Mi­crosoft's sec­ond an­nu­al lo­cal con­fer­ence, M4: An Event by Mi­crosoft–Em­pow­er­ing Your En­ter­prise and Fu­ture-Proof­ing Your Busi­ness, brought to­geth­er the tech gi­ant's part­ners, busi­ness lead­ers and In­for­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) in­dus­try ex­perts to dis­cuss how tech­nol­o­gy can serve as a key dri­ver and en­abler of in­no­va­tion and suc­cess in a dig­i­tal world.

Oth­er dis­cus­sions in­clud­ed how ad­di­tion­al in­no­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies op­ti­mise busi­ness op­er­a­tions, as well as the re­al­i­ty of 'da­ta as the new cur­ren­cy'.

Court­ney Munroe, group vice pres­i­dent of World­wide Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Re­search, In­ter­na­tion­al Da­ta Cor­po­ra­tion (IDC), served as the keynote speak­er, re­veal­ing his ex­ten­sive in­sight in glob­al ICT trends and how en­ter­pris­es should be in­no­vat­ing for suc­cess. Munroe al­so dis­cussed the ICT im­pact and out­look for the Caribbean.

The M4 Con­fer­ence al­so fea­tured a slate of high-lev­el Mi­crosoft in­sid­ers who shared their per­spec­tives on ad­vanc­ing busi­ness by un­der­stand­ing and mas­ter­ing dig­i­tal op­er­a­tions and new tech­nolo­gies. Speak­ers in­clud­ed Marc Reguera, di­rec­tor of Fi­nance at Mi­crosoft World­wide, cur­rent­ly re­spon­si­ble for dri­ving ex­ter­nal en­gage­ment with Mi­crosoft Fi­nance on Busi­ness In­tel­li­gence (BI); Daniel Ko­rn, di­rec­tor of Le­gal & Cor­po­rate Af­fairs at Mi­crosoft Latin Amer­i­ca, where he leads Mi­crosoft's gov­ern­ment af­fairs en­gage­ments in 46 coun­tries in the re­gion; as well as Bryan Rop­er, Win­dows Chief Sto­ry­teller at Mi­crosoft, whose sharp, cre­ative in­stinct and pas­sion for tech­nol­o­gy of­fered au­di­ences a provoca­tive view of in­no­va­tions de­signed to move pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors for­ward.

A fo­cal point of the con­fer­ence was a dis­cus­sion on the nar­ra­tive of 'da­ta as the new cur­ren­cy'. With Mi­crosoft's vi­sion fo­cused on rein­vent­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty through mean­ing­ful dig­i­tal in­for­ma­tion, au­di­ence mem­bers gained an un­der­stand­ing of how to trans­form their busi­ness­es by lever­ag­ing da­ta and cre­at­ing an ac­tion-dri­ven cul­ture in which all em­ploy­ees are em­pow­ered with ac­cess to da­ta and in­sight.

Win­dows 10 and its in­tel­li­gent cloud ca­pa­bil­i­ties were al­so cen­tral to the di­a­logue on har­ness­ing pro­gres­sive tech­nol­o­gy to aug­ment busi­ness. Ac­cord­ing to Frances Cor­reia, coun­try man­ag­er, Mi­crosoft T&T, East­ern & South­ern Caribbean, dig­i­tal busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion is in­te­gral to lead­ing in a dis­rup­tive en­vi­ron­ment.

"At the M4 con­fer­ence, par­tic­i­pants had the op­por­tu­ni­ty to learn how they can sig­nif­i­cant­ly in­crease com­pet­i­tive­ness in this Mo­bile-first, Cloud-first world by trans­form­ing in­to ag­ile, flex­i­ble busi­ness­es with Mi­crosoft's ser­vices," Cor­reia said.

"With the one con­verged plat­form of Win­dows 10, busi­ness­es will be able to stay up-to-date with the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy. For lo­cal and re­gion­al busi­ness­es to achieve growth, it is im­per­a­tive that they are equipped with in­no­v­a­tive so­lu­tions, and we were hap­py to share how Mi­crosoft can sim­pli­fy the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion for our cus­tomers."