One year of Phi: Small language models making big leaps in AI

By Dustin Ward

A new era of AI  One year ago, Microsoft introduced small language models (SLMs) to customers with the release of Phi-3 on Azure AI Foundry, leveraging research on SLMs to expand the range of efficient AI models and tools available to customers.  Today, we are excited to introduce Phi-4-reasoning, Phi-4-reasoning-plus, and Phi-4-mini-reasoning—marking a new era…

Microsoft Cost Management updates—April 2025 

By Dustin Ward

Whether you’re a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you’re spending, where it’s being spent, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Microsoft Cost Management comes in.  Manage your cloud…

Adaptability by design: Unifying cloud and edge infrastructure trends 

By Dustin Ward

Adaptability isn’t an option. It’s the strategy. Every day, we engage with organizations navigating growing business complexity across industries, geographies, and regulatory environments. From global manufacturers modernizing plants to financial institutions re-architecting for resilience, we are seeing the same pattern: ambitions are moving faster than traditional architectures can respond to.  Organizations must also contend with…

Azure AI Foundry: Your GPS for the changing AI landscape

By Dustin Ward

I spent most of the last decade in the Midwest (hello, Chicagoland!) but now live in the Seattle area and work at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Before moving here, I’d visited the Redmond campus dozens of times as a Microsoft partner and customer, but had only basic airport-campus-hotel-restaurant navigation skills. Relocating a family of…

Forrester Total Economic Impact study: A 304% ROI within 3 years using Azure Arc 

By Dustin Ward

As businesses continue to adapt to changing market demands, running modern workloads requires the rapid integration of AI from digital to physical estate. Managing enterprise-level infrastructure and applications across environments needs to be simplified with centralized visualization and control across IT assets. Azure Arc extends the Azure platform to standardize governance, security, and orchestration for…