Microsoft kicked off this week with the Convergence 2015 conference for its business customers, where the company announced the availability of new products and services, inlcuding Skype for businesses, Office 2016 preview and PowerBI. Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft, demonstrated products and services built by Microsoft for industries, organizations and individuals, to drive insight and action from their data.

Microsoft Azure IoT Suite is an integrated offering that takes advantage of all the relevant Azure capabilities, to help businesses connect, manage and analyze all of their "things." Available in preview later this year, this new offering will provide businesses with finished applications targeting common Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios - such as remote monitoring, asset management and predictive maintenance — to simplify deployment and provide the ability to scale their solution to millions of "things" over time. Currently in preview, Azure Stream Analytics will be generally available next month as part of Azure IoT or as a standalone service. C

Microsoft also announced that Windows 10 will provide versions of Windows for a diverse set of IoT devices, under the Windows 10 IoT moniker. Windows 10 IoT will offer one Windows platform with universal applications and driver models that will span a wide range of devices, from low-footprint controllers such as IoT gateways to devices such as ATMs and industrial robotics. Windows 10 IoT will also bring enterprise-grade security from the device to the cloud and native connectivity for machine-to-machine and machine-to-cloud scenarios with Azure IoT services.

First unveiled in January, the new and improved Power BI is a cloud-based (software-as-a-service) business analytics service for non-technical business users. With a browser or a Power BI mobile app, customers can visualize and analyze their data with accessible tools. New Power BI connectors, dashboards and reports for some of the industry’s most popular data sources — including Google Analytics, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, Zuora, Acumatica and Twilio — will be available soon. Power BI is now available in the U.S. and more than 140 markets around the world.

Microsoft said that the Spring ’15 release for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, expected by the end of the second quarter of 2015, will deliver performance enhancements, deepen interoperability with Office 365, and with new knowledge management enhancements, improve collaboration between businesses. The release also introduces Microsoft Social Engagement, the latest update to Microsoft’s social monitoring tool designed to enable people to monitor and engage in the context of their Dynamics CRM and/or Office application.

Office Delve, now globally available, uses machine learning techniques to help people discover relevant documents, conversations and connections from across Office 365.

Announced a year ago with the code name Oslo, Delve is the first application built for Office 365's Office Graph machine learning engine. It's designed to analyze how people work on Office 365 and automatically make relevant data on colleagues and content easily accessible. It does this by linking to content via card icons in a dashboard interface.

Microsoft also announced that Delve is gaining the ability to analyze content within Exchange Online email attachments. The application will also soon be able to access content from the Yammer enterprise social network, as well as allow users to perform Yammer actions from within the Delve interface.

The company announced the IT Professional and Developer Preview of Office 2016, a key milestone for the next version of Office on the Windows desktop. Office 2016 is expected to be generally available in the second half of this year.

Skype for Business (previously Microsoft Lync) technical preview starts Monday, and the new Skype for Business client, server and service within Office 365 will be available starting in April. Skype for Business delivers an enterprise-ready voice and video collaboration experience based on the familiar Skype user interface, including the ability for Skype for Business customers to connect with anyone in the Skype network.

Microsoft also today released a preview of Office 2016 for Windows, making the sneak peak available only to subscribers of its business-grade Office 365 plans.

Like its predecessor Office 2013, "Office 2016 Preview (for Business)" requires Windows 7 and later.

Office 2016 Preview includes Access, Excel, Lync, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher and Word.

Although the focus is clearly on Office 365 subscribers, Microsoft has promised that it will also offer perpetual-licensed versions, those that are paid for once, then used as long as desired. Office 365 subscribers will be able to upgrade to Office 2016 as part of their plans.

Office 2016 will be the standard desktop suite, and is separate from (and different than) Office for Windows 10, the touch-enabled versions of Excel, Word and PowerPoint targeting tablets and touchscreen-equipped PCs.