The contemporary digital landscape is in constant flux, demonstrating an evolution in a matter of mere moments rather than years or even months, leading to the possibility of businesses becoming outdated if they don't keep up. Key players in this digital revolution are Microsoft partners, such as Logicalis, instances of their pivotal role in the transformation of the information technology industry and shaping the digital strategy of businesses are riveting. As they fill the role of implementers and managers of Microsoft technology in businesses, Microsoft Partners can drive productivity, spark innovation, while simultaneously amplifying the overall return on investment.

Definition of a Microsoft Partner & Their Specialised Services

Microsoft partners essentially are businesses that specialise in offering IT (Information Technology) services. Their skills and offerings encompass the deployment, administration, and maintenance and support of a variety of Microsoft's cloud-based, productivity, and business-specific applications. They are proficients in platforms and applications that range from Azure and Office 365 to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and even further beyond these. It is, therefore, of utmost importance to understand that if a business harbours ambitions of escalation, desire for expansion or digitisation of its operations, the role of a Microsoft Partner can be instrumental and invaluable to facilitate this change and transformation towards their operational goals.

Nuances of Microsoft Certified Solutions & Their Integration

Microsoft Partners employ a suite of Microsoft certified solutions to weave digital solutions fluently into the complex tapestry that is your business's IT landscape. Using Microsoft Certified Solutions effectively translates into integrating reliable and industry-vetted tools that answer and fulfil the unique needs and goals of your distinct businesses. Alongside enhancing your business's digital initiatives, these certified solutions make your businesses IT environment more proficient in handling myriad workloads, ensure the secure processing and management of data and applications, and provide substantial aid in the hassle-free optimisation of existing processes.

Importance and Role of Microsoft Partners in the Field of IT Transformation

Microsoft partners like Logicalis have honed an expertise in refining the very core of your business operations by way of spearheading strategic IT transformations. Their services can be instrumental in streamlining your business operations, optimising outdated processes, digitising services to scale with the 21st-century digital expansion, and advancing customer experiences to unprecedented levels. Beyond these, Microsoft partners can guide businesses in leveraging the vast amount of data they generate to extract crucial insights, create operations with agility at their core, and in the construction of robust, resilient infrastructures. To fully comprehend and benefit from these advantages, businesses ought to recognise Microsoft partners as crucial allies in the journey of their digital evolution.

The Need for a Microsoft Partner for Your Business

In light of a landscape rife with competition and stringent demands for rapidity in digital transformations, forging an alliance with a Microsoft partner empowers businesses to channel the power of Microsoft's advanced proprietary technologies without needing to navigate the often daunting complexities single-handedly. Microsoft partners are powerhouses of knowledge, capable of simplifying and easing the transformation process, providing necessary guidance to businesses, while also ensuring that the integration with existing systems occurs smoothly and apace.

Advantages of Partnering with Microsoft Azure Partners

Adoption of cloud-based services in the present age has become a staple element in the standard IT setup for an increasing number of businesses. Microsoft Azure partners, a unique subset within the larger fraternity of Microsoft partners that concentrate on cloud services, are more than qualified to guide you expertly through this digital pilgrimage. From doing everything from migrating your data, workloads, and applications to cloud realms, to managing your infrastructure while making use of Azure's superior analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities for increased business intelligence-Microsoft Azure Partners make your journey towards cloud adoption streamlined, free of unnecessary complexities, and most importantly, one that involves wise, value-driven investments.

Conclusion

In this age that's dominated by digital impulses, choosing to partner with a Microsoft partner like Logicalis is no longer viewed as mere choice or option, it has rather become a strategic necessity. Their expertise and seasoned understanding of Microsoft technologies, coupled with Certified Solutions, can be a game-changer, one that can mean the difference between a successful, seamless transition to a digital landscape versus one that's disruptive and heavy on expenses. Irrespective of whether you're only at the beginning of your digital transformation journey, or if you're already deep into it and exploring avenues to maximise your existing IT investments, a Microsoft Partner can offer insights, innovative solutions, and game-changing strategies that are tailor-made to align with your specific business model and objectives.

Source: Busines NewsWire

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NEW YORK—The New York Times is striking back against the threat that artificial intelligence poses to the news industry, filing a federal lawsuit on Wednesday against OpenAI and Microsoft seeking to end the practice of using its stories to train chatbots.

