The latest wave of innovation in Microsoft Industry Cloud
This is an exciting time of year for Microsoft Industry Cloud as we continue our commitment to helping every organization use technology to accelerate their digital transformation and build organizational resilience. Advances in technology, including recent work in AI and large language models, are creating a new world of innovation that will shape how organizations function, serve, and optimize digital transformation. Our Industry Cloud solutions are focused to enable customers and partners to adapt to the changing landscape across industries and geographies. Here is a look at what we have recently delivered as well as a preview of what is coming in the months ahead.
Microsoft Cloud for Retail
Retail is one of the most agile and innovative industries. With ever-evolving consumer demands and shifting supply chains, successful retailers are characteristically adaptable and resilient. Microsoft Cloud for Retail helps retailers accelerate innovation with industry-specific solutions that enable them to maximize the value of their data. Our primary focus of this wave is offering solutions for retailers to provide engaging shopping experiences while empowering store associates to be more productive and customer-focused. In this release, Microsoft Cloud for Retail continues to invest in both Smart Store Analytics and Store Operations with customer-requested features and additional AI and machine learning-based capabilities.
Microsoft Cloud for Retail’s Smart Store Analytics solution provides insights on store performance using anonymized data of store transactions and shoppers’ in-store journeys. Store managers see KPIs, data visualizations, and data science models that help them monitor store performance and make data-driven decisions for optimizing store performance. Working with AiFi, the largest provider of autonomous shopping solutions, we have enabled an end-to-end autonomous store solution. AiFi’s camera-only technology, running on Microsoft Azure, captures anonymized data throughout the shopper’s journey in real-time. Computer vision tracks shopper actions and enables frictionless checkout. In addition to enabling frictionless checkout, this solution helps retailers further improve customer experiences by understanding:
- How customers interact with the products on the shelves.
- How shoppers react to promotions and communications.
- What they choose to take off the shelf and purchase.
With this release, we are adding additional AI and machine learning based insights around product recommendations and foot traffic analysis, to add to existing models and visualizations that are helping store operators optimize store layout, product catalog, and shelf placement for peak performance.
With Store Operations Assist, store associates can be more productive and engage more meaningfully with customers. The application provides employees with the ability to conduct typical business processes such as inventory counts, stock audits, store walks, shift change checks, incident reporting, and safety audits. Associates can also view and use customer insights to schedule follow-up consultations. Store managers can digitally review and provide feedback, support associates, and see their store’s performance. With this release, we are enabling additional features like tablet support, branching logic for survey responses, and enhanced integration with Microsoft Teams front line worker apps.
Azure Data Manager for Agriculture (preview)
Azure Data Manager for Agriculture (preview) helps enable a more sustainable future and a more productive agriculture industry by empowering organizations to drive innovation through insights, reduce their environmental impact, optimize agriculture operations, and build trust rooted in transparency. With access to data and insights from the farm, organizations can drive harvest and production efficiency, reduce food waste, create nutrient-dense and high-quality products, automate and improve environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and Scope 3 emissions reporting, and provide transparency to stakeholders.
Azure Data Manager for Agriculture (preview) extends the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform with industry-specific data connectors and capabilities to connect farm data from disparate sources, enabling organizations to leverage high-quality datasets and accelerate the development of digital agriculture solutions. Instead of devoting resources to managing unstructured data, customers and partners can focus on product innovation with the ability to reason over readily available and abundant data. Furthermore, organizations can use in-house, third-party, or Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform services to speed the path to analytics and business intelligence solutions. With a connected ecosystem of partners building solutions on top of Azure Data Manager for Agriculture (preview), this is another step towards a connected and collaborative agriculture industry.
With the current wave, we are delivering one-step geospatial and temporal indexing capabilities enabling customers and partners to easily integrate non-harmonized farm machinery activity data from different sources. In addition, the Azure Data Manager for Agriculture (preview) now includes integration of Climate Field View™ by Bayer. Partners like Bayer have used Azure Data Manager for Agriculture to shift from a self-managed data estate to a managed model with Microsoft. The Climate Field View platform harnesses data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture’s satellite and weather pipelines to enable insights on potential yield-limiting factors in growers’ fields. Our strategic partnership, leverages Bayer’s industry knowledge-as well as data connectors, models, transformations, and workflows-to inform how we strengthen Azure Data Manager for Agriculture and empower organizations to address the challenges in agriculture today. Furthermore, we are improving time to value by enhancing the Azure portal experience for developers and system administrators.
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
With this release, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare continues the development of features that enable patient-centric operating models to ease the burden on providers and help facilitate proactive healthcare. Our healthcare customers and partners are a key part of our development of solutions for providers and payors. We have landed and continued to iterate on several impactful capabilities in this wave: Patient journeys, care management, and virtual health data tables.
Optimizing each touchpoint in a patient’s experience can help providers improve patient satisfaction, retention, and loyalty, while payors can address efficiencies and the return on investment of their health plans. Patient journeys in Patient Outreach enable health organizations to orchestrate trigger-based workflows across patient touchpoints to automate repetitive tasks and allow patients to get personalized care faster.
Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare has also developed solutions and data integration capabilities for health organizations to make it easier for them to provide care anywhere. Our aim is to make it easier for caregivers to access and track patients’ vitals and to gain early insights into patient conditions. Device data support for care management (preview) uses the MedTech service in Azure Health Data Services to normalize data from diverse medical devices and convert it into the fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) format in a secure way.
Additionally, we are improving the time to value with updates to Virtual Health Data Tables (general availability) to include support for the create, update, and delete FHIR operations. Utilizing this functionality, customers can perform updates to FHIR resource data on the remote FHIR service directly from within Microsoft Power Platform. This enables health customers to leverage the Microsoft no-code and low-code Power Platform to build health applications, simplifying the complexities of the FHIR standard. Learn more about our current and upcoming Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare release.
We have also expanded collaboration with Cognizant to integrate Cognizant’s TriZetto healthcare products. With this integration, we aim to improve efficiency and help customers achieve significantly shorter time-to-value with enhanced patient and member engagement, improved data interoperability, and improved insights. Together we will also develop and run Cognizant’s current and future healthcare software as a service (SaaS) solution on Microsoft Azure, migrate new and existing clients from on-premises environments to streamlined functions managed on the Microsoft Cloud, and support future technologies designed to deliver new insights for payers, providers, and consumers
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability continues to empower organizations in their sustainability efforts across our solutions which streamline data ingestion, integration, calculations, reporting, and more. Our offering also includes Environmental Credit Service (preview), bringing efficiency, trust, and transparency to voluntary ecological markets. We continue to extend our data story with the availability of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability API (preview) which allows organizations to get emissions data for extensibility and customization for solutions and reporting.
This also extends our Scope 3 category calculations for the GHG Protocol, including providing reporting on the following Scope 3 categories:
- Scope 3 category 3: Fuel and energy-related activities not included in Scope 1 or Scope 2.
- Scope 3 category 12 (included in a previous release): End-of-life treatment of sold products.
Additionally, our joint solution with Ecolab, a global sustainability leader in water, hygiene, and infection prevention, combines the power of the ECOLAB3D™ digital platform with Microsoft Sustainability Manager. With this solution, organizations are able to monitor and manage water data so they can gain greater visibility into how they are tracking against water and sustainability goals.
Another highlight is our expanded set of emission factors which now includes the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra). Defra emission factors are used by the United Kingdom and other international organizations for reporting greenhouse gas emissions, which help organizations to maintain compliance with industry standards and regulatory requirements.
Lastly, data capture (preview) helps organizations train and use optical character recognition (OCR) models for processing and ingesting Scope 2 purchased energy invoices to differentiate between energy providers. Data capture uses Microsoft Power Platform’s AI Builder and document intelligence solutions. With this, organizations can now create a seamless workstream to ingest data from within Microsoft Sustainability Manager to use in calculations and reporting.
We are committed to helping our customers meet the needs of new ESG demands and markets and are actively working to extend reporting and sustainability solutions to do so. More updates are coming soon about expanded data management capabilities.
Azure Data Manager for Energy
Azure Data Manager for Energy is a secure, reliable, hyperscale, fully managed cloud-based data platform solution that supports a wide variety of energy solutions compatible with OSDU™ Date Platform. This solution addresses the challenge of data—moving from disparate systems and disconnected applications to a holistic approach. Azure Data Manager for Energy is designed to help organizations get more value from their data by scaling ingestion and data enrichment, providing easy interoperability, and unlocking self-serve data analytics capabilities. The open Microsoft platform enables developers, data managers, and geoscientists alike to innovate the next generation of digital solutions for the energy industry.
Since its preview, the team has addressed multiple customer feedback items that can be seen on the release notes page. Customers can look forward to another heavily requested feature that will allow for scenarios including testing, training, and evaluation of Azure Data Manager for Energy or specific OSDU™ Data Platform features. This will be released as a separate “Developer” Tier in the coming weeks.
Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services
Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services continues to invest in delivering capabilities to manage financial services data at scale and make it easier for financial services institutions to improve customer experience, coordinate engagement, and drive operational efficiency. This wave focuses on strengthening offerings in banking, cross-vertical experiences, and financial services data models. We are prioritizing providing customers and partners with more flexibility in meeting their specific needs through componentization. The components offer individual deployment and configuration capabilities for customer onboarding, document processing, and in how customer financial information is represented. We will enable flexible adaptation of the UI to different scenarios, offer a wealth of tools for document processing and management using AI, and provide various endpoints for partner enablement in the process. We plan to improve the retail banking loan onboarding solution with the new document intelligence feature and offer additional flexibility enhancements as requested by our customers and partners.
In partnership with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, KX has released kdb Insights—a robust, integrated data management and time series streaming analytics solution for optimal real-time decisioning. Leverage the capabilities of kdb Insights running on a virtual machine to build and deploy highly performant, data-intensive applications. Kdb Insights allows developers to build real-time analytics with connectivity, tool, and infrastructure ease.
Global partner ecosystem
Our unique value proposition is our global ecosystem of partners. These partners create tailored solutions for organizations by developing connectors and continuing to build on top of our industry cloud offerings. Independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators, and advisory partners from every industry can extend the capabilities of our Microsoft Cloud for industries to meet the unique needs of customers across the globe. Trusted advisers like Accenture, Avanade, Capgemini, EY, KPMG, and PwC are helping organizations everywhere plan, design, and implement strategies and robust solutions to enable transformation across several industries including Healthcare, Sustainability, and Financial Services. Find a complete list of partners who are developing joint solutions built on our platform that deliver differentiated customer experiences, empower employees, and manage enterprise risk on AppSource and Azure Marketplace.
Learn more
Microsoft Industry Cloud continues to expand our offerings in the industry space. We continue to invest in clouds such as Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing.
Follow us on Industry Cloud blogs for industry-specific news and read more about what’s upcoming on our documentation pages.
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