Microsoft, innovation and reaching federal agency objectives

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Fed Tech Talk’s audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne.

Seasoned listeners may remember Microsoft as an arrogant technical giant. Well, things have changed. Today’s Microsoft is focused on adapting to the needs of the modern cloud and application development environment.

Patrick Curran, federal chief technical officer at Planet Technologies, a multiple award-winning Microsoft partner, was on this week’s Federal Tech Talk. He detailed how Microsoft has evolved to better respond to needs of today’s federal information process.

Curran’s responsibility is to thoroughly understand agency goals and provide options for completion in the most efficient way possible. One of the best examples of this is the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft. This $7.5 billion acquisition shows that Microsoft is investing in tools for software developers.

GitHub is a development platform that most software professionals associate with open source software. Analysts view this purchase as a long term immense strategic value.

Moving to the cloud isn’t a fad or a current trend. This movement to shared pools of configurable computer system resources is a decades-long play. Microsoft is working with partners like Planet
Technologies to bring value to each federal dollar spent on every part of the stack from application development to storage. Some have used the phrase “steady, reliable, Microsoft” to describe the dream of Bill Gates and Paul Allen.