Microsoft ushers in the era of Quantum Computing at Ignite 2017

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Microsoft kicked off its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida yesterday. The company welcomed over 25,000 business customers to its annual IT event to showcase its latest enterprise solutions and highlight its future directions.

Microsoft showcased how it is infusing cloud, AI and mixed reality across it products to help customers visualize and create the future of business. Microsoft also shared how quantum computers could help solve some of our planet’s biggest challenges.

News spanned Microsoft’s commercial businesses — Office 365, Windows 10, Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AI — with a focus on how the company is empowering people and organizations to succeed in a rapidly evolving workplace, and enabling customers to harness data, AI, hybrid and cloud technologies to evolve business process and innovate for the future.

“Digital technology is impacting all aspects of our society and economies, creating unprecedented opportunity for organizations of all sizes,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “I’m optimistic and inspired by the ingenuity of customers, partners and developers everywhere that are pushing the frontiers of what’s possible with mixed reality and artificial intelligence infused across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure, to transform and have impact in the world.”

Microsoft has spent the last decade developing solutions in quantum computing and announced the creation of a new programming language optimized for exploiting scalable quantum computers and deep integration of the programming language into Visual Studio, providing developers debugging and other support and state-of-the-art simulators that can run locally or on Microsoft Azure. 

Microsoft also announced the expansion of Microsoft 365 with two new solutions to empower firstline workers and education customers.

More information and news from Microsoft Ignite can be found at the Microsoft News Center. Readers can also follow and engage with the Microsoft Twitter community at @MSFTnews and @MS_Ignite using #MSIgnite.