Empower cloud adoption

You know that innovation and digital transformation is critical to business success. Digital transformation is the adoption of cloud-based and digital technologies to replace old systems and create better customer experiences, better efficiency, business insights, and greater innovation from the data. You don't accomplish innovation solely through the introduction of new technologies. You need to focus on supporting the people who catalyze change and create the new value that you seek. Developers are at the center of digital transformation, and to empower them to achieve more, you need to accelerate developer velocity. To unleash the creative energy of developer teams, you need to help them build productively, foster global and secure collaboration, and remove barriers so they can scale innovation.

Generate value

• In every industry, each organization is trying to do one thing: drive constant value generation.
• The focus on innovation is essentially a process to help your organization find new ways to generate value.
• Perhaps the biggest mistake organizations make is trying to create new value by introducing new technologies.
• Sometimes the attitude is, "If we just use more technology, we'll see things improve." But innovation is first and foremost a people story.
• Innovation is about the combination of people and technology.

Organizations that successfully innovate toward digital transformation see vision, strategy, culture, unique potential, and capabilities as the foundational elements. They then turn to technology with a specific purpose in mind. Every company is becoming a software company. The hiring of software engineers is growing at a faster rate outside the tech industry than inside, according to LinkedIn data.

Innovation is accomplished when organizations support their people to create the value they seek. One group of those people, developers, is a catalyst for innovation. They play an increasingly vital role in value creation and growth across every industry. They're the builders of our era, writing the world's code and sitting at the heart of innovation. Innovative organizations build a culture that empowers developers to achieve more.

Developer productivity

Developer velocity

Empowering developers to invent means accelerating developer velocity, enabling them to create more, innovate more, and solve more problems. Developer velocity is the underpinning of each organization's tech intensity. Developer velocity isn't just about speed. It's also about unleashing developer ingenuity, turning your developers' ideas into software with speed and agility so that innovative solutions can be built. The differentiated Azure solution is uniquely positioned to unleash innovation and cloud adoption in your organization.

Build productively

There are several areas of opportunity where Azure can help you build productively:

• Ensure developers become and stay proficient in their domain by helping them advance their knowledge.
• Hone the right skills by giving them the right tools.

One of the best ways to improve your developers' skills is by giving them tools they know and love. Azure tools meet developers where they are today and introduce them to new digital transformation technologies in the context of the code they're writing. With the Azure commitment to open-source software and support for all languages and frameworks in Azure tools, your developers can build how they want and deploy where you want.

Azure DevOps provides best-in-class tools for every developer. Azure developer and digital transformation services infuse modern development practices and emerging trends into our tools. With the Azure platform, developers have access to the latest technologies and a cutting-edge toolchain that supports the way they work.

• AI-assisted development tools
• Integrated tools and cloud
• Remote development and pair programming

Go to Azure DevOps documentation

Action

To create a DevOps project:

1. Go to Azure DevOps Projects.
2. Select Create DevOps project.
3. Select Runtime, Framework, and Service.

Innovate collaboratively

Innovate through collaboration

Software development is a team sport. Collaboration with peers and knowledge sharing within the team is fundamental. Breaking down barriers between development and operations is essential. You can also tap a wealth of organizational knowledge outside your core product team by using platforms like GitHub.

GitHub, the largest developer community, is at the heart of the open-source community. It will always be an open platform that supports all developers. Collaboration is at the heart of GitHub. Developers made more than 1 billion contributions over the course of a year to the open-source projects and private repositories hosted on GitHub. It's where developers collaborate, store their source code, and manage continuous integration.

Go to the Microsoft Azure repo on GitHub

Open-source innovation

To innovate, many developers use open-source code. 80 to 90 percent of new application development begins with open-source code. Open source isn't just about code. It's also about interconnected communities and developers around the globe building together. By using an open development model with GitHub, teams innovate and collaborate, identify security vulnerabilities early, and discover expert talent. Enterprise development teams can integrate GitHub repositories with Microsoft Teams and Azure. Teams is the only solution that brings together chat, voice, and collaboration with the power of Microsoft Office applications, meetings, and business process workflows, all in a single user experience. It's the hub for teamwork and innovation.

Learn more

• Open source starts in GitHub
• Open source on Azure
• Microsoft Teams

Innovation characteristics

Innovate by using Azure DevOps

Enterprises use GitHub to host source code and Azure Pipelines for continuous integration and continuous delivery to quickly deploy changes to Azure. Connect Azure Boards with GitHub repositories to take advantage of the rich project management capabilities provided by Azure Boards, which spans Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting.

Characteristics of innovative applications

With Azure, your developers can build cloud-native applications by using canonical modern application patterns. Azure supports and provides all the building blocks that your developer teams need to build applications that use containers, managed databases, AI, and serverless capabilities.

Scale innovation

Sparking innovation for customer experiences and line-of-business applications is a high priority for every business leader. Whether you're building web, mobile, IoT, or mixed reality experiences, innovation is key to the future success of your organization. To scale innovation, organizations need to focus on packaging and shipping their unique business value as composable services so that partners and employees can participate in shared value generation easily and efficiently.

Azure has a unique offering to help you spark and scale innovation in your organization. To drive more innovation, professional developers today can create applications and building blocks that empower other experts in your organization to build applications on a reliable foundation. With Azure, they get security from the ground up, backed by a team of experts, and proactive compliance trusted by enterprises, governments, and startups.

LiveOps innovation

Future ready: LiveOps

Innovative organizations are embracing a mentality of live operations (LiveOps). LiveOps is a design process for continual engagement with customers. The end-to-end customer journey is the focus. It's an approach to design and direction that's focused on delivering value to your customers, with an emphasis on customer satisfaction and outcomes.

LiveOps also helps to humanize data. A LiveOps approach makes data more actionable, so your organization can take actions, in real time, that will have an impact on your applications, your customers, and your business. It's a process that's focused on experimentation, emphasizing iteration and evolution, and driving consistent and frequent change. LiveOps is an approach to combining DevOps with your CRM.

LiveOps transition

Game development is one example of an industry that's embracing LiveOps today. Modern games are the iconic LiveOps applications. Games have been going through a quiet revolution, transforming from packaged goods with a lifetime measured in hours to active communities with a lifetime measured in years. With more than 2 billion gamers out there, and tens of thousands of new games shipping every year fighting for attention, game developers are turning toward LiveOps to better engage and retain their player base over time. Innovation happens through continuous player engagement: content updates, special events, promotions, and offers.

Azure PlayFab

Azure PlayFab is a complete back-end platform for live games and an example of a leading LiveOps application platform. With Azure PlayFab, you can continuously monitor your code, get real-time analytics, and release real-time updates to optimize your applications and increase monetization. The PlayFab objective is to deliver the intelligent cloud for games, empowering developers to better engage, retain, and monetize their players.

PlayFab offers differentiated, higher-margin LiveOps tools and services to boost profitability and extend game lifespans. PlayFab is fully device and platform agnostic and can be easily integrated with social identity providers like Facebook or Steam, store platforms to orchestrate commerce, and device platforms like iOS, Android, Xbox, and PlayStation. The Azure data estate enables PlayFab to provide intelligent services to help our customers make better games and smarter decisions, acquire and keep players, and learn faster by running more experiments and iterating more quickly.

Go to the Azure PlayFab documentation