Gesture-based data analytics, as depicted in science-fiction thriller movie Minority Report, could soon become an everyday reality. The future of computing as we know might transform completely into something in which users could browse through mountains of data by using simple gestures. Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice-President, Cloud & Enterprise Group, Microsoft, spoke to BusinessLine about how the company is building that future with the combination of cloud, analytics and its futuristic virtual reality gadget HoloLens. Excerpts: 

Microsoft recently restructured its cloud computing team and reporting structure. How will this change your approach towards the market?

There are three core ambitions that we have as a company – to enable more personal computing, enable re-invention of productivity and business process, and finally to rebuild the intelligent cloud platform. We changed our financial reporting to map these three ambitions so that shareholders could measure our progress more keenly across these three ambitions.

Generally, the financial community has been very receptive and feels good about the transparency we now provide.

What in your opinion is the future of computing and the role cloud could play in this?

One of the things is the mobility of the experience. This means, it is not about whether you use a PC or the phone, tablet or a wearable. It is about how you fuse the experience that a user gets, across all those devices. I think that really can enable a special experience that differentiates itself from the ones before.

I am a believer in wearables and IoT (Internet of Things) in a big way. When you take that data and integrate it with your phone or with your home, you start to unlock certain scenarios that probably 5-6 years ago felt more like science fiction.

For example, I have a wearable that tracks my steps, a weighing scale that I can use that tracks my weight. It integrates with my phone and I can track my weight, diet, exercise and seamlessly fuse across work spaces.

We have customers like Hyderabad-based Hug, using things like HoloLens technology that we are coming out with, in which one can integrate vision and holographics with computation, with machine learning, and with vast amounts of data.

It was like Minority Report, where you look at data by using gestures. It felt like fiction at that time, but will be normal within three years.

How far are we from this reality?

We’ve been showing HoloLens over the last few months and have tremendous excitement. We’ve announced our developer kits. Developers can start building applications for it and we’ve got pretty much every industry and start-up knocking at our door. The reality is that experiences that we can build are only limited by imagination.

It is the combination of HoloLens with the cloud that makes things even more magical, because if you can use analytics and machine learning as well as the services we have, with Azure, to process data and make sense of it, you can use Hololens to actually surface that to a user in a magical way.

For instance, at a retail store, retailers can look at shelves through HoloLens with colour coding and heat map to know how frequently that item is being sold and where do people most spend their time at the store. For consumers it’s going to change the experience at home and it’ll be very different.

With the cloud computing market getting crowded, what would be your focus areas in the space?

On the price perspective, one of the things we have committed to is matching any price in the commodity cloud infrastructure. We do aggressively price our core infrastructure services. At the same time, places where we look to differentiate further are around some of the higher level services, particularly with data.

If you look at our machine learning service, our Azure IoT services and other data warehousing services, those are the places where we have some unique value that we’ve built. It’s really the ability of the customers to use the core building block and infrastructure services, plus those higher level services. That makes Azure unique, in the sense that it combines both infrastructure and higher level services, all in one. Customers find it very attractive.

How is the local cloud data centre helping you attract more customers?

I think there’s an enormous opportunity. One of the things we feel good about is that a variety of industries, whether it is public sector, government, healthcare, or finance – industries that were historically worried about cloud – are now jumping into cloud in a big way.

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