My favorite customer stories of 2017
I’m fortunate that my job allows me the opportunity to see amazing stories play out every day. With the strong support of my team, our customers and partners are in a constant cycle of innovation, producing new solutions to old problems, or creating entirely new ways of doing business.
The start of any new year is a time to look back at the year that has finished, and 2018 is no exception. I’d like to share just a few of the stories that stood out to me as I thought about the past year.
PGA pro teaches through technology
If you know me personally, you know how much I love a good round of golf. In the middle of a Pacific Northwest winter, however, there’s not much of a chance to play a round. For many Washingtonians like me, we’re lucky to have a resource like Gregg Rogers Golf Performance Centers to stay sharp through the rainy months.
With the help of Microsoft partner Taqtile, Gregg Rogers Golf Performance Centers built a custom app that allows instructors to not just watch and review a golfer’s swing, but to provide deep analysis and even compare their student with other users of the app.
“Ultimately, we’re not a technology company,” says the namesake owner. “We’re a golf improvement facility, a small business that happens to specialize in getting people to have fun. Microsoft provides the technology that we use to help our customers have more fun on the golf course—and take our business to the next level.”
Deep partnerships unlock power of scale
With millions of professionals using its Creative Cloud services, Adobe has long shaped the digital experience of multimedia. But they wanted to take the next step, connecting that multimedia content to user engagement with the Adobe Experience Cloud.
In March 2017, Adobe Experience Cloud became available on Azure, integrated with Dynamics 365 and Power BI. This gave users access to the global infrastructure, security, data analytics, and AI capabilities of Azure, and the connected experience with Dynamics 365 that powers integrated sales and marketing.
To me, strategic partnerships like Microsoft’s with Adobe prove that the whole can be more than the sum of its parts. On their own, our technologies are impressive. But together, they’re transformative.
A trusted partner helps bring intelligence to data
Onboard a massive cruise ship, thousands of sensors are collecting data in real time – meaning companies like Carnival Cruises can wind up overwhelmed, with more raw data than they know what to do with. To make sense of this array of information, they turned to a trusted partner experienced with analytical and predictive solutions, Arundo Analytics.
They took on a big challenge: Keeping track of the water onboard the ship (I assume the navigation team had a handle on the water underneath the ship). Some variables impacting water usage are predictable, like the cleaning and laundry schedule. Others, like the length of a passenger’s shower, are less so. This means the ship may burn resources producing water at sea, or holding onto water that’s ultimately unneeded.
Using the data collection infrastructure already in place, Arundo built a microservice on Azure that uses historical data about the ship and its passengers, real-time data from the infrastructure already in place, and historical weather data to predict how much water will be needed for any given route, saving more than $200,000 a year – per ship.
Partnering for R&D excellence in life sciences
Health and life sciences is probably the industry most ripe for digital transformation. Health care is complex and multifaceted – two challenges cloud technology excels at addressing.
I was proud to work on a strategic partnership with PAREXEL Informatics that we announced in October. Bringing a new treatment to patients requires extensive work – biopharmaceutical companies need to conduct clinical trials, control and share data, track and report patient outcomes, manage regulatory information around the world, and capture real-world evidence that the treatment works. Patients also need to be engaged throughout the process, and confident that their personal health data is secure.
PAREXEL’s integrated solutions help optimize this process, and our partnership with them will accelerates it. We’re working together to bring new therapies to patients sooner, while maintaining our shared commitment to security and regulatory compliance. By combining the power and security of our cloud services with PAREXEL’s deep domain expertise, together we can develop innovative, patient-centric technologies that bring research breakthroughs to life.
Taking technology from obstacle to opportunity
When Hurricane Irma battered the southeast United States this fall, Atlanta lost power for two days, and the national headquarters of the Boys & Girls Clubs remained closed for business. But 4,300+ club locations in cities and on military bases across the nation continued their work to support local young people.
This wasn’t always possible. Just a few years ago, all the organization’s data was stored on a server in that Atlanta office. But now that they’ve moved to Azure, they have 24/7 access – no matter what’s happening on the ground.
The move to Azure is part of an organizationwide digital transformation, allowing Boys & Girls Clubs to move past the obstacles presented by their legacy IT infrastructure into new areas of opportunity. One of those new opportunities is MyFuture.net.
MyFuture.net is a new platform powered by Dynamics and hosted on Azure, offering 125 online activities for club members, including computer science, digital art, leadership, and animation. With more than 11,000 users across the nation, this is just one of the ways Boys & Girls Clubs makes a difference every day.