????很多公司認為，如果他們把更多的企業(yè)應用置于云端，那么他們就不再需要那么多IT人員了。你可能不需要一個SharePoint或Exchange方面的專家。那么，大型企業(yè)的IT部門人數(shù)現(xiàn)在是否在縮減？

????總會有一些人是網(wǎng)絡安全、終端用戶設備、協(xié)作或數(shù)據(jù)庫方面的專家，這些人是不會失業(yè)的。但企業(yè)為什么要提供這些職位？就是要幫助企業(yè)轉型。

????你剛剛談到了預算縮水的問題。一個有趣的現(xiàn)象是：你可以問問任何一家公司——不管它從事制造、包裝、能源、零售還是什么行業(yè)——其IT支出的哪一部分正在上漲，哪一部分正在下降。后者就是所謂“過時的IT”——它可能是很多風扇或服務器什么的。即便你是一個以本地應用為主的用戶，你在研發(fā)或測試新應用時也會用到大量云技術。你可能會在云端上構建移動或網(wǎng)頁后端，但你還沒有把ERP（企業(yè)資源規(guī)劃）系統(tǒng)放到云端上。

????所以在某種程度上可以說，他們希望用和昨天一樣的投資獲得更多的回報。然后他們想花更多的投資去做他們正在做的新東西。

????并不是只有IT部門的IT支出很有限，這個現(xiàn)象在營銷和人力資源領域也很普遍。一個有意思的現(xiàn)象是企業(yè)的分析支出。Power BI（微軟的“商業(yè)情報”分析服務）是我們以SaaS模式（Saas又稱“軟件即服務”，是一個用來描述云應用的行業(yè)術語）發(fā)布的，我起初以為它的用戶主要是開發(fā)者或營銷人員。后來我發(fā)現(xiàn)人力資源部門也在使用Power BI，這是因為“人力分析”的重要性。因此，有些領域我原本沒有預料到會出現(xiàn)較大的IT支出，但它們卻成了IT的開支大戶，因為現(xiàn)在IT已經(jīng)無所不在。

????讓我們談談數(shù)據(jù)吧，如何制作非常復雜的數(shù)據(jù)集，以及如何分何這些復雜數(shù)據(jù)，令普通人也能看得懂。

????如果你看看我們的數(shù)據(jù)庫業(yè)務特別是SQL服務器業(yè)務……我覺得非常搞笑的是，很多人認為亞馬遜網(wǎng)頁服務（Amazon Web Services）是數(shù)據(jù)領域的領軍者，卻沒有意識到我們通過“古老的”數(shù)據(jù)庫業(yè)務早已實現(xiàn)了數(shù)據(jù)的平民化——這項業(yè)務已經(jīng)發(fā)展到80億美元的市值，無處不在，居于企業(yè)的核心地位。

????我們最近剛剛收購了一家名叫Revolution Analytics的公司。憑借我們的數(shù)據(jù)解決方案，我們將徹底改變所謂的“高級分析”的面貌。我們的機器學習技術將把高級分析和統(tǒng)計學機器學習技術帶到全球各地的數(shù)據(jù)科學部門。我們的Excel絕對擁有這種優(yōu)勢。作為一項SaaS服務，Power BI可以使你通過云端進行豐富的可視化和儀表盤操作，并進行協(xié)作與分享。

????我非常關注這些技術的使用。我仔細研究了Office 365的租借和服務使用情況。所有這些數(shù)據(jù)都是用儀表盤工具（Dashboard）分析的。如果一位利用Office 365的工程師——比如說他正在利用其Exchange Online功能——有一個儀表盤，我就可以發(fā)現(xiàn)他的使用情況。所以，它其實已經(jīng)成為我們理解公司內(nèi)部的大數(shù)據(jù)及其協(xié)作方式的通用工具。

????而且它不僅僅是報告或儀表盤這樣簡單，它是實時的數(shù)據(jù)。這意味著我可以問一個自然語言的問題，并且可以獲得回答，做豐富的可視化操作，然后分享回去。這就是我以前提到過的“數(shù)據(jù)文化”。僅僅擁有大數(shù)據(jù)，并不意味著你就擁有了正確的見解，或擁有了更好的決判能力，所以你必須要有數(shù)據(jù)文化。什么意思呢？如果你有了正確的工具，你只需要擁有數(shù)據(jù)文化就可以了。這正是Power BI的目標。

????Many companies think that if they put more business applications in the cloud, they don’t need as many IT people. Maybe you don’t need a SharePoint expert or an Exchange expert. Is the net number of IT professionals shrinking at large companies?

????There are always going to be people who are experts in security, or end-user devices, or collaboration, or databases. That’s not going to go away. But what’s the reason all of these professions come together? To help the business transform itself.

????You talk about shrinking budgets. So here is a fascinating phenomenon. Ask any company—it could be in manufacturing, packaged goods, energy, retail, what have you—what in their total digital technology spend is going up as a percentage of revenue. Then ask what is coming down. It’s what was considered past IT—maybe a bunch of fans, or servers. Even if you are predominantly an on-premise customer, you’re using the cloud quite a bit for development and testing new applications. You may be building a mobile or web back end in the cloud, but you’re not yet moving your ERP [“enterprise resource planning”] system to the cloud.

????So in a sense they want more out of the same dollar for what they did yesterday. And then they want to spend more dollars for things that they’re doing that are new.

????IT spend is not limited just to the IT department. It’s spread across marketing and human resources. One of the fascinating things I see is the amount of analytics spend. Power BI [a Microsoft “business intelligence” service], which we launched as SaaS [“software-as-a-service,” the industry term for a cloud-based application], I initially thought would be used by developers and maybe marketers. It turns out that HR departments all use Power BI because “people analytics” is a big deal. So in places where I traditionally would not have expected big IT spending, they are becoming big spenders of IT, because IT is everywhere.

????Let’s talk about data, making really complex data sets, and making the ability to parse them available to mere mortals.

????If you look at what has happened with our database business, at the core, with SQL Server…I mean, it’s just pretty hilarious for me to think about people who think of Amazon Web Services as a leader in data and not have an understanding of the democratization of data that we have done with our regular old database business—an $8 billion business that’s everywhere, in the core of the enterprise.

????We just bought a company called Revolution Analytics. We are going to completely change what it means to do advanced analytics with our data solutions. We have machine-learning stuff that is about really bringing advanced analytics and statistical machine learning into data-science departments everywhere. We absolutely have this strength in Excel, but Power BI is a SaaS service that allows you to do these rich visualizations and dashboards and collaborate and share.

????I’ve been very, very focused on usage. I look at what’s happening in Office 365 by tenant, by service. All of that is dashboarded. So if one of the engineers on Office 365, say Exchange Online, has a dashboard I can go discover that usage. So it’s become, in fact, the lingua franca of how we make sense of big data inside the company and how we collaborate on it.

????And it’s not just reports or dashboards. It’s live data. That means I can ask a natural-language question, get a response, do a rich visualization, and then share back. That, I think, is what I referenced before as data culture. Just because you have big data doesn’t mean you have insights or a better ability to pass judgment. So you’ve got to have this data culture. What does that mean? You are only going to have a data culture if you have the right kinds of tools. That’s what Power BI is about.