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Ignite 2025: Drive the next era of software innovation with AI

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CyrilBelikoff
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Nov 18, 2025

Artificial intelligence is unlocking new possibilities and redefining what’s achievable. Software companies, startups, ISVs and AI Natives are leading the charge, using AI to speed up delivery, scale effectively, and unlock new business potential. Microsoft empowers software companies to unlock growth through AI-driven innovation, empowers their developers to ship faster and scale through programs, incentive and Microsoft Marketplace.

There is clear momentum in AI innovation, led by forward-thinking software companies. For instance, Microsoft Marketplace now offers 4,000+ AI Apps and Agents—more than any other marketplace—as well as additional cloud solutions designed to help customers accelerate their innovation.

Software company acceleration at Microsoft Ignite.

This week at Ignite, Microsoft is empowering software companies across three key areas:

1. Unlock growth with AI

Software companies can access a broad choice of models, tailor them to their use case, and create AI apps and agents that deliver outcomes while using responsible AI to protect data and reduce risk.

New announcements:

  • Unified tools catalog in Microsoft Foundry (Public preview)

New Microsoft Foundry updates in preview will enable developers to enrich agents with real-time business context, multimodal capabilities and custom business logic through a unified Tools catalog of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers built with security and governance in mind. The catalog includes Unified tool discovery, deep business integration, new tools for prebuilt AI services, and custom tool extensibility.

 

 

  • Managed instance on Azure App Service (Public preview)

Enables organizations to move web applications to the cloud with just a few configuration changes, saving the time and effort of rewriting code. Whether .NET web apps are running on-premises or in virtual machines, developers will be able to modernize them into a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment and future-proof their infrastructure. The result is faster app modernization with lower overhead and access to cloud-native scalability, built-in security and Azure’s AI capabilities. 

 

 

  • Cohere joins Microsoft Foundry’s first-party model lineup (Public preview)

Cohere’s leading language models (Command A, Embed 4 and Rerank) are now available directly from Azure, giving customers fast, secure, and compliant access without third-party dependencies. Delivered with Azure-native governance, observability, networking, and billing, Cohere on Azure enables organizations to build high-performance retrieval, classification, and generation workflows at enterprise scale. 

 

 

  • Introducing Anthropic's Claude models in Microsoft Foundry (Public preview)

Microsoft and Anthropic are expanding their existing partnership to provide broader access to Claude for businesses. Customers of Microsoft Foundry will be able to access Anthropic’s frontier Claude models including Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5. This partnership will make Claude the only frontier model available on all three of the world’s most prominent cloud services. Azure customers will gain expanded choice in models and access to Claude-specific capabilities. 

 

2. Accelerate development

Ship faster with AI-assisted workflows, build across clouds and open-source stacks, and use databases that speed data access and analysis to quickly move from prototype to production.

New announcements:

  • Systems innovation (Private preview)

Remote storage throughput of up to 20 GBps, up to 1 million remote storage IOPS and network bandwidth of up to 400 Gbps, enabling significant performance improvements for the latest Azure VM series. Azure Boost is a server subsystem designed by Microsoft consisting of purpose-built software and hardware that offloads server virtualization processes traditionally performed by the hypervisor and host OS. Various storage and network intensive workloads will benefit the most from these new performance specifications.

 

 

  • Microsoft Defender for Cloud + GitHub Advanced Security (Preview)

With Microsoft Defender for Cloud and GitHub Advanced Security, you can protect cloud-native applications across the full app lifecycle from code to cloud. This natively integrated solution helps connect software developers and security teams while staying in the tools they use every day; to prioritize the most critical risks exposed in production and fix these risks faster with AI-powered remediation.

 

 

  • Azure HorizonDB PostgreSQL (Private preview)

A new PostgreSQL cloud database service delivering high speed and elastic scalability for building or modernizing mission-critical applications. Integrated with Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Fabric, Visual Studio Code and more, Azure HorizonDB streamlines development. Modern authentication with Microsoft Entra ID and security features like Microsoft Defender and private endpoints support enterprise-grade protection.

 

3. Scale with confidence

Turn innovation into revenue with Microsoft Marketplace by expanding your reach through the partner ecosystem, unlocking go-to-market benefits, and differentiating with offers that stand out.

New announcements:

  • Global release of Microsoft Marketplace (General availability)

Microsoft Marketplace — your trusted source for cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents — is now globally available following its launch in the United States in September. All traffic from legacy storefronts (Azure Marketplace and AppSource) is now redirected to Marketplace.Microsoft.com.

Featuring the industry’s largest catalog of AI apps and agents, Marketplace extends the Microsoft Cloud, helping customers accelerate their AI-first transformation with tens of thousands of vetted solutions from our partner ecosystem. These solutions integrate easily with Microsoft products, delivering faster time-to-value.

 

 

  • Microsoft Agent 365 (Preview)

Extend the existing infrastructure that you use for managing people to agents. Agent 365 equips your agents with the same apps and protections, tailored to agent needs, saving IT time and effort on integrating agents into business processes. It includes leading Microsoft security, productivity and collaboration solutions: Defender, Entra and Purview to protect and govern agents; Microsoft 365 productivity and collaboration apps and Semantic Index to accelerate their productivity; and Microsoft 365 admin center to manage agents. We're already seeing great examples from Devin, Genspark, Glean, Kasisto, Manus AI, n8n, ServiceNow, Workday, and more.

 

 

  •  Unified programs for software companies – App Accelerate (Public preview)

Our Partner Program is focused on delivering more value for software companies, and we’ve identified an opportunity to simplify the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program (MAICPP) offers available to software companies today. We're announcing a new offering for software development companies, available in 2026—combining incentives, benefits, and co-sell resources across existing offerings such as ISV Success, and Marketplace Rewards—into one streamlined pathway for partners. App Accelerate brings together ISV Success, Marketplace Rewards, and more into a single-entry point, creating a unified and simplified experience to help partners accelerate their growth through Microsoft Marketplace.

 

 

  • Early access to co-sell benefits (Pilot)

As part of our new unified offer, we’re creating an additional route for software companies to access co-sell benefits. This pathway is designed for partners who may not have reached the $100K milestone in Marketplace Billed Sales (MBS) or Azure Consumed Revenue (ACR) but demonstrate readiness in other critical areas. This early access option is nomination-based, with eligibility determined by criteria such as Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), customer traction, and pipeline strength.

 

  • Resale enabled offers (General availability)

Analysts estimate nearly 60% of cloud marketplace business will be channel-led by 2030. With a partner ecosystem of 500K+ —Microsoft Marketplace is fully embracing the channel-led Marketplace opportunity with the general availability of resale enabled offers.

Resale enabled offers enable software companies to empower channel partners to manage their Marketplace listings through a repeatable model designed for scale. This helps software companies break through to new markets without adding overhead while channel partners maintain their customer relationships while getting the added value of Marketplace.

Sales of eligible solutions also count toward customers’ Azure consumption commitments, opening the door to larger, more strategic deals funded by pre-committed cloud budgets—creating stickier relationships and fueling growth.

Featured Ignite sessions

Whether you're attending Ignite in person or joining online, these sessions are designed to help software companies build smarter, scale faster, and unlock new growth opportunities.

Keep the momentum going—explore more Ignite sessions and activities created with software companies in mind.

Let’s create the future together

You are redefining what’s possible with AI. Microsoft is here to help you create the future.

Get started

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Updated Nov 18, 2025
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