Microsoft is working to link its services to the Metaverse

Microsoft is looking to adapt part of its software services stack to the metaverse. Ihsan Anabtawi, CMO of Microsoft UAE, said the company is working to make its cloud division compatible with metaverse experiences, and allow companies to use the resulting data as resources for their specific applications.

Microsoft prepares for the era of the Metaverse

Microsoft is one of those that see the metaverse as part of a digital future for consumers and institutions alike. In this context, Ihsan Anabtawi, CMO of Microsoft UAE, commented on the company’s plans and considerations regarding the metaverse.

For Ihsan Anabtawi, the rise of the metaverse is inevitable. This new tool should be treated as a natural phenomenon that complements the internet as it is known today. On this point, he said:

We should consider the metaverse as the next step in the evolution of the internet, which started as an internet of data in the 1990s and 2000s, the internet of people in the 2010s and is now the internet of things.

Microsoft is now working to connect its cloud and other divisions to multiple metaverse experiences to enable consumers and businesses to build rich applications.

Microsoft’s Metaverse Business

Microsoft aims to bring more users into the metaverse, actively investing in providing the tools to make it a long-term reality. Ihsan Anabtawi explained that this is not just a trend for the company. He stated:

This is not a short-term investment, but bringing the full power of our work in several areas to enable the future of computing in the metaverse for businesses and consumers.

Part of this commitment to the metaverse is related to the company’s headset offering, the Hololens 2, which will allow other companies to produce holographic prototypes instead of physical ones, and to perform different calculations for, say, product design before mass production. In this sense, Microsoft’s cloud division would provide the analytics, data and artificial intelligence needed for this task as part of its backend.

On the consumer side, Microsoft has also been active. In November, the company launched Mesh, a metaverse feature for its Teams app that allows the use of digital avatars on calls. Microsoft is also involved in setting metaverse standards as part of the Metaverse Standard Forumlaunched in June.