Microsoft Jamaica Host The Microsoft Envision Forum

Microsoft Jamaica hosted the Microsoft Envision Forum, with more than 100 leaders from local companies and government, and technology experts on the latest business and tech trends in financial industries, government and corporate areas. With a focus on celebrating its 20 anniversary in Jamaica, the event opened with a keynote by Herbert Lewy, Regional Manager for the Caribbean, who expressed “We are also taking in the opportunity to celebrate a very important milestone for us, our 20th anniversary in Jamaica.

A lot has changed since we first started operations, but one thing has remained unchanged: our success relies 100% on the success of our clients and partners. We are here to help them embrace technology to do more and in a better way” said Mr. Lewy “We’ve had a great impact in Jamaica in this incredible 20-year journey: impacting teachers and students with +567 educators certified in Microsoft Education tools and +9,276 students and teachers using Office 365; empowering local businesses with more than +1,5k locals SMBs enabled by Microsoft technology, and +176,779 youth broadly served.

Also, on stage was Colette Roberts Risden, Permanent Secretary Ministry of Labour and Social Security presenting their partnership with the company on the digital transformation journey for the Jamaican Government. “The ministry has seen tremendous cost savings of over 2 million since the implementation of Microsoft office 360, it has made our daily operations easier as we are now able to see the movement of all staff members and plan and make decisions accordingly”.

A key part of the event was to highlight the importance of accelerating digital transformation. The digital world is advancing at amazing speeds—and it is all connected to the cloud. To succeed, business leaders must embrace a digital transformation: new ways of connecting people, data, and processes to create value for customers. According to panel speaker Rickardo Ebanks of Victoria Mutual Group “we are happy to have high adoption rates of the various tools like Microsoft Teams and Office. We have found it to be quite an enabler for work and productivity in our business”. Just like Jamaica organizations across the globe continue to embrace the cloud wholeheartedly. Global cloud spending is predicted to reach USD 390 billion by 2020 as reported by Forbes.

This growth is being fueled by businesses of all sizes but is spiking in particular among the world’s largest enterprises, as they begin to move en masse from “dev-test” cloud scenarios to mission-critical workloads. And these businesses are transforming using Microsoft Azure as the cloud foundation – driving new levels of organizational productivity, intelligent data-driven experiences, and deepened business trust.

Whether an enterprise of today or tomorrow, customers are turning to Azure for its enterprise-proven capabilities spanning basic computing, networking, and storage, to mobile and web app services, to advanced cloud scenarios such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cognitive services and machine learning.