The Times says the companies are threatening its livelihood by effectively stealing billions of dollars worth of work by its journalists, in some cases spitting out Times’ material verbatim to people who seek answers from generative artificial intelligence like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The newspaper’s lawsuit was filed in federal court in Manhattan and follows what appears to be a breakdown in talks between the newspaper and the two companies, which began in April.

The media has already been pummeled by a migration of readers to online platforms. While many publications—most notably the Times—have successfully carved out a digital space, the rapid development of AI threatens to significantly upend the publishing industry.

Web traffic is an important component of the paper’s advertising revenue and helps drive subscriptions to its online site. But the outputs from AI chatbots divert that traffic away from the paper and other copyright holders, the Times says, making it less likely that users will visit the original source for the information.

“These bots compete with the content they are trained on,” said Ian B. Crosby, partner and lead counsel at Susman Godfrey, which is representing the Times.

An OpenAI spokesman said in a prepared statement that the company respects the rights of content creators and is “committed” to working with them to help them benefit from the technology and new revenue models. “Our ongoing conversations with the New York Times have been productive and moving forward constructively, so we are surprised and disappointed with this development,” the spokesperson said. “We’re hopeful that we will find a mutually beneficial way to work together, as we are doing with many other publishers.”

Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment.

Artificial intelligence companies scrape information available online, including articles published by news organizations, to train generative AI chatbots. The large language models are also trained on a huge trove of other human-written materials, which helps them to build a strong command of language and grammar and to answer questions correctly.

But the technology is still under development and gets many things wrong. In its lawsuit, for example, the Times said OpenAI’s GPT-4 falsely attributed product recommendations to Wirecutter, the paper’s product reviews site, endangering its reputation.

OpenAI and other AI companies, including rival Anthropic, have attracted billions of dollars in investments very rapidly since public and business interest in the technology exploded, particularly this year.

Microsoft has a partnership with OpenAI that allows it to capitalize on the company’s AI technology. The Redmond, Washington, tech giant is also OpenAI’s biggest backer and has invested at least $13 billion into the company since the two began their partnership in 2019, according to the lawsuit. As part of the agreement, Microsoft’s supercomputers help power OpenAI’s AI research and the tech giant integrates the startup’s technology into its products.

The paper’s complaint comes as the number of lawsuits filed against OpenAI for copyright infringement is growing. The company has been sued by several writers—including comedian Sarah Silverman—who say their books were ingested to train OpenAI’s AI models without their permission. In June, more than 4,000 writers signed a letter to the CEOs of OpenAI and other tech companies accusing them of exploitative practices in building chatbots.

Microsoft team announced a new tool, named Azure Migrate application and code assessment tool for .NET, abbreviated as AppCAT. This tool is intended to help developers in the migration of on-premises .NET applications to Azure. AppCAT tool enables the assessment of .NET source code, configurations, and binaries, identifying potential issues and opportunities during the migration process to Azure.

As reported, its primary purpose is to uncover any challenges that could be faced while porting an application to Azure and to enhance performance, scalability, and security by recommending modern, cloud-native solutions.

AppCAT is available in two versions, a Visual Studio extension and a .NET CLI tool, providing flexibility in usage. Once the analysis is initiated, the tool generates a comprehensive report highlighting necessary checks or modifications to ensure the proper functioning of the application post-migration.

Using static code analysis, as reported AppCAT determines application technology usage, pinpointing areas that may require attention. It facilitates efficient collaboration by allowing users to navigate to specific lines of code, address issues, mark them as resolved, and save progress for future reference.

The tool provides estimates of the effort required to address each issue, components of applications, and entire projects. It offers detailed guidance on issue resolution and links users to relevant Microsoft documentation.

Both the CLI tool and Visual Studio version enable users to save analysis results in HTML, CSV, and JSON formats. The HTML report closely resembles the Visual Studio dashboard, presenting information on the number of projects analyzed, incidents, and issues.

(Generated report after migration, Source: Announcing the Azure Migrate application and code assessment tool for .NET)

The report evaluates the effort required to resolve each incident, issue, and project, categorizing incidents by severity. Various views provide insights into incidents, guidance on resolution, and direct access to the corresponding code.

The official announcement post mentions detailed step-by-step documentation articles for both Visual Studio and .NET CLI approaches.

Currently, AppCAT supports projects written in C# and Visual Basic, analyzing code in project types such as ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, and class libraries. It is compatible with all .NET frameworks, including .NET Framework, .NET Core, and .NET 5+.

