Insight Imparts Expertise at Global Azure Bootcamps in 7 Cities

Community user groups join together to teach and learn how to run and develop advanced business solutions on the open cloud platform

TEMPE, Ariz., April 29, 2019 – The range of cloud services offered by Microsoft Azure is virtually unlimited, but that also means the learning curve to get the most out of it can be daunting. For the fifth year in a row, architects and data infrastructure consultants from Insight Enterprises (NASDAQ: NSIT), the global systems integrator of Insight Intelligent Technology Solutions™, provided a deep dive into building and managing applications in Azure during Global Azure Bootcamps hosted Saturday at seven Insight locations across the United States.

The deep technical experts from Insight’s Digital Innovation team, who normally design and maintain transformative solutions that create competitive advantages for businesses of all sizes, instead shared their enthusiasm for the Azure platform by teaching essential cloud-computing skills to community members in Cincinnati; Columbus, Ohio; Raleigh, North Carolina; Nashville; Atlanta; Boston; and Manchester, New Hampshire.

The Insight events joined about 300 other participating locations globally for a one-day exploration of Azure’s capabilities for software as a service, infrastructure as a service and platform as a service. In Cincinnati and Nashville, Insight app developers trained community members on topics like Azure DevOps, road mapping, site recovery, Cognitive Services and Data Factory. Many Insight locations, like in Columbus, included labs for participants to create Azure web apps.

“Conversational agents, or chatbots, have become a difference maker across industries, helping businesses engage with their customers more cost-effectively and with greater user satisfaction. Azure has been a powerful means for us to build first-to-market virtual agents, so we wanted to share the lessons we’ve learned from developing chatbots to show how cutting-edge technology can benefit business,” said Insight architect Keith Wood, who led the Raleigh training. “Azure Bootcamp is a terrific way to give people of varied experience greater familiarity on how to use technologies like Cognitive Services, Azure Search, Bot Service, and Microsoft Bot Framework during a day of hands-on labs.”

At the Boston-area boot camp in Burlington, Massachusetts, and at Manchester Community College in New Hampshire, two of Insight’s Digital Innovation developers – Jim Wilcox, senior architect and a Microsoft MVP of developer technologies, and senior data architect Beth Wolfset – focused on artificial intelligence (AI).

“Cloud services like Azure are opening up the possibilities of AI to companies of all sizes, and we set up a ‘Learn AI’ boot camp for emerging AI developers to focus on practical exercises that help develop their technical skills,” said Wilcox. “By the end of the workshop, participants were able to understand how to configure apps to call Cognitive Services, build an app with its API (application programming interface), and understand how to implement several Azure features.”

Overall, this was the seventh annual Global Azure Bootcamp organized by volunteer groups to train enthusiasts on the cloud platform. This year emphasized a Global Science Lab centered on using machine-learning algorithms to analyze data from NASA’s TESS mission to discover exoplanets around distant stars.

Insight, one of Microsoft’s top global partners, was named the Microsoft Worldwide AI Partner of the Year and the Microsoft U.S. Partner of the Year awards for Apps and Infrastructure – Open Source and Data & AI – Internet of Things in 2018.