“The Cloud.” Once a buzzword used by millennials in hipster coffee shops and tech conventions, the cloud has become an imminent reality for businesses today. More and more software architects are tasked by their employers to re-architect and migrate their existing systems for deployment into the cloud for greater reliability and scalability at a lowered cost. When done right, immersion to the cloud enhances internal and external operations that generate new business opportunities that ultimately improve the bottom line.

The competition is heating up in the public cloud space (projected by Forrester to reach $191 billion by 2020) where Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are three of the many platforms competing for a bigger share of the lucrative market. While AWS has a significant head start on the others, Google and Microsoft are strong contenders and they both have the power, money, technology, and marketing to attract individual and enterprise customers. In a strategic move to promote Azure’s growth in the enterprise space, Microsoft initiated an immersion training program at no cost to their customers. Touted as a one-day “boot camp”, the immersion training includes extensive content and training material, a comprehensive curriculum, and dedicated rack servers or “pods” to facilitate hands-on Azure navigation and training.

Technossus has been heavily involved in Cloud initiatives and projects and has expertise in the area of architecture and development of applications for the cloud. Microsoft’s Rodrigo de Carvalho wrote, “For Microsoft, Immersions are the preferred vehicle to teach customers new things, stimulate them to know new technologies and embrace new concepts and ideas. Having Technossus deliver the session in Irvine has been a great example of where technology and solution providers work hand in hand to add value to customers. The expertise brought by Technossus’ Solution Architects to the session and their extensive experience in developing applications using Microsoft Azure and Visual Studio made all the difference and customers left the discussion inspired by what they learned.”

As a Gold Partner, Technossus has made extensive investments in understanding the Azure ecosystem and it was no surprise that we were asked to lead the Azure immersion training program. We are well acquainted with the challenges enterprises face. Technossus specifically addresses concerns during the immersion sessions that business leaders have in migrating or building applications for the cloud.

The typical audience during an immersion session is composed mostly of enterprise architects seeking to architect a cloud environment to optimize existing resources and enable application innovation in order to maintain an edge in their respective industries. The program addresses innovations such as enhancing the mobile customer experience, creating B2B partner portals, or mixing and matching traditional line-of-business apps and data to create new views and opportunities for the business. Insights on the flexibility of Microsoft’s enterprise-grade development and cloud environments that make the introduction of new technology with existing systems as seamless as possible in a collaborative and hands-on fashion make the immersion session beneficial and advantageous for the audience. By dividing the Application Innovation track into three experiences, Technossus addresses the following: