Partner Blog | Azure updates for partners: December 2025
At Microsoft Ignite 2025, we explored what it means for organizations to move into the era of Frontier transformation. This shift is focused on embedding AI across every part of the business to improve decision-making, increase speed, and create new value. Organizations leading in AI make it foundational. They rethink processes and integrate new technologies from the start to improve efficiency. For partners, this move toward Frontier represents a significant opportunity to lead customers into this new era. By building AI-powered solutions, connecting data for intelligent insights, and deploying Microsoft Azure’s cloud-ready platforms, partners can deliver value faster and scale confidently through the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft Ignite came with a significant number of announcements, so I’ve gathered the Azure updates that matter most for partners. These are the capabilities that can strengthen your ability to deliver intelligent solutions, drive operational efficiency, and differentiate your product or service in the market. You can also explore how partners are turning momentum into action, access highlights, and grab practical guidance from my Microsoft Ignite session. Continue reading hereDon’t miss Building Agents with Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Foundry Agent Service!
Our dynamic four-part webinar series, Agentic AI + Copilot Partner Skilling Accelerator, empowers you to harness the Microsoft AI ecosystem to unlock new revenue streams and enhance customer success. Across the four sessions, Microsoft partners can expect to learn how to apply AI tools in no-code, low-code, and pro-code scenarios to build intelligent chat and workflow solutions, extend and customize capabilities, and create advanced, custom AI functionality. Don't miss the final session in the series, Building Agents with Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, where you'll learn how to design and deploy intelligent agents with Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft Foundry Agent Service, including multi-agent architectures and key protocols such as A2A and MCP. The live virtual event is scheduled for December 15, 2025. Register today to reserve your spot! Be sure to follow this Partner news blog for all partner related announcements by clicking follow above!Partner Case Study | Tiger Analytics
In every industry, preventing equipment downtime and maintaining operational continuity is a top priority. Preventive maintenance—making rounds, doing routine maintenance, and logging data—has long been a manual, tedious process, but with recent advances in AI, predicting and preventing failures and downtime is becoming more manageable than ever before. Tiger Analytics is a solutions integrator and Microsoft partner that implements AI-powered solutions. The organization has all three Solutions Partner designations for Azure, as well as three specializations: AI Platform on Microsoft Azure (formerly AI and Machine Learning on Microsoft Azure), Build AI Apps on Microsoft Azure, and Analytics on Microsoft Azure. They believe in using AI to transform operations for customers across industries. Their commitment to using AI to develop smart solutions empowered them to help a medical device company develop a predictive maintenance solution for their radiation therapy devices. Continue reading here Explore all case studies or submit your own Subscribe to case studies tag to follow all new case study posts. Don't forget to follow this blog to receive email notifications of new stories!Secure migration starts with trusted cloud and AI expertise
Modernizing legacy IT environments and moving securely to the cloud are top priorities for customers today. With the cloud migration market projected to reach $1.03 trillion 1 by 2030, representing an approximate 28% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), 2 organizations everywhere seek to strengthen their digital foundations—and they expect migrations to be secure, efficient, and tied to business outcomes. This is where partners make the difference. Your expertise speeds transformation and empowers customers to realize the full value of Microsoft Azure. Why modernizing legacy IT environments is essential Modernization is critical across industries. As software and hardware reach end of support, the risk of disruption rises. Unsupported systems create security gaps and operational challenges because they no longer receive essential updates. Meanwhile, regulatory pressure is mounting. Regulations like the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and mandates in financial services and data management demand secure, up-to-date infrastructure to stay compliant and avoid costly penalties. Modernization isn’t just about reducing risk; it’s about seizing the moment of innovation. Modern platforms support AI, automation, and advanced data capabilities. Customers can move faster, operate more efficiently, and respond rapidly to new opportunities by updating legacy systems. Your expertise positions them competitively at the frontier of AI and intelligent operations. Continue reading herePartner Case Study | Tiger Analytics
Organizations need to adopt more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solutions to keep up with the evolving landscape of data analytics. Traditional on-premises systems, while robust and reliable, often face limitations in handling the increasing volume and velocity of data. To thrive, organizations must modernize their critical applications, replacing legacy systems with cloud-native solutions that offer better scalability, fault tolerance, and security. Microsoft partner Tiger Analytics is at the forefront of this modernization process. The organization has all three Solutions Partner designations for Azure, as well as three specializations: AI Platform on Microsoft Azure (formerly AI and Machine Learning on Microsoft Azure), Build AI Apps on Microsoft Azure, and Analytics on Microsoft Azure. Tiger Analytics used their expertise to execute a digital transformation for a leading global intimates and sleepwear retailer’s analytics ecosystem, delivering a seamless migration from the on-premises model to Azure and Snowflake. Over a period of 10 months, the intimates retailer was able to transition out of legacy on-premises systems with a 100% success rate on all workloads—and significantly reduced costs along the way. The framework Tiger Analytics used to execute this migration can be tweaked for any organization based on their priorities, processes, and current ecosystem. Collaborating for a smooth migration The global intimates and sleepwear retailer is on a mission to build a modern ecosystem that will improve customer experience and enhance productivity. The company adopted Microsoft Azure in 2022 and migrated their enterprise data from Teradata to Snowflake in 2023. With the right foundation in place, the retailer seized the opportunity to build a modern data platform and shed the legacy technology debt. The retailer collaborated with Tiger Analytics to implement a well-structured, phased migration strategy to ensure a smooth transition of analytical and reporting workloads. The objective of this exercise was not only to refactor the code to a new platform, but also to introduce best practices and efficiencies to improve current processes—all while minimizing effort and costs. For Tiger Analytics, the first step in the migration strategy was a comprehensive workload prioritization and business impact analysis. This process involved collaboration with business stakeholders, IT, and the data science team to thoroughly understand the current landscape. Their top considerations were the number of scripts per module, need for automation, module dependencies, impact on daily tasks, and complexity of implementation. Continue reading here Explore all case studies or submit your own Subscribe to case studies tag to follow all new case study posts. Don't forget to follow this blog to receive email notifications of new stories!GPT‑5.1 in Foundry: A Workhorse for Reasoning, Coding, and Chat
Azure AI Foundry is unveiling OpenAI’s GPT-5.1 series, the next generation of reasoning, analytics, and conversational intelligence. The following models will be rolling out in Foundry today: GPT-5.1: adaptive, more efficient reasoning GPT-5.1-chat: chat with new chain-of-thought for end-users GPT-5.1-codex: optimized for long-running conversations with enhanced tools and agentic workflows GPT-5.1-codex-mini: a compact variant for resource-constrained environments Learn more here!Partner Blog | Azure updates for partners: November 2025
We’ve moved beyond the era of experimentation. Across our partner ecosystem, I’m seeing a decisive shift from exploring what’s possible with AI and cloud to executing with focus, scale, and sustainable impact. Azure Accelerate and momentum in the Microsoft Marketplace give partners like you a strong foundation to align investments and deliver outcomes that matter. Microsoft Ignite is where those insights become action. It is where ideas become practice and where partners shape what is possible for customers. From November 18–21 in San Francisco and online, you will hear directly from our product leaders, preview the latest in Azure and AI innovation, and connect with peers who are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Make time for ancillary events, interactive roundtables, and the Partner Hub to build new skills, expand your network, and explore hands-on opportunities to advance your work. I’m especially looking forward to the sessions on AI-powered innovation in Azure, my session on how partners can accelerate growth with Azure, and the hands-on labs. There is always a moment that sparks new ideas that I can take back to my team. If you have not registered, do so today. Plan your agenda, pick sessions that stretch your thinking, and come ready to take fresh ideas back to your customers. Here’s a look at other recent updates designed to help partners move faster, innovate more, and deliver greater value with Azure. Continue reading here Be sure to follow our Azure discussion board for updates and new conversations!OpenAI’s open‑source model: gpt‑oss on Azure AI Foundry and Windows AI Foundry
Open-weight models give customer decision makers control and flexibility - no black boxes, fewer trade-offs, and more options across deployment, compliance, and cost. With OpenAI’s gpt-oss open-weight models on Azure AI Foundry, you can: Fine-tune and distill the models using your own data and deploy with confidence. Mix open and proprietary models to match task-specific needs. Spin up inference endpoints using gpt oss in the cloud with just a few CLI commands. And Foundry Local makes gpt‑oss-20b usable on a high-performance Windows PC – enabling use-cases in offline settings, buildings in a secure network, or running at the edge. Check out more here!Now Generally Available: Azure Native Pure Storage Cloud for Azure VMware Solution
