2020 has been a year of many firsts. From a business perspective, the last one year alone accelerated digital transformation faster than the last decade. For many businesses this acceleration was a response to urgent needs to address unique situation which demanded remote work, remote service, eCommerce or resilient supply chains.

As we step out of pandemic, the changed culture and expectation both from employees and customers, is going to cause specific business model shifts unique to each industry. Tech Adoption in this new world will not be about simply reacting to a situation, but a thoughtful business and capability led approach to fuel innovation by taking advantage of technology. The success in this will be dependent on our ability to trust the technology, the people and the business model. This is what Microsoft calls Tech Intensity.

For specific industry verticals, as they embrace digital transformation coupled with Tech Intensity, there is a need for specific purpose built solutions and optimization. The fundamental imperatives around which each industry vertical is taking decisions to transform is either creating new customer experiences, empowering employees, optimizing operations OR transforming products. The demand is to be able to achieve this faster, with agility and efficiently. The approaches fundamentally differ in the uniqueness of data and its flow within an industry vertical. So tech platforms offering industry specific ready workflows, data models , compliances and APIs are great accelerators.

Microsoft is empowering exactly this via unique industry cloud offerings. With the recent announcements, Microsoft now has five such cloud platforms : Microsoft Cloud of Retail, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and Microsoft Cloud for Non Profits.

Each of this offering cohesively brings together different Microsoft Tech Capabilities like Microservices Architectures, Databases, Analytics, Cognitive Services, Dynamics 365, Office 365 , Security underpinned by industry specific data models, connectors and accelerators. The platform construct is modular and extensible, which means as a customer you have choice of adopting as you transform and grow. It also empowers the extensive Microsoft partner ecosystem to build differentiated industry solutions on top of each cloud to help customer realize value faster. You can know more about it here What’s Next for Industry (microsoft.com)

I urge each one of you to explore the unique capabilities available like Loan Management for Financial Services, Multichannel Fulfilment for Retail, Virtual Health and many more. If these interest you, if you wish to use OR enhance any of these ready capabilities with the state of the art security and extensibility, Microland can help.