Microsoft presented more than 90 new services and updates at Ignite 2021. This year’s annual conference showcased opportunities in optimizing for the new world of hybrid work, assisting customers in building hyperconnected businesses, transforming into digital businesses, and protecting their digital journeys with end-to-end security.

“Every industry in the region has felt the full force of the digital transformation, as enterprises have had to adopt drastically different strategies to keep their organizations secure and stable, requiring them to be technologically flexible,” said Naim Yazbeck, Regional Director, Enterprise and Partner Group (EPG), Microsoft UAE.

This year’s three major areas of focus:

Metaverse: A comprehensive set of resources designed to power metaverses through IoT capabilities that enable customers to create “digital twins” of physical objects in the cloud and use AI-powered resources to create natural interactions through speech and vision machine learning models.

AI: The Azure OpenAI Service will give customers access to Microsoft’s partner OpenAI’s

Digital Ecosystems: Microsoft is building the identity system of the future, one that claims to connect and enable people, organizations, apps, and smart devices to make real-time access decisions safely and securely. The Azure Active Directory (AD) extends beyond securing and managing access to now assisting customer processes across external collaboration methods.