Co authored by: vjirovsky Azure Native Integrations enable you to easily provision, manage, and tightly integrate Independent Software Vendors (ISV) SaaS with a unified billing on Azure. By leveraging the power of Azure, Pure Storage Cloud Service offers you the same trusted Pure Storage capabilities in the cloud, without the complexity of refactoring or rearchitecting your VMware environments. You can easily discover and sign up for this via the Azure Marketplace. Azure Native Integrations enable you to easily provision, manage, and tightly integrate Independent Software Vendors (ISV) SaaS with a unified billing on Azure. By leveraging the power of Azure, Pure Storage Cloud Service offers you the same trusted Pure Storage capabilities in the cloud, without the complexity of refactoring or rearchitecting your VMware environments. You can easily discover and sign up for this via the Azure Marketplace. “We’re excited to announce Microsoft’s strengthened partnership with Pure Storage through the Azure Native Integrations program. With the service now generally available, customers can seamlessly deploy enterprise-grade block storage on Pure directly from the Azure portal. This seamless integration with Azure VMware Solution enables elastic capacity, flexible performance, and instant resizing – all while unlocking the full power of Azure’s cloud and AI capabilities.” - Scott Hunter, Vice President Product Management, Microsoft Developer Division Key Benefits of Azure Native Pure Storage Cloud on AVS Enterprise customers migrating VMware workloads to the cloud have long faced challenges with storage scalability, cost inefficiencies, and operational overhead. With this GA release, Pure Storage removes those barriers and delivers: Decoupled Scalability & Flexibility: across Compute and Storage solutions, so you pay only for what you need. Seamless Native Azure Experience: Provision Pure Storage Cloud resources via the client of your choice - Azure portal, CLI, PowerShell or SDK. Multi-Region support: Enjoy the support for your Pure Storage resource across East US, East US 2, West US 2, Central US and Australia East regions, with many more coming in shortly! Cost Efficiency: Achieve up to 40% Total Cost of Operations (TCO) savings through best-in-class data reduction and compression solutions. Streamlined VMware Migration: Simplify the transition of VMware workloads from on-premises or hybrid and multi-cloud environments onto Azure with consistent storage performance, nearly zero downtime, and minimal business disruption. Easy management: Perform all daily operations on AVS from a single VMware vSphere client directly via built-in plugin for Pure Storage Cloud Robust performance and reliability for mission-critical workloads with enterprise-grade Data protection and Data resilience support, with solutions such as Pure Snapshots and Hybrid Disaster Recovery in the pipeline. Fig 1: Pure Storage benefits of decoupled storage scalability. Why Pure Storage? Gartner report from Sept 2025 states that by 2029, consumption-based storage as a service (STaaS) will replace 50% of on-premises enterprise storage and data services infrastructure capital expenditure (capex), an increase from 15% in early 2025. Pure Storage® is a pivotal storage player among the Enterprise customers in revolutionizing the storage, management and resiliency while ensuring flexibility. From AI to archive, Pure Storage delivers a seamless cloud migration experience with one unified Storage as-a-Service (STaaS) platform across on-premises, private and public cloud, and hybrid environments. Pure has been named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Storage Platforms, with highest rating in Execution & Vision. An enterprise-favorite, some key customers for Pure Storage include ServiceNow, NASA, Comcast and many more! Fig 2: Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms, Sep 2025, Gartner Inc. Get Started with Azure Native Pure Storage Cloud Getting started is simple and fully integrated into the Azure experience. You can now start your journey quick and easy, and you pay only for the storage you use. For a detailed step-by-step visual guide, check out this YouTube playlist. Search and Provisioning the Pure Storage Cloud Resource Look for “Pure Storage Cloud” in the Azure portal or Azure Marketplace and sign up to subscribe. Select the service and create a new Pure Storage resource. Follow the instructions in the QuickStart to easily spin up your Pure Storage resource. Fig 3: Searching for Azure Native Pure Storage via Azure portal Create Storage Pools Using your Vnet and a delegated subnet to PureStorage.Block/storagePools, use the Overview blade navigation or the Action tile in the bottom to create and configure your storage pools. Fig 4: Newly created Pure Storage resource Overview in Azure portal Fig 5: Create Storage pool blade in Azure portal Connect to an Azure VMware Solution (AVS) resource Once created, you can use the Connect button up top to link your storage pool to AVS. In a few minutes, your storage pool is coupled with your VMware resource and ready to use! Fig 6: Connect AVS button establishes connection between storage pool and AVS resource Also, it automatically installs the Pure Storage Cloud plugin into your VMware resource, so you can manage everything, including the storage, from a single place, vSphere Client. Fig 7: Creation of a Datastore within the vSphere Client – this maps to a Storage container on your Pure Storage Cloud resource We’re excited for you to try out our solution! If you have suggestions or questions, contact us at azurenative@purestorage.com Resources Sign up for the service via Azure marketplace here. For a detailed visual guide on the step-by-step process to create a Pure Storage resource on Azure, check out this YouTube playlist. To learn more about the service, FAQ, and how to create your resource, check out the Microsoft docs as well as the Pure docs. Learn about how to create datastores and volumes and manage your Pure Storage here. Check out Azure Storage's blog and Pure’s press release for more excitement around the Pure-Microsoft partnership.
What’s New? Unveiling the Latest Features of the Azure Native Dynatrace Service
Introducing Multi-Subscription Monitoring for Dynatrace on Azure We’re excited to announce the general availability of Multi-Subscription Monitoring (MSM) for the Azure Native Dynatrace Service (ANDS). This powerful new capability allows customers to monitor multiple Azure subscriptions through a single Dynatrace resource—significantly simplifying the setup of observability for multiple Azure subscriptions at scale. Organizations often operate across dozens—or even hundreds—of Azure subscriptions. Until now, when setting up observability with the Azure Native Dynatrace Service, customers had to create one Dynatrace resource per Azure subscription, leading to higher operational overhead and some redundant configurations. With Multi-Subscription Monitoring, customers can now consolidate monitoring of up to 20 Azure subscriptions into a single Dynatrace resource, streamlining their operations and reducing complexity. 🧩 How It Works The feature is available directly in the Azure portal: Navigate to your Dynatrace resource. Go to Environment Configuration > Monitored Subscriptions. Click Add Subscriptions. Select the subscriptions you want to monitor—Dynatrace will automatically detect those where your managed identity has the required permissions. Click Add. Once added, the subscriptions will appear with an “Active” status, and diagnostic settings will be applied automatically based on your tag rules. ⚠️ Note: You can link up to 20 subscriptions per Dynatrace resource. If you reach the 20 subscriptions linked to one Dynatrace resource, you have to create a new Dynatrace resource in the next Azure subscription you want to link. To use MSM, the managed identity associated with your Dynatrace resource must have Owner permissions on the target subscriptions. 📘 Learn More Check out the article here for step-by-step guidance and stay tuned for updates on the Azure Tech Community blog. We look forward to your feedback! Announcing Enhanced Customization for Dynatrace OneAgent Installation on Azure VMs We’re excited to introduce a powerful new capability in the Azure Native Dynatrace Service: The installation of Dynatrace OneAgent on Virtual Machines (VMs) now supports additional parameters. This enhancement adds flexibility and control to your observability workflows—directly from the Azure portal. Previously, customers installing Dynatrace OneAgent via the Azure portal needed to manually configure important options. This included enabling system logs, choosing infrastructure-only monitoring, or setting proxy configurations. These settings were only available through CLI-based setups or post-installation. This manual configuration created friction for certain use cases, including the following: Security-conscious teams wanting to pre-configure log ingestion, proxy settings and custom installation paths. SREs managing multiple subscriptions desiring to predefine host groups and network zones for better organization and routing. With this update, we’re providing advanced configuration and automation. What’s New: Full Parameter Control at Install Time You can now configure the following parameters during agent installation via the Azure portal or CLI: Parameter Description Monitoring Mode Enable full-stack or infra-only monitoring Host Group Assign host to a logical group Network Zone Route traffic through a specific network zone Proxy Define address of proxy server Custom Host Name Custom host name for agent Enable Log Monitoring Enable/disable log monitoring Enable Auto Update Auto-update agent version Access to System Logs Enable/disable system log collection Enable Automatic Ingestion Enable/disable auto-ingestion Extensions ingest port Set custom ingest port StatsD Port Set custom StatsD port These parameters are optional, giving you the freedom to tailor the installation to your environment’s needs. 🔍 Learn More To explore the full list of parameters and their usage, check out the official Dynatrace documentation: Customize OneAgent installation on Linux — Dynatrace Docs We look forward to your feedback!
