad and a lot fired up. If not, they’ll get bored and they might wander off. That’s why it has taken me seven years to build my team: an eclectic mix of statisticians, economists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, biophysicists, and telecommunications specialists who are helping shape the way Microsoft uses data. When I started my team in 2010, the Microsoft IT Data and...