Microsoft set out to create a cloud platform that would enable businesses all over the world in 2010. It celebrated15 years of introducing Azure innovation to the world in February, and it is proud that Microsoft has once again been named a leader in The Forrester Wave most recent study, The Forrester Wave: Public Cloud Platforms, Q4 2024. The accolade, in their opinion, is a tribute to the innumerable engineers, developers, and partners who have put in endless effort to shape Azure into the platform that businesses rely on current to spur innovation, scale with assurance, and tackle the challenges of an AI-driven world.
Recognized for vision
Public cloud development and infrastructure platforms are evaluated by The Forrester Wave based on how well their present offers and strategies work. The Q4 2024 report highlights the strategic investments it has making to make sure Azure is a complete platform that enables genuine business impact, not just a cloud provider. That entails assisting organisations globally in striking a balance between modernisation, migration, and the quick development of artificial intelligence.
Azure is a good fit for organisations seeking quick uptake of Artificial Intelligence innovation as well as core cloud offerings for longstanding Microsoft environments, the report stated, citing Microsoft’s genAI strategy and Azure AI capabilities like Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Studio, GitHub Copilot Enterprise, and Microsoft Fabric as key differentiators.
It’s dedication to ongoing innovation and customer success across all cloud tiers is reaffirmed by Forrester’s recognition. Let’s examine why it think Microsoft was named a leader by The Forrester Wave.
AI at the Core: Powering innovation from cloud to edge
From being a way to scale infrastructure, cloud computing has developed into a vital tool for intelligence and creativity. In a similar vein, AI has emerged as a crucial tool for businesses looking to develop, modernise, and stay competitive. AI is reimagining every app and creating completely new applications that were previously unthinkable. In a nutshell, AI is changing how it work and how businesses function.
It has made AI a central component of cloud strategy because Microsoft has a thorough understanding of the difficulties clients encounter when juggling the demands of the present with those of the future. It is creating a smooth basis for the upcoming generation of intelligent apps at scale by integrating AI into developer tools, platforms, data, and infrastructure.
Giving clients options and flexibility is a crucial component of this strategy. For instance, with over 1,800 models accessible on Azure AI Foundry, it provide one of the most extensive collections of open-source and foundation models. Over 30 new models from top partners have been added to model catalogue in the last two months, and also continued to develop their own Phi family of models.
Across the AI space, Microsoft work spans multiple domains
AI-powered app development
To revolutionise how businesses create and implement AI-powered solutions, it keep investing in AI infrastructure, enterprise-grade AI services, and developer tools that have a tangible commercial impact, including GitHub Copilot Enterprise and Azure AI Foundry.
Azure offers the scalable infrastructure required to effortlessly integrate AI across workloads, from modernising business processes to speeding up software development. Customers are realising value in intelligent automation, sophisticated analytics, and AI-infused application development. For instance, with AOAI, responsible AI protection and capabilities are activated by default, and providing their most recent models as they launch in almost real time through strategic agreement with OpenAI.
Azure AI Foundry
Azure AI Foundry is a unified platform that was introduced at Ignite in 2024 that allows developers, IT managers, data scientists, and other AI development professionals to create, modify, and oversee AI agents and applications at scale. It offers a wide range of AI tools and capabilities in well-known settings by integrating easily with current workbenches like GitHub, Visual Studio, and Copilot Studio.
Azure AI Foundry simplifies AI development with a straightforward discovery and administration site, a uniform software development kit (SDK) enabling agent toolchain access, and strong APIs (application programming interface). More than 60K customers are currently using these capabilities for their AI transformation. It also provides enterprise-grade governance, model customisation, and secure data integration to speed up the road to production.
Enterprise-grade AI infrastructure
Azure is the platform for tomorrow’s game-changing AI applications as well as the infrastructure that enables AI for today’s solutions. It approach involves investing across the board, from infrastructure, data, and AI platforms to developer tools. This all-encompassing strategy establishes the groundwork for the upcoming generation of large-scale intelligent applications.
To assist guarantee enterprise-grade dependability for AI workloads, has increased GPU capacity to accommodate large-scale deep learning models. Using high-throughput interconnects like NVLink and InfiniBand and innovative designs like Grace Blackwell, it is also constructing the greatest scale-up and scale-out infrastructure to enable AI training and inferencing. Customers benefit from high throughput, low latency access to Azure, and highly available specialised infrastructure with these new cutting-edge solutions, which help guarantee the seamless operation of their AI applications.
Adaptive cloud approach enables flexibility across environments
According to The Forrester Wave analysis, multicloud and hybrid capabilities are becoming commonplace. Businesses must seamlessly integrate public cloud, hybrid, and edge infrastructure to maximise performance, improve security, and spur creativity in increasingly complex environments. One of Azure’s primary differentiators is its adaptive cloud strategy, which allows businesses to integrate their cloud operations and use AI, apps, data, and infrastructure in a scalable and seamless manner:
Seamless hybrid and multicloud operations
Azure Arc gives enterprises a unified platform for resource management regardless of their location by extending Azure’s security, governance, and AI capabilities across on-premises, multicloud, and edge environments.
AI-driven data and analytics
By combining data, analytics, and AI-driven insights into a single solution, Microsoft Fabric enables businesses to make wise decisions in real time across their whole data estate.
Scalability across the intelligent edge
Businesses can install and execute AI inferencing workloads at the edge with the same dependability, security, and performance as in the cloud with Azure’s AI-optimized architecture.
Through a unified platform that breaks down silos, spurs innovation, and enables companies to expand AI and apps without interruption wherever they operate, it enable organisations to develop and scale with agility.
Looking ahead with Azure AI
Microsoft strategy and ongoing investments in AI, app development, and enterprise-grade infrastructure are validated by this The Forrester Wave award. It is with Azure has developed into a reliable platform for all cloud workloads through constant innovation and close cooperation with customers and the Microsoft partner ecosystem. For the past 15 years, it has been committed to creating and managing the cloud platform that enables businesses to innovate with confidence.
As they go, it still dedicated to supporting clients’ data and analytics strategies with tools like Microsoft Fabric, accelerating development with GitHub Copilot and Azure Developer Services, and scaling AI applications with Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI Service.
Advanced workloads will continue to be supported by constantly growing AI infrastructure, which includes more GPU capacity. Additionally, enterprises can continue to personalise their cloud journeys with hybrid and multicloud solutions, such as Azure Arc, which guarantee smooth operations across environments.
