The Record - Issue 9: Summer 2018

ISSUE 9: SUMMER 2018 £9.00

Cultivating tomorrow’s enterprise Making the shift from ‘process first’ to ‘culture first’

PLUS:

Why microservices enable a seamless omnichannel retail experience How artificial intelligence is transforming the media industry Gavriella Schuster explains how Microsoft is renewing its commitment to partners

Janet Lewis outlines Microsoft’s vision to empower financial firms to transform

The technology that is helping to create a new manufacturing landscape

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Š 2018 DXC Technology Company. All rights reserved.

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WELCOME: SUMMER 2018

The mindset to lead through digital transformation TO N I TO W N E S - W H I T L E Y : M I C R O S O F T

I

meet with customers and partners all over the world and am constantly amazed at the transformations they are driving with today’s technologies. And yet we are just beginning to realise the potential of technology, which increasingly challenges what we thought was possible – turning unsolvable challenges into opportunities that we can tackle together.

As we look at some of these emerging technologies and the potential that they represent for our society, it’s important to adopt the right growth mindset and to create the right learning cultures, where we work and where we live. It’s those individuals that approach each new day as a learning opportunity that will benefit most.

We know that the world is swimming in data. We are generating data about ourselves, our work, our society, every second of every day. Getting to a stage where you have meaningful data at your fingertips is a huge effort in and of itself. But just having the data does not lead to impact. And this is where public sector and commercial sector organisations are having to transform.

If we are to navigate and lead digital transformation successfully, we need to ensure that our culture is ready to engage and learn in order to thrive. At Microsoft we’ve been charting our own digital transformation journey, and one of the big realisations was that we needed to focus on creating the right culture.

As increased levels of automation and intelligence take hold, we know that jobs will be replaced. However, we also know that new jobs will emerge, which map to the demands of new technologies and require more specialised skills around computer and internet literacy, familiarity with productivity software, and fluency using a wide range of digital devices.

As we look to empower our future generations of leaders and visionaries, we need to encourage people to reach beyond their education and capabilities, to apply a growth mindset. If we can spur natural curiosity, and not just raw skills, together we can achieve anything.

Toni Townes-Whitley is corporate vice president of Industry at Microsoft

3

need need room room to to breathe, breathe, could could we we live live under under the the sea? sea?

Underwater skyscrapers – Underwater skyscrapers – a dream our software could bring to life. a dream our software could bring to life.

Innovative thinkers everywhere use Innovative everywhere use INDUSTRY thinkers SOLUTION EXPERIENCES INDUSTRY SOLUTION EXPERIENCES from Dassault Systèmes to explore the from Dassault explorefrom the true impact of Systèmes their ideas.toInsights true impact ofworld their ideas.

Insights from the 3D virtual are helping to blur the virtual world are helping to blur the 3D boundaries between architecture the boundaries between architecture and marine engineering and may one and marine and may one day help us engineering create new cities at sea. day help us create new cities at sea.

How long before everyone can have How a sea long view?before everyone can have a sea view?

It takes a special kind of compass to understand It takes a special kind of compass to understand the present and navigate the future. the present and navigate the future.

3DS.COM/MARINE 3DS.COM/MARINE

CONTENTS ISSUE 9: SUMMER 2018

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PA R T N E R I N G FOR SUCCESS Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner organisation, tells us about the major changes Microsoft is making to the way it is working with partners.

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For pharmaceutical companies, the quality management is centered in laboratory processes but it really impacts all areas of business including planning, manufacturing, project management, production scheduling, and more.

Companies invest significant amounts of time, resources, and money to implement add-on solutions that ensure product excellence, cost control and compliance with stringent regulations.

Ready for Microsoft Dynamics for Opera 365 tions

AX for Pharma is really designed to help you comply with GMP regulations

Now you can address those challenges at a fraction of the cost you would expect, with effortless integration across your total operations system. Advanced Quality Management delivers a complete platform that works as a native part of Microsoft Dynamics AX and helps you drive results built on productivity and compliance.

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CONTENTS 3

WELCOME

1 2 M A R K E T W AT C H The latest news from Microsoft and its partners

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20

54 32

2 0 C O V E R S T O R Y

4 4 DevOps enters the boardroom

3 0 How to equip the workers of tomorrow

4 5 Achieving a competitive edge with automation

3 2 A powerful combination

4 6 A digital blueprint for IT support

3 4 Partnering for success

4 7 Reshaping process engineering and simulation

Cultivating tomorrow’s enterprise: how to adapt from ‘process first’ to ‘culture first’ Steven Armstrong from Blue Prism discusses true digital transformation

Angelique Mohring from GainX on how to address the challenges of transformation Gavriella Schuster tells us about Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner organisation

3 8 MaaS: turning theory into practice

Boris Karsch from Cubic Transportation Systems outlines the benefits of Mobility as a Service

4 0 AI: job creator or destroyer?

Angelique Mohring from GainX on how to address the challenges of transformation

4 2 How innovation drives digital

transformation Taras Young from CompanyNet explains what’s needed to get real results

4 3 A new era of intelligent transformation

Karl Redenbach from LiveTiles says a new mindset is needed to succeed with AI

Mary Robbins from Redgate Software explains how DevOps is gaining ground

Alyssa Putzer From Metafile on the benefits of robotic process automation

Carol Rizio from DXC Technology says support must fit the way employees work Joseph McMullen from Aveva discusses the power of the cloud

4 8 Unlock the barriers to collaboration

Jeff Schumann from Wiretap on how to increase employee productivity

4 9 Fail fast and often

Corey Hynes from Learn On Demand Systems says failure should be an option

5 0 A smooth transition to Microsoft Teams

Anders Lokke from Pexip on managing the move from Skype for Business

5 1 Empowering Microsoft partners

Simon O’Carroll from Mercato Solutions on the benefits of low-code platforms

5 2 Create your own cloud ecosystem

Stamatis Barbounakis outlines the interworks.cloud platform

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CONTENTS 5 4 Office 365 tailor made Claranet’s Neil Thomas on the importance of training

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How to migrate DNS

successfully Magnus Bjornsson gives an overview of the Men & Mice software suite

56 U sing technology to help those with autism How UK charity Dimensions is succeeding with GCI technology

C O M M U N I C AT I O N S & M E D I A

8 6 How to transform insurance

processes DXC Technology’s Lori Murray says companies can enhance their existing IT

6 4 Transforming the media industry with AI What needs to be done to ensure industrywide success 6 8 Transforming media production in the cloud Avid’s Craig Dwyer on the benefits of cloud-based workflows 7 0 An easy way to integrate AI Steven Armstrong from Blue Prism on the role of a digital workforce platform

8 7 Is digital transformation so

hard to achieve?

Dionisis Poulis from Diastasys on the benefits of the cloud

8 8 Why insurers’ digital

strategies depend on the cloud Mike Dwyer from EIS Group explains

9 0 The power of UFE in banking

Özkan Erener from VeriPark discusses united front ends

9 2 Putting the platform first

5 8 Successful collaboration using video Why Arup has chosen software from Pexip 6 0 Adding value to Office 365 How Denk IT is succeeding with help from CodeTwo

7 1 In-flight entertainment made easy How StreamingBuzz’s BuzzOff solution is benefitting AirFi

Andrei Charniauski from Finastra on how pioneers are realising success

9 3 Protecting customer data

James Varga from The ID Co. on the impact of open banking

FINANCIAL SERVICES

7 4 Cloud-powered insurance

How Microsoft and its partners are enabling the shift 9 4 Optimising the invoicing

61 D on’t make security suffer The benefits of the Virtual Smart Card solution from Charismathics

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8 2 Accelerating digital

transformation Microsoft’s Janet Lewis on how finserv companies can transform

process Jon Rushton from Bottomline discusses the potential of machine learning

9 5 Same tune, different key

Stephen Hollands from Willis Towers Watson on underwriting risk

M A N U FA C T U R I N G & R E S O U R C E S

P U B L I C S E C TO R

1 3 2 Make omnichannel

work for you Blue Prism’s Steven Armstrong on meeting the ‘always-on’ expectation

9 8 A new manufacturing landscape

The transformations impacting the sector

1 0 6 Consolidating to improve

performance How DXC Eclipse is being used

by Schneider Electric

1 0 7 Augmenting reality

1 1 4 Connecting the cities of the future How civic leaders can do more with less 1 2 0 Keeping score with a datadriven jail Roy Minney from DXC Eclipse on how to better manage jails

modern manufacturers Dassault Systèmes on how digitalisation is revolutionising innovation

success Why stationery retailer Eason has chosen Episerver software

1 2 2 Taking a COTS approach Andrea Ruosi from AX for Pharma discusses commercial off the shelf software

F E AT U R E D PA R T N E R S

R E TA I L & H O S P I TA L I T Y

1 3 7 A selection of Microsoft

partners present their solutions

1 1 0 Creating a new smart

manufacturing culture Mike James from ATS Global on adopting a culture-first strategy

John Tsucalas from DXC Technology discusses the hub of the travel industry

1 3 5 Achieving omnichannel

Melissa Topp from ICONICS on the benefits of a combined solution

1 0 8 Game-changing approaches for

1 3 4 Airport of the future

THE LAST WORD

1 2 6 Breaking the retail monolith

How microservices can create a more personal retail experience

1 4 4 Anthony Bruce from PwC on

how to create a productive workplace

1 1 1 Transforming training with

simulation How Arizona Public Service is using tools from Schneider Electric

1 3 0 Microsoft: leading the way in

e-commerce Ed Kennedy from Episerver discusses Microsoft’s strong toolset

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ISSUE 9: SUMMER 2018 Executive editor Andy Clayton-Smith Editor Lindsay James

WHATEVER YOUR MARKETING NEEDS

Editorial team Rebecca Gibson, Jacqui Griffiths, Elizabeth Robinson Contributors Chris Ellen, Arup; Roy Salfarlie, Arup; Mike James, ATS Global; Joseph Mcmullen, AVEVA; Craig Dwyer Avid; Andrea Ruosi, AX for Pharma; Steven Armstrong, Blue Prism; Colin Redbond, Blue Prism; Jon Rushton, Bottomline Technologies; Kim Erbo Christensen, CDM; Samir Belkhayat, Cegid; John Hayes-Warren, Claranet; Neil Thomas, Claranet; Szymon Szczęśniak, CodeTwo; Andrew Taylor, Collabco; Johannes Petrowisch, COPA-DATA; Taras Young, CompanyNet; Boris Karsch, Cubic Transportation Systems; Axel Denk, Denk; Dionisis Poulis, Diastasys; Roy Minney, DXC Eclipse; Lori Murray, DXC Technology; Maria Pardee, DXC Technology; Carol Rizio, DXC Technology; John Tsucalas, DXC Technology; Michael Robinson, Eason; Mike Dwyer, EIS Group; Glenn Lim, EIS Group; Ed Kennedy, Episerver; Andrei Charniauski, Finastra; Angelique Mohring, GainX; Lorenzo Zanni, IABM; Melissa Topp, ICONICS; Stamatis Barbounakis, interworks.cloud; Pelli Papoulidou, interworks.cloud; Essam Makhlouf, ITWORX Education; Corey Hynes, Learn on Demand Systems; Karl Redenbach, LiveTiles; Matt Scott, Malong Technologies; Magnus Bjornsson, Men & Mice; Guy Finley, Media and Entertainment Services Alliance; Simon O’Carroll, Mercato Solutions; Paal Christian Myhre, Meshcrafts; Alyssa Putzer, Metafile Information Systems; Donovan Brown, Microsoft; Rainer Kellerhals, Microsoft; Janet Lewis, Microsoft; Vic Miles, Microsoft; Bill Moffett, Microsoft; Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft; Toni Townes-Whitley, Microsoft; Kat Willson, Microsoft; Dennis Vanderlip, Microsoft; Pat Renzi, Milliman; Anders Lokke, Pexip; Tuomo Parjanen, PayiQ; Philip Mercer, PowerON Platforms; Mary Robbins, Redgate Software; Magnus Engström, Saab Aeronautics; Amanda Moore, Schneider Electric; Stephan Visarius, Segment of One; Jon Vink, StreamingBuzz; James Varga, The ID Co; Özkan Erener, VeriPark; Stephen Hollands, Willis Towers Watson; Greg Moran, Wiretap; Jeff Schumann, Wiretap.

