The pandemic has forced organizations to become more agile and adapt quickly to changing market dynamics. Gartner’s research found that over two-thirds of corporate directors accelerated their digital business initiatives during 2020 and plan to increase their spend on IT and technology by an average of 6.9%. Operational flexibility has been – and will continue to be – a significant differentiator. According to the Institute for Supply Management, 97% of US businesses have been or will be impacted by   supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic.

It’s highly significant, therefore, that Microsoft has just announced that the next phase of its industry cloud program will include financial services, manufacturing and the non-profit sector, in addition to its earlier announcements regarding their Health Cloud and Retail Cloud. We see this as an unparalleled opportunity for clients to continue to accelerate their digital transformation, especially around operational flexibility and scale, retiring legacy systems and driving more personalized customer engagement. Microsoft’s industry clouds will offer a highly differentiated and tailored approach relevant to each industry, with the unique opportunity to bring the power of their entire platform to drive value to their, and our, clients.

Bringing your business strategy to life

As the leading Microsoft global systems integrator, complemented by Accenture’s deep strategic industry insights and scale, Avanade regards the Microsoft industry-specific cloud platforms as an essential component to bring your business strategy to life. In fact, it’s a key element of resetting your organization to ensure it’s positioned for continual and rapid change. This includes reining in your disparate digital initiatives and rethinking how your business will grow.

How will this industry cloud approach impact on each of the five sectors highlighted above?

Health: We focus on improving care, enhanced patient engagement, and deeper clinical and operational insights using cloud platforms as part of our approach. Our work with Johns Hopkins and the Robert Packard Center for ALS Research used cloud computing, AI, machine learning, an enormous amount of patient data, and a powerful, interactive data infrastructure to determine what causes ALS and identify potential treatments.

Financial Services: Banks have acknowledged the need for greater operational flexibility during the pandemic, especially when coping with spikes in customer demand. We’ve developed our Banking Accelerator, built on Microsoft Dynamics 365, Azure and Power BI, to speed up customer engagement through AI. We’ve helped clients such as AIB and Zurich use cloud platforms to improve employee experience and customer management.

Manufacturing: We’re working with clients to go beyond Industry 4.0 digitalization to enhance both worker and workplace, drive core resilience and enable agile, innovative production. A good example is the work we did with a consortium of manufacturers to produce 20 years’ of medical ventilators for the UK’s National Health Service – in just 12 weeks.

Retail: We’re passionate about helping retailers inspire customers and create better experiences for their employees. At Subway, the world’s largest restaurant chain with over 40,000 outlets in 100+ countries, we introduced a new digital loyalty program, MyWay Rewards, and increased membership by 10 times compared to their previous legacy platform.

Nonprofit:  At Avanade, our purpose is to make a genuine human impact. Through our Tech for Social Good partnership with Microsoft we help nonprofits fulfill their missions through digital transformation. By using Microsoft’s cloud capabilities and building on its common data model for nonprofits we’ve built unique, relevant and repeatable solutions for clients.

As you can see, these industry solutions are core to how Avanade, Microsoft and Accenture are applying the power of Microsoft Azure to help clients accelerate digital adoption and transformation. For more details, please contact us today.