Industry clouds have been a major focus area for Microsoft. The recent announcement from Microsoft on the General Availability of Microsoft cloud for financial services was much anticipated. In this post I will focus on my favorite – Microsoft cloud for Retail.
What does an industry cloud offer to business/clients? What are the tangible tools, solutions that are in a box? How can partners deliver value to clients through an industry cloud?
When I look at Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google cloud, I think of them as massive virtual worlds in which businesses of all sizes are setting up shop. If we were to extend that analogy to industry clouds then we could say that an industry cloud is equivalent to planned development city or a blueprint city.
For example a retail cloud or blueprint city tries to make the life of a retail business better by providing a set of products and solutions that help retail organizations. These tools and products allow businesses to easily collect massive amount of data that is generated through retail lifecycle processes, view customer analytics to better understand their customers, empower their employees, and make fast paced intelligent decisions.
The cloud is a great equalizer, it gives small businesses the scale and agility at a fraction of cost. Industry cloud solution adds an additional layer of features and functionality focused towards that particular industry. Microsoft cloud for retail for example enhances the existing ecommerce and brick and mortar POS solution of retail business by adding capabilities like an AI powered recommendations and ratings application, AI powered fraud protection application, and Business 2 Business commerce model.
If you are a business, should you be looking at Industry cloud solutions seriously? The answer is yes indeed. Adopting an industry cloud not only allows you to modernize and transform your business in a short period, but also gives you access to the network of partners who are working together to enhance this industry cloud.
Finally getting to the point – what is in Microsoft cloud for Retail?
Here are the list of solutions in Retail cloud from Microsoft
- D365 Commerce: D365 Commerce is an omnichannel commerce solution that provides all components of a retail solution to manage your brick and motor stores and your online stores. Solution components include POS software, hardware station, retail headquarters product to manage products, stores, POS devices. It also enables you to deploy a fully functional ecommerce website. The omnichannel experience enables you to provide functionality like buy online and pickup in store. The ecommerce site also provides B2B commerce to manage your distributors and partners who are selling on your behalf.
- Ratings and review service: Azure AI powered solution allows displaying related products/services and manage feedback and interaction with consumers, automated moderation
- D365 Fraud Protection: Protecting your online instore transactions, logins through an Azure AI powered fraud protection service
- D365 Intelligent Order Management: D365 Commerce + Teams integration to enable multichannel fulfillment and seamless customer experience
- Teams: Multiple apps built on top of teams that enhance employee productivity through features like, shift tracking, tasks management, vacation requests, walkie-talkie
- Intune: Shared device setup based on employee login
- D365 Connected Store: Dynamics PowerApp to manage store security, foot traffic analytics, setup display aisles in store and measure the effectiveness of the location/position
- D365 Omnichannel for Customer Service: Serves as a single interaction point for your customers. Customers can reach you via chat, SMS, social channels, portals. Not certain if this is included out of the box in retail cloud but is a great solution for managing customer interaction
- D365 Customer Insights: Unifies your customer data from across multiple channels to provide AI powered insights into your customer behavior
- D365 Supply Chain Management: Microsoft’s enterprise ERP solution to manage supply chain, and manufacturing. Allows you to manage inventory, products, warehouses, manufacturing process and works seamless with D365 Commerce to meet your end to end consumer needs.
In subsequent blog posts, I will walk through each of the above solution components in detail plus some of the emerging trends in the retail space and how the Microsoft cloud for retail aims to help businesses implement these trends.
Vishy 