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PA R T N E R S

Microsoft is the world leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realise their full potential.

P U B L I S H I N G PA R T N E R S

AVEVA, recently combined with Schneider Electric Software, drives digital transformation across the asset and operations lifecycle of capital-intensive industries.

As the pioneer, innovator and market leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Blue Prism delivers the world’s most successful Digital Workforce.

Dassault Systèmes, the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, provides businesses and people with virtual universes to imagine sustainable innovations.

DXC Technology (DXC: NYSE) is the world’s leading independent, end-to-end IT services company, helping clients harness the power of innovation to thrive on change.

Episerver connects digital commerce and marketing to help organisations create unique digital experiences for their customers, with measurable business results.

Finastra builds and deploys innovative, next-generation financial technology on its open Fusion software architecture and cloud ecosystem.

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M A R K E T W AT C H

Microsoft tech to transform healthcare Microsoft has forged a number of new partnerships to improve healthcare options for patients across the globe

DID YOU KNOW?

US$150 billion – the potential annual savings AI could create for the US health economy by 2026 Accenture

55% – the proportion of people in 12 EMEA countries who would be happy to receive their healthcare via AI PwC

50% – the percentage that AI could potentially reduce healthcare treatment costs by Frost & Sullivan

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O

ver the past few months, Microsoft has joined forces with many organisations in a bid to transform healthcare and improve the needs of patients across the globe.

One example is its collaboration with the UK’s Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) to develop solutions that will provide more personalised care.

“This powerful partnership between GOSH and Microsoft is a potential game-changer for healthcare,” said Neil Sebire, chief research information officer at GOSH. “It brings together academic and clinical expertise to be leveraged by the capabilities of

Microsoft with the singular aim of improving healthcare for children.

Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) tools, platforms and emphasis on security and ethics, will empower GOSH to help even more children and young people to fulfil their potential.”

Meanwhile, Apollo Hospitals in India is using cloud, big data analytics and AI to expand the quality of healthcare to over 300 million people. Through a partnership with Microsoft’s AI Network for Healthcare, Apollo Hospitals now applies machine learning and AI to cardiovascular health records to develop an Indian-specific heart risk score. This solution helps predict a

Microsoft to acquire GitHub for US$7.5 billion in stock

Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire GitHub, the software development platform used by over 28 million people.

The acquisition will enable developers to achieve more at every stage of the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub and bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.

Microsoft unveils underwater data centre prototype

patient’s risk for heart disease, which allows doctors to establish treatment plans and an earlier diagnosis.

This is just the start of how AI will be used across the sector. At the recent Microsoft Build conference in Seattle, US, Microsoft launched the AI for Accessibility programme which puts AI tools in the hands of developers to accelerate the creation of AI solutions for the one billion people with disabilities worldwide.

Microsoft Translator is one example, which helps those who are deaf or hard of hearing by providing realtime captioning during conversations.

Another example comes from computer software provider Adjacent

Technologies, which has leveraged Microsoft’s Seeing AI solution to develop a pair of smart glasses that allow the visually impaired to ‘see’ what is in front of them thanks to an in-built camera and wi-fi connectivity. Users take a photo of what’s in front of them and this image is then converted into audio and sent to their mobile phone.

“AI can be a game-changer for people with disabilities, already we’re witnessing this as people with disabilities expand their use of computers to hear, see and reason with impressive accuracy,” said Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer of Microsoft, in a blog post.

Microsoft is testing an underwater data centre to accommodate the growth in demand for cloud computing infrastructures near highly populated areas.

Developed as part of Microsoft’s Project Natick, the shipping container-sized prototype is currently processing data on the seafloor near Scotland’s Orkney Islands in the UK. Placing data centres underwater near coastal cities could provide faster internet access for those who live within 120 miles of the coast.

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M A R K E T W AT C H

Microsoft Canada uses LoDS’ Cloud Slice in Learning Camps

Hollywood approves BuzzOff from StreamingBuzz

Microsoft Canada has adopted Learn on Demand Systems’ Cloud Slice technology to reduce the set-up times and costs of its Learning Camps.

Cloud Slice has reduced the time it takes to set up the labs at the Microsoft Canada events from 30 minutes to three and decreased the costs per student from US$76.92 to US$2.

