Source: msdynamicsworld.com

We begin our look back at 2019 in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem with the most popular and important stories of the year.

Expanding customer adoption, big wins and open-source initiatives

Microsoft continued to secure big wins and broker new partnerships across industries in 2019. Perhaps one of the biggest—and most surprising—wins came at the end of October when Microsoft was awarded the $10 billion US Department of Defense JEDI cloud contract, beating out frontrunner AWS. Particularly in the US, many major retailers are nervous about the rise of Amazon, and Microsoft pushed the message of cloud-competitiveness without the reliance on AWS. Microsoft brokered major Azure partnerships with Walgreens, Albertsons, Kroger and Australian supermarket giant, Coles.

Over the past few months, Microsoft routinely touted its capabilities to support SAP S/4HANA, as SAP rehosts SAP Cloud Platform to Azure. In spite of fierce competition in the CRM market, Microsoft and Salesforce have continued to team up because of their many joint customers, with Salesforce using Azure to support its Marketing Cloud. Among many other big partnerships, KPMG is using Azure for risk management, SK Telecom is focusing on 5G and cloud, Adobe integrated its Experience Cloud, and ServiceNow is using it for HR automation.

In 2018, many Microsoft customers closely watched the company’s acquisition of GitHub which was already a major arena for hosting templates and sample code and has continued to expand. While some were concerned it would mark an effort to damage open-source, Microsoft has instead focused significant resources on open-source projects. For example, the team integrated the open-source Prometheus monitoring system with Azure Monitor for Containers or continued the collaborating with the AdoptOpenJDK project, even after acquiring jClarity.