Regarding Azure targets, this tool identifies potential migration issues for Azure App Service, AKS, and Azure Container Apps. As reported, future updates may include the ability to set explicit targets and filter recommendations accordingly.

Lastly, looking into the roadmap ahead, the development teams state that the focus is on enhancing the tool with AI capabilities and integrating it with Copilot for comprehensive migration assistance. 

Correspondingly, Olia Gavrysh, Senior Product Manager, .NET, wrote the following:

Another big feature that we are currently working on is to get you a more curated assessment based on the Azure target you choose. We plan to add the ability to set the target before the report and build the report based on that target.

Imagine two companies in the same business––generating and delivering information to consumers. One has done it for more than 170 years, the other––founded in 2015––for about 15 months. The older company invests substantial financial resources in paying its employees to create “original works of authorship” that are so valuable that “more than 10 million subscribers pay” to receive them. The new company arrives and, instead of hiring its own people to research, write, and edit original content, relies on––“without consent or compensation”––the older company’s intellectual property and lets a software application produce content it confesses “may not always be accurate.” In fact, the newcomer sometimes attributes such “misinformation” to the older company, tarnishing its reputation.

That’s the gist of a federal lawsuit filed in late December by the New York Times Company against Microsoft, OpenAI, and a “web of interrelated” OpenAI companies known for ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence program. For older readers, this may sound like a 1970s commercial starring John Houseman for a company that makes “money the old-fashioned way”––earning it through “hard work, research”––over an upstart that “bite[s] you on the bottom” to say “we’re here.” But make no mistake, this is serious business for the information ecosystem. 

The Times’s lawsuit is one of several brought by content creators ranging from renowned fiction authors to prizewinning nonfiction writers to comedian Sarah Silverman against generative AI companies that train their large language models (LLMs) on the content creators’ intellectual property. These cases involve pressing policy concerns about incentivizing and rewarding human creation of original content, as well as knotty legal problems regarding intellectual property and the copyright concept of fair use.

The Times’s 69-page complaint boils down to a key assertion: Microsoft and OpenAI “seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment” that “steal audiences away from” the newspaper while propelling OpenAI’s “valuation to as high as $90 billion.” The complaint asserts that the newspaper sued only after “months” of negotiations failed to produce an agreement that would let the paper receive a “fair share” for its content.

The ramifications of Microsoft and OpenAI’s alleged “systematic and competitive infringement” of theTimes’s intellectual property rights stretch far beyond the fiscal well-being of a lone business. The defendants’ purported free-riding threatens the “public interest” and “our democracy” by disincentivizing the production of quality and independent reportage across the journalistic board:

If The Times and its peers cannot control the use of their content, their ability to monetize that content will be harmed. With less revenue, news organizations will have fewer journalists able to dedicate time and resources to important, in-depth stories, which creates a risk that those stories will go untold. Less journalism will be produced, and the cost to society will be enormous.

One may disagree with the Times’ editorial opinions and quibble with the stories it prominently features, but its complaint correctly emphasizes the “damaged information ecosystem . . . awash in unreliable content” in which we currently live.

National newspapers like the Times and Wall Street Journal will play an increasingly vital role in informing citizens as reliable local journalism dwindles. Northwestern University’s November 2023 report on the state of local news predicts that given “the current trajectory, by the end of [2024], the country will have lost a third of its newspapers since 2005. Discouragingly, the growth in alternative local news sources—digital and ethnic news outlets, as well as public broadcasting—has not kept pace with what’s being lost.” The report adds that “residents in more than half of U.S. counties have no, or very limited, access to a reliable local news source—either print, digital or broadcast.” 

Large daily newspapers also are suffering, with fewer journalists employed to cover the news. The Northwestern report asserts that “many of the large dailies owned by chains employ less than a fifth of the journalists on staff in 2005.” Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, has severely cut its number of employees in the past three years.

One solution involves generative AI companies entering into licensing agreements with content creators, paying them for using their copyrighted works. The venerable Associated Press news service did just that in July 2023 with OpenAI. Additionally, Axel Springer, owner of Politico and Business Insider, entered into an agreement with OpenAI last month that allows content usage from “Springer media brands for advancing the training of OpenAI’s sophisticated” LLMs.

OpenAI virtuously proclaims it wants to “redistribute profits from our work to maximize the social and economic benefits of AI technology.” Forget––temporarily––post-hoc redistribution: Paying the Times and news organizations upfront for content that economically benefits OpenAI’s generative beast is essential for a well-informed citizenry.