StreamingBuzz’s cloud-based streaming solution BuzzOff has been approved for use by five Hollywood studios – Warner Bros, Fox, Disney, Paramount Pictures and NBC Universal.

The solution enables airline passengers to stream content produced by these Hollywood studios to their own mobile device, tablet or laptop, without downloading an app.

London Midland invests in Microsoft Office 365 and Surface Hub Wiretap debuts GDPR solution for Teams Uk train operating company London Midland has invested in Microsoft Office 365 and Surface Hub to streamline its operations and allow its technicians to stay connected and share information.

Firstline workers can also use Skype for Business to stay connected with colleagues based at head office and share videos and photographs from the site.

DATE FOR YOUR DIARY

Media and Entertainment Day 24 July 2018; New York, US Organised by the Media and Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), the event will provide key players in the media industry with the latest updates on data, analytics and security technologies.

Read more on page 64

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Pexip introduces video interoperability for Microsoft Teams Pexip is to deliver a Microsoftcertified interoperability solution for Microsoft Teams.

The company demonstrated the solution at the recent Enterprise Connect event, where it showcased the join experience from a video system, content sharing, video performance and more.

w w w. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c o m

Governance technology firm Wiretap has released a data management module that gives organisations the tools to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation within Microsoft Teams and Yammer.

The solution serves as a collaboration ‘unblocker’ by mitigating the risks, such as compliance or insider threat concerns, that are associated with rolling out Microsoft Teams or Yammer.

Finastra expands FusionFabric.cloud platform Microsoft partner Finastra has launched three new components to its FusionFabric.cloud platform, which aims to help fintechs, consultants, banks and academics to create and deploy innovative apps.

The three components are: Fusion Creator, a cloudbased development environment; FusionOperate, a production environment to deploy and run apps; and FusionStore, an online marketplace for banks to search, try and buy apps.

Tower implements EIS Group insurance platform on Microsoft Azure New Zealand general insurer Tower is implementing a new Microsoft Azure cloud-supported core and digital platform from EIS Group so it can simplify products and processes and create digital customer experiences. The new platform will be used for quoting, policy administration, billing, claims and customer management and supporting omnichannel customer self-service.

Insurers must reshape their workforces, says Accenture

DID YOU KNOW?

Over 90% of the top 50 banks globally are using advanced analytics, according to Efma’s The Holy Grail of data strategy: How to leverage new opportunities digest

Celcom launches first intelligent virtual agent in South East Asia Telecommunications provider Celcom Axiata Berhad has launched an intelligent virtual agent that combines artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to engage with customers and answer banking transaction-related questions.

The chatbot can also auto-learn question variations through a knowledge-based system that will improve their effectiveness over time.

Insurance companies must reshape their workforces to work with artificial intelligence (AI) or risk missing out on growth opportunities, according to research by management consulting firm Accenture.

The study found that insurers who invest in AI and humanmachine collaboration could increase their revenue by 17% over the next five years.

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M A R K E T W AT C H

Scandinavian petrol station chain adopts CDM Price Management

Visibility platforms are driving retail, says IDC Visibility platforms can help retailers improve the productivity of their inventory and employees, according to a new TechBrief from analyst firm IDC. The report found that visibility platforms enable retailers to optimise resources and improve the efficiency of processes like inventory, returns and task management across their stores, warehouses and offices.

According to the report, 80% of retailers have a specific budget allocated for increasing enterprise-wide visibility.

A large Scandinavian petrol station chain has adopted CDM’s Price Management solution. Developed by Danish Microsoft partner CDM, the solution allows the petrol chain to optimise its revenue by implementing smarter price strategies that are based on the actions of its competitors.

The price management solution works with an advanced set of price rules and price relations based on competitors and their location, time of the day or price-war controls.

Episerver releases new updates Global software company Episerver released several new updates to its Episerver Digital Experience Cloud software platform in the second quarter of 2018.

The new version of Episerver Advance draws on cognitive artificial intelligence to analyse the behaviour of site visitors based on realtime visitor activity. Meanwhile, customers can expect enhanced page rankings and performance and an improved rich text editor with updates to Episerver CMS. Episerver Commerce has been upgraded to improve page ranking and performance, while Episerver Campaign has been updated to include important functionalities for General Data Protection Regulation compliance.

DID YOU KNOW?

87% of online shoppers are comfortable sharing personal information with brands in exchange for a better online shopping experience, according to Episerver

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Travel Counsellors selects GCI to implement Skype for Business

Microsoft partner GCI will implement Skype for Business and an Enghouse Interactive virtual contact centre for Travel Counsellors, which will enable the corporate and leisure travel company’s 2,000 employees to collaborate more effectively.

Travel Counsellors will be able to take secure payments and use Skype for Business to route and log calls and simplify the customer journey from initial enquiries to booking confirmation.

GCI’s support will also enable Travel Counsellors to expand its team of homebased travel experts by over 200 this year.

Pan American Energy chooses AVEVA

DXC TECHNOLOGY GROWS COMPANY AND REPUTATION

Pan American Energy (PAE), the first private oil company in Argentina, has implemented the first cloud-based simulator in Latin America.

The project was driven by the Human Resources and Quality Operations departments, along with the Energy division.

The goal of the cloud-based simulator is to increase safety process standards, improve competencies and the operational efficiency of its new combined cycle generation plant located at Cerro Dragón.

The simulator from AVEVA includes consulting services specialised in training control room operators. The cloud technology provides flexibility to run simultaneous training sessions with geographical independence maximising simulator benefits.

CompanyNet wins contracts with UK Government and Mencap

eBECS and Sable37 acquired by DXC

End-to-end IT services company DXC Technology has advanced its position as a global independent systems integrator partner for Microsoft Dynamics 365 by acquiring eBECS and Sable37.

Sable37 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Value Added Reseller and global independent software vendor of cloud-based industry solutions for Microsoft Dynamics 365. Meanwhile, eBECS delivers complete Microsoft business solutions and managed services. Both companies have been combined with DXC’s Eclipse practice to expand its Microsoft Dynamics 365 cloud capabilities across the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, US and Canada.

DXC named a public cloud leader

Microsoft partner CompanyNet is to supply digital workplaces for the UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Mencap, Britain’s leading charity for people with learning disabilities.

At the core of each project will be CompanyNet’s Kira platform, which augments the latest features of Microsoft SharePoint Online.

“These new partnerships show that forward-thinking organisations are ready for a deeper engagement around Office 365 – one that starts with the needs of the organisation, and uses technology to meet them,” said Andy Hamilton, CEO of CompanyNet.

CodeTwo Backup to receive enhancements this summer CodeTwo Backup for Microsoft Office 365 will receive enhancements in August 2018, which will enable users to automatically back up folders and files on Microsoft SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

Global technology research and advisory firm Information Services Group has named DXC Technology as a leader in public cloud infrastructure consulting, implementation and managed services.

DXC was recognised for its deep experience in migration, hybrid cloud strategy and design, cloud native deployment, and cloud governance, security and orchestration.

Claranet acquires Union Solutions Managed IT services provider Claranet has acquired UK-based data protection specialists Union Solutions.

Claranet’s networks, hosting, communications and security teams work closely with Union Solutions and the combined offering will enable customers to access more services for migrating and running their critical applications and infrastructure 24/7.

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M A R K E T W AT C H

Top five traits of digital transformation leaders Photos: Kate Stanworth

GCI deploys Skype for Business at Shelter

A Microsoft and IDC survey has outlined the five factors that organisations must consider if they want digital transformation success. They include:

1 2

Culture and change – organisations must create a digital-first culture.

3

Organisational behaviour – digital leaders are set apart by their ability to prioritise business agility and innovation.

Digital transformation approaches – successful companies start their digital transformation with a series of small, quick projects that deliver positive business outcomes and accrue to drive innovation.

4 5

Leadership and structure – digital transformation leaders focus on realigning their entire ecosystem, including supply chains, partners and employees.

Using data as an asset – leaders invest in technologies like artificial intelligence and big data to turn data assets into capital.

Converged ICT service provider GCI is to provide UK housing and homelessness charity Shelter with Microsoft Skype for Business.

Shelter will deploy the platform across 44 sites so it can run a more flexible contact centre that will support the 60,000 people who contact the charity every year.

