Building Partner Success on Microsoft Cloud for Retail

What you will learn

• Microsoft Cloud for Retail creates the foundation to build and implement the retail solutions for success.
• What Partners must understand how to create successful offerings for their retail customers.
• How Microsoft encourages partners to bridge the gap between Microsoft’s core retail offerings and customer requirements.
• Understanding the role of a coherent Partner business model.
• How to improve your odds of success by building your business to provide services for customers.
• Why Digital transformation can be the difference between business success and failure.

One of the most important lessons from the pandemic of 2020 is businesses that embrace and plan for digital enhancement survive and perform better than those without a digital presence. The cycle of lockdowns and restrictions meant that, for some businesses, digital transformation initiatives needed to be implemented immediately. In the restaurant and retail industries, digital became the difference between a survival strategy or possibly closing the doors forever.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail lays the foundation for retailers by giving them specific capabilities across the Microsoft Solutions Areas stack. It does this by tying together the capabilities, customizations, and standards to give retail establishments the components they need to deliver automation, better understand their customers, power flexible and resilient supply chains, empower employees, and incorporate specific workflows.

Microsoft is noted for leveraging the specialized knowledge and skills of Partners to provide a bridge between their services and customers. Microsoft handles common data models, cross Cloud connectors, workflows, APIs, and other components and standards specific to the retail industry. Customers work directly with Partners to implement a retail Cloud solution customized to precisely meet their needs.

Partners can ensure their customers’ retail digital transformation is successful and optimized for business success.

Partners Enhance Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Think of a Partner as the connection that understands what the customer needs to understand what is needed from the breadth of retail Cloud services. The job of a Partner is to assist a customer to migrate to the retail Cloud, customize it for the customer’s business, and support that customer in their ongoing digital transformation efforts. To put it succinctly, Microsoft provides the tools, standards, and support to partners who then build on that foundation, to develop solutions to meet customer needs.

Partners begin by understanding the workflows and data models of their customer’s retail needs. Customers often migrate to the Cloud from existing on-premise and legacy solutions; Partners can dive into those applications and their associated databases to help the customer negotiate the complex task of moving those functions to the retail Cloud.

Partners can address an enormous variety of customer concerns, including:

• What needs to be done about legacy applications that must remain operational?
• How is the data moved to the Cloud?
• What is to be done about heavily siloed data?
• What customizations does a customer need?
• How does the retail Cloud interface with the applications of outside supply chain vendors and distributors?
• What are the timings for each of the workflows?
• What workflows need high-availability, disaster recovery, and so forth?
• What are the specific security requirements for each of the workflows and data?
• Are there specific privacy requirements that must be followed?

The role of a Partner is to help the client navigate through these and hundreds of other questions and concerns. Customers depend on their Partner to give them the right answers and help them through the digital transformation without disruption.

There is a huge opportunity for retail Partners to add value to the retail Cloud because Microsoft can’t do everything, and they don’t want to do it all. Microsoft’s strength is in developing solutions and creating opportunities for Partners to help customers with their specific needs.

Simply put, Microsoft provides the base toolset upon which a partner builds the customized solution for their client using their unique knowledge of the environment, needs, workflows, data, standards, and regulatory requirements of their customer.

Partners Must Build a Vertical Cloud Business Model

To take advantage of the opportunities introduced by Microsoft in the retail Cloud space, it’s important to review your strengths to determine your best strategy. The concept is to create a unique value proposition, or story, combining Microsoft with the Partner eco-system.

How do you do this? Here are some considerations:

• Understand your sweet spots.
• Consider what is your experience, skills, and training.
• Have a clear view on what motivates you and your team.
• Develop a view on the market opportunity within the vertical Cloud that helps your customers.

Make sure your offerings are well aligned with Microsoft and customer needs. After all, you don’t want to go to all the trouble of creating an organization to fulfill a need and then find out there’s not a market for it or that Microsoft doesn’t support it.

Open the various components of the Microsoft retail Cloud such as Azure, Power Platform, Dynamics 365 and so forth, and deliver targeted solutions that take advantage of those to provide great service to customers.

A good place to begin is to look at what you do today and compare it to what you can do using Microsoft Cloud for Retail. Add these to your offerings to give your business a competitive edge over other partners. This will help you convince your customers that you are right for them because you can offer them solutions that work for them.

It is vital that as a Partner you understand what the customer wants and needs from the retail Cloud platform. For example, if they want to use e-commerce, then you must onboard dynamics in e-commerce and then customize it. Once you’ve done that, you can personalize it for your customer by adding branding and so forth.

From all these inputs, create a business model describing what services you deliver and how you intend to provide them. Create a profile of your ideal customer and use that to define your market. This profile helps you identify the candidates for your services and products. Without the customer profile, you are shooting in the dark and your promotion efforts are likely to fail.

