Its that time again, it’s the end of the year and it’s time to reflect on the things that have happened in the technology world and think about what went well, what didn’t go so well, where cloud providers are investing, and where we think they might be going in 2024.
In this article we will discuss some of the technology shifts we expect to see during 2024 and the types of things customers are getting excited about or concerned about and try to predict how this will influence what happens next year.
I believe the below diagram is a good reflection of some of the big themes we will see next year in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem.
AI as a Service
AI is obviously not a new thing, and if we think about Azure, we have had Azure Cognitive Services around for quite a few years now. While there have been some cool projects delivered using it, it’s fair to argue that adoption hasn’t been as high as we think it will be for AI in 2024. During 2023, we all saw the explosion of ChatGPT usage, and suddenly, AI applications and vendors were everywhere. People are delivering real value using AI, and every customer is asking how they can use AI to help solve their day-to-day business challenges.
In Azure, we have had the Azure Open AI service reach general availability in 2023. Although the service has been in preview for a while before that, it wasn’t until the hype around ChatGPT exploded that customer demand and interest in Azure Open AI really took off.
I think we will have a lot of organizations trying to build their own solutions using Azure Open AI during 2024, and I think one of the interesting things to watch for will be to observe customer success by using Azure Open AI directly themselves vs the success of customers who leverage AI via the CoPilot experience.
CoPilot’s everywhere
CoPilot is obviously the place where all of the hype has been in Q4 of 2023. Microsoft is making a huge move in integrating CoPilot with pretty much every Microsoft product. It completely makes sense to try and drive productivity for users in all technologies.
CoPilot is really the user interface for AI as a Service within Microsoft products. They seem to have nailed the branding the first time which is often a complain of Microsoft historically.
CoPilot ranging from things like helping me to be a better developer in tools like Visual Studio code but also helping me do more and also do things the right way in the Azure portal. Where it really gets powerful though is in the context of my own business data. CoPilot in the Microsoft 365, Teams and Power Platform ecosystems will help me build better apps for my organization and unleash our makers to build better apps and get more value from our organizational data.
For me the AI as a Service theme is really good but paired with CoPilot it democratizes AI to be available to solve real-world business problems without the need for a huge team of experts.
Data & Fabric
In the early summer of 2023, Microsoft announced Microsoft Fabric. This is a branding and product strategy around better alignment of the Microsoft data and reporting technologies.
In the summer, all the hype was about Microsoft Fabric being released, and in Q4, Microsoft Fabric reached General Availability. Initially, it was innovators and early adopter customers using the preview of Fabric, but 2024 will see the majority of customers begin using Fabric as its maturity comes along.
I’d expect we will be likely to see 3 trends:
- Azure Synapse customers starting phased migrations to transition parts of their data platform to adopt the Fabric
- Power BI users will be likely to see how they can more widely adopt other features within Fabric, which will help them to solve more of their data problems at lower complexity than with some of the previous options on Azure
- We will see new adopters of Fabric who are attracted to a lower Total Cost of Ownership for an enterprise data platform
Another key driver for the 2024 adoption of Microsoft Fabric will be the alignment with Azure Open AI and Copilot’s. With Fabric offering Copilot around Data Science, Data Factory, and Power BI, there are adoption accelerators, but the Fabric aim is to empower every business user with a CoPilot experience through Power BI and Microsoft 365 which will allow them to get the maximum value from their organizational data within Fabric.
Integration
Integration and iPaaS are going to grow massively in 2024. There are various reports out there that make predictions for the market size to be in the following ranges:
- 2021 = $3bn
- 2027 = $13 to 23bn
The great thing is that over the last 18 months, Microsoft has been getting their act together around integration. Product and platform-wise, Microsoft have always sort of had the tools for the job but they have always lacked the cohesive messaging about how to talk to customers about integration.
It’s always been a little frustrating when Microsoft has had such solid platforms such as Power BI, Power Apps, Microsoft 365, and Azure for building solutions, and all of those solutions need integration but Microsoft lacked a vision and branding about how to stitch those services together with integration. That has been changing a lot during 2023. We see Microsoft giving airtime to integration products at the big conferences and we see Microsoft teams talking about integration to customers in a way that they haven’t done before.
We think that there will be a significant increase in the use of technologies within the Azure Integration Services brand for integration workloads. This will include technologies like.
- Logic Apps
- Service Bus
- API Management
- Azure Functions
- Data factory
There are going to be a few different themes of adoption which will be increasing in 2024. These will include:
- Existing BizTalk customers for on-premises integration with Microsoft will be accelerating their cloud adoption and using Logic Apps
- Customers using other vendors such as Mulesoft, will find that there are cost reduction and total cost of ownership opportunities by moving their integration workloads to Azure and will be looking to migrate.
- There will be new customers for Azure Integration Services driven by the adoption of other parts of Azure and the opportunity to leverage existing skill sets for integration will be attractive.
One of the interesting things with the integration theme is that there has been some consolidation of vendors in the iPaaS space over the last few years but if you look at the biggest cloud providers I’d argue only Microsoft in the top tier of big cloud providers has a mature integration platform offering. Amazon and Google have bits of a platform but no real track record in this space, and with other integration vendors in the iPaaS space they were predicated on the assumption that integration should be a very expensive thing, and I have felt for a long time that could be Microsoft’s big opportunity.
A good analogy to describe what I mean here would be that I think Microsoft is thinking about integration as if they were the operator of the tube in London. They have the infrastructure and trains for millions of people to do their integration journeys, whereas historically integration vendors have thought of themselves as being a garage that sells multi-million-dollar Super-Cars.
Cost Optimization
Towards the end of 2023, we saw a big increase in the number of customers wanting to talk about their Azure Spend and looking at how they can get a better understanding of where they spend their money and how they can make sure they are getting good value for money.
This really is no surprise; many reports have indicated that customers can have as much as 20-30% waste in their cloud spend. Customers have been adopting Azure at a rapid pace and its been tough for governance teams to keep up to speed with what has been delivered never mind validating if the organization is getting value for money.
Looking for ways to reduce Azure costs? Check out these Azure cost optimization best practices.
I think this will be a bigger theme in 2024. Customers have delivered great solutions that have enabled their users to do the things the business needs. In 2024 I think many solutions will be revisited with the mindset of looking at the sustainability of the solution that was implemented. Questions will be asked like:
- Are these resources the correct size?
- Can we choose more cost-effective resources for our workloads?
- Can we get better at tracking and managing our costs?
- Can we optimize the usage and scaling of our resources to fit the usage patterns?
Relationships between Technologies
In this article, one of the areas I find interesting is the relationships between the technologies that are trending, and I wonder how successful any would be without the other. For example,
- Would Azure Open AI be as successful without the CoPilot experience that will drive mass user adoption?
- Would Azure Open AI be as successful without the investments Microsoft has made in the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem?
- It does feel a bit like a year where the dots are being joined; things are coming together.
What does 2024 hold for Turbo360?
The trends we expect to see in 2024 will align well with our product investments in Turbo360 during 2023 and going into 2024.
Cost Management & Optimization
We discuss above how we see many customers starting to look at the long-term sustainability of the solutions they have already built with Azure. In 2023, we introduced the Cost Analyzer module for Turbo360.
At Kovai.co, we had been having challenges with the effective cost management and optimization of the solutions we run on Azure, and we had decided to address gaps in the Azure Cost Management offering with our own Cost Analyzer solution.
After eating our own dog food for a while and seeing some significant benefits, we introduced the module within Turbo360, and our customers are also starting to feel they have transparency of their costs and are identifying significant cost savings they have yet to spot for years.
In addition to the transparency, we have added advanced features for rightsizing resources and scheduling reconfiguration and downtime to match the usage needs of your environments.
Supporting Integration Solutions
We expect that the growth in the integration space will see a lot of customers developing solutions with Azure Integration Services. This will lead them to identify a need for a holistic platform for managing and monitoring their integration solutions.
We feel that the Turbo360 “Business Applications” module and the “Business Activity Monitoring” modules offer a best-in-breed solution to provide a great support experience for your IT support people to operate integration solutions.
Business Activity Monitoring can also let you provide self-service to your business users, which will make them want to use your integration platform all the more.
Supporting Azure solutions
In addition to integration-specific solutions, we expect continued growth around Azure solutions. We have been adding advanced support for more Azure resource types and features like incident management and escalation policies. We expect to see continued growth of customers, finding that in order to meet their monitoring needs at a time when it’s challenging to find enough Azure experts, they can use Turbo360 to address that gap.
Supporting Power Automate Solutions
In 2023, we introduced support for monitoring Power Automate solutions in Turbo360. While we haven’t called the Power Platform out specifically as a 2024 trend, we think that customers will continue to use Power Platform a LOT.
Power Platform is really at the plateau of productivity where customers are developing good solutions effectively, but we are finding customers have a need for advanced monitoring of Power Automate or have a need for a single pane of glass to monitor Azure and Power Automate side by side. To address this need, they are coming to Turbo360, and we think as we raise awareness of this capability, we will find more customers loving it in 2024.