The solution will provide an omnichannel approach that allows all users to receive the same level of service regardless of how they contact Shelter.

ICONICS launches Smart Energy AnalytiX

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DATE FOR YOUR DIARY

Global automation software provider ICONICS has launched its Smart Energy AnalytiX software-as-aservice solution.

The solution incorporates ICONICS’ expertise with energy management, fault detection/diagnostics and KPI self-service dashboard technologies into a cloud portal-based subscription solution. It targets customers’ operational expenditure, providing an inexpensive, subscription-based payment structure with lower deployment cost and time.

Microsoft Inspire 15-19 July 2018; Las Vegas, Nevada, US Microsoft and its current and future partners will explore how enterprises can build and maintain a modern workplace and how they can use artificial intelligence to transform business processes and personalise customer experiences.

VIEWPOINT

Will virtual reality change manufacturing culture?

ATS Global’s Mike James outlines the future of virtual reality within manufacturing Recently, I visited US based experience design firm Deep Canvas, to see a vehicle prototype being demonstrated through virtual reality technologies. This technology made it easy for global teams to collaborate on vehicle design, offering them an ideal way to ‘feel and touch’ the vehicle without having to travel. The success of this project suggests that developments using virtual

reality technologies will certainly gain ground in the future.

The ATS Attribute Dimensional Operational Shared solution fills the gap between the virtual design world of computer aided design and the physical world of manufacturing. The technology, which is now available in 3D, aims to improve quality management in manufacturing, and allows users to collect, combine, analyse, report and act on production data. Every

day manufacturers are adopting these technologies, improving quality, efficiency and changing cultures too.

Mike James is chair of the board of directors at ATS Global

C O V E R S TO R Y

Cultivating tomorrow’s enterprise For many commercial and public-sector organisations, traditional operational models still hold sway. But as digital innovation transforms the global economy, successful delivery of products and services will require a fundamental reorientation from ‘process first’ to ‘culture first’

BY MICHELE WIT THAUS

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he shift to digital technologies holds the promise of enhanced dialogue and collaboration with both partners and customers.

However, as with all change, it is not without risk. Business decision makers need to be confident that they have the tools to enable successful transition and are looking to thought leaders who can point the way.

“Leaders need to understand how technology will impact their businesses, how to think about an always-on connection to all of their products, customers, assets and people – and how all of this will change their competitive landscape,” says Toni Townes-Whitley, Microsoft’s president

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VIEWPOINT

Transparency is the key Done effectively, digital optimisation adds value, says Kim Erbo Christensen, CEO of CDM A/S in Denmark Digital optimisation can help companies direct resources to more value-adding task, and in our experience the best results are achieved using business-critical software solutions customised to our clients. One area is within tender management, which can be very time consuming and a drain on resources, often requiring numerous people to handle quite complex processes.

When using the CDM Tender Optimizer solution, all processes are digitalised and automated with regard to communication with authorities, preparation of tenders, procurement and collection of tenders from suppliers, documentation and integration to EU portals. It means that the company will get

for US Public Sector, Healthcare and Financial Services. “They need to get ahead of the change that is already upon us so they can successfully pursue digital transformation, rather than simply react to the disruptive changes that technology is creating all around them.”

To do this, a culture change is needed across the organisation, she says. “Becoming a digital enterprise will inform and change how a com-

“It’s vital for a successful business to be one that is constantly transforming itself through learning” pany makes decisions, how it engages customers, how it empowers employees, how it transforms products and how it optimises operations.

“This starts with the leadership team defining what culture means to the company, embracing and communicating this at all levels, and building momentum by demonstrating the great work happening every day. This is critical to getting employees to support and accelerate the digital transformation journey.”

a solution that ensures 100% transparency when it comes to processes, competition and any legal issues that might occur.

User friendliness and optimisation of user interface for the individual employee is a key differentiator. For one client – an organisation that purchases medicine – this has enabled them to have 12 employees manage more than 340 tenders a year worth x1.2 billion (US$1.4 billion). Because of their organisational structure, their work processes and an effective supporting software solution, they have managed to save an average of 28% on their pharmaceutical purchases.