Partner Opportunities for Microsoft Cloud for Retail

As Microsoft Partner, your business model should incorporate the following three capabilities across the end-to-end retail value chain:

Foundational Retail Insights. Extend the value of the Cloud platform. Help retailers gain insights across their journey using human workflows, business process workflows, and data and AI workflows.

Develop Partner Offerings & Solutions. Build or improve your SaaS or PaaS solutions and extend and connected experiences throughout the retail value chain. These should use Microsoft Cloud capabilities as the foundation and build upon them by using APIs or deep integration.

Unlock Service Opportunities. For services by deploying and connecting the Microsoft retail Cloud with other core retail systems. Democratize data and create a modern data estate. Where possible, bring data together across siloed systems, harmonizing and co-mingling it with data throughout the retail operating echo system.

Partner Success Phased Approach

Microsoft stresses four different parts of the retail Cloud journey. These are built on top of Microsoft Cloud platforms that include Dynamics 365, Azure, Power Platform, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Advertising. As a Partner, you measure success by deploying the underlying dependent technologies and the solution packages. You also build on and extend the core Cloud capabilities using retail specific applications and platforms with a four-phase approach:

Deployment & Customization. Get the customer into the retail Cloud. This is the onboarding phase of the project. For the most part, it’s not out-of-the-box because there are always customizations that need to be done.

Integrate Partner Offerings. Ensure your offerings are deeply integrated into the Microsoft Cloud for Retail. This should be a seamless integration such that customers never know where your offering ends and Microsoft’s core components begin.

Expansion & Partner Solution Interoperability. At this point, facilitate interoperability between your solution and the retail Cloud.

Evangelize Value. Strategically evangelize the value of the partnership and business success to senior customer executives.

Remember to build your business model to inspire and add value by working closely with your customer and keep them at the forefront of technology. Keep the platform current and make sure that they remain competitive using the appropriate technologies.

However, remember that digital transformation is more than technology, it also comprises people and processes–so offer your clients help in these areas as well. People will need to be trained and must adjust to the new technologies and workflows. Processes will change, and these must be evaluated, tested, and implemented. People come first, processes second, and technology third. Work on these three concepts together to help your client succeed with their digital transformation efforts.

Remember that you are a partner with the customer. Keep your customer’s best interest in mind and always work towards what is best for the customer. The goal is to improve the business of the customer so that they remain competitive in the marketplace and have new and more powerful opportunities to succeed. By keeping this at the forefront of your mind, you will gain long-term customers–their success is your success.

Use Cases

Let’s look at a few use cases to help clarify how partners can add value to the Microsoft Cloud for Retail offerings.

Migrating to the Cloud. One straightforward use case is to help a customer migrate their existing systems to the Azure Cloud. Some can directly migrate several application systems while others may need to remain on legacy on premise systems for time until they can be converted. This can happen with older, obsolete operating systems and hardware.

Connections to legacy systems. Legacy systems present a special case in that it may not be possible to migrate them to the Cloud, or even if it is, the operating system and applications may be obsolete. Partners can specialize in building connections such as ETLs and database links as needed to keep the legacy systems operational.

Adding functionality. Some customers may need extensions to the Microsoft Cloud for Retail core. They might need a fully operational fraud detection system, specialized inventory control, or interfacing to a POS system.

Personalization. Partners can personalize the retail Cloud for their customer by adding branding and other unique features. Additionally, they can tune personalization and add new personalized features for the consumers who use e-commerce system. Some customers may want fully functional, very personalized systems and others may want minimal personalization.

Inventory management. Help your customers build a resilient supply chain by creating a smarter fulfillment operation that uses artificial intelligence and real-time data to achieve optimum stock levels.

Microsoft advertising and digital ads. Many customers want to take advantage of the Microsoft advertising and digital ads components. These require customization for each individual client.

Demand generation. Marketing is extremely important for most businesses. Demand generation is not just lead generation; instead, it consists of a gradual and comprehensive process for marketing departments to funnel audiences that are receptive to the brand to the business. Businesses have often built specialized demand generation applications or have specialized requirements leveraging Partners for their expertise to meet these needs.

Conclusions

Microsoft Cloud for Retail offers many exciting capabilities for retail establishments to digitally transform their businesses. Developing digital transformation strategies will enable greater opportunities for success in the fast-changing marketplace of today. Partners help bridge the gap between the Microsoft core offerings and can meet customer needs for success.

Partners must carefully examine their own competencies, goals, and skill sets to align this to the needs of customers. Understanding customers and combining this with the knowledge of your own value-added proposition, you can select and gain retail customers to help them succeed in digitally transforming their business.

Microsoft is encouraging Partners to bridge the gap between Microsoft core Cloud retail offerings and customer requirements. The Partner ecosystem is fully supported and encouraged by Microsoft, so Partners should take advantage of the opportunity to provide the best quality service to their customers.