Kim Erbo Christensen is CEO at CDM A/S

Digital transformation brings with it many challenges, says Melissa Topp, senior director of global marketing at ICONICS. “The first is the perceived divide between a company’s IT and operations departments. The second is a misconception that industrial automation customers resist any interest in new technology if existing equipment is doing its job.”

Topp sees promise in the interest many companies have shown in the emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). “Affordable IoT devices have allowed for the best of both worlds – enabling customers to avoid a major ‘rip and replace’ scenario and resulting in quicker adoption of digital transformation for businesses.”

But what happens when organisations perceive technological innovation as an existential threat?

“The hardest thing for a company to do is to reinvent itself in a way that threatens its historical basis for success – and yet that is the very essence of digital transformation,” says Greg Moran, chief operating officer at Wiretap. “Iteration and rapid adjustment to customer data should drive the transformation process. Typically, this results in fundamental ­re-definition of organisation structure, external partnerships, and new go-to-market

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VIEWPOINT

Think ‘people first’, not ‘technology first’ Business culture matters in the digital economy, says Mary Robbins, from Redgate Software Times are changing – and changing fast.

Established companies are being edged aside by disruptive players using the latest technology to update their business model to meet changing customer demands, on demand.

But here’s the thing. The biggest weapon in their challenge to the status quo isn’t the new technology they’re bringing to the marketplace; it’s the different DevOps culture they encourage. One in which following rules is replaced by encouraging collaboration.

One where change is embraced, not feared.

And one that replaces big releases every six months or so, with constant small releases.

Strangely enough, nine years ago, no one had ever heard about DevOps. Now, every major technology company – and a

lot of companies you wouldn’t think of as technology companies – practice DevOps, because it’s been shown to deliver the best value, and enable companies to release features and products to the market sooner.

Donovan Brown, Principal DevOps Manager at Microsoft, describes DevOps as the union of people, processes and products to enable the continuous delivery of value to customers. Note he puts people first because a cultural shift is required before technological innovation can take place.

Collaboration is key. Walls need to come down. Rules need to be broken. A few eggs probably need to be smashed on the way.

Mary Robbins is DevOps product marketing manager at Redgate Software

VIEWPOINT

Redefining banking Technology and regulation change the way financial services are delivered to customers, says Andrei Charniauski from Finastra The financial services industry is not new to radical digital transformation – recent advances in customer experience, mobile banking and real-time payments have already stopped many of us going to bank branches. There is now a new challenge called open banking – driven by technology, enforced by regulation – that opens up access to customer bank accounts and undermines the very foundations of established banks.

Partners from outside of financial services can now integrate banking capabilities into their applications and deliver seamless experience to clients. As financial services become embedded into lifestyle and work,

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clients begin banking without banks – on the apps of their choice and preference.

Open banking will force existing financial institutions to shift away from their traditional – direct-to-customer – business model to a highly collaborative approach. Successful open banks will drive partnerships with firms outside of financial services like retailers, hospitality, travel agents or business application providers. This means change – and established financial institution will significantly renew their approach to IT architecture and talent acquisition.

Andrei Charniauski is in the Product Strategy and Market Intelligence team at Finastra

strategies that truly reflect the company’s new value proposition – without undermining its fundamental mission.”

Matt Scott, co-founder and chief technology officer at Malong Technologies, believes that the biggest obstacle to the adoption of innovative technologies can be summed up in one word: heritage. “It’s the legacies of really smart people who contributed great ideas back in the day. The bad ideas are really obvious and easy to discard.

But the toughest roadblocks are when the ideas were great and worked well in their time. How do you honour them properly – and also move on?”

The solution, he says, is to view this history as context. “It’s part of our responsibility to help them through every stage: from interest to testing to full-scale deployment. We do it with data, benchmarks, validation, communication and feedback at every step.”

Adherence to outdated traditions can prevent beneficial change, says Simon O’Carroll, marketing director at Mercato Solutions: “The biggest blockers to digital transformation are ultimately people adopting the ‘This is how we have always done it’ attitude. When actioned, the majority of digital transformation programmes are made up of stand-alone initiatives, often with strong disagreements on collaboration practices and senior team members believing they have a digital vision, whilst employees disagree.” He advocates joining up already deployed instances into coherent transformation solutions, as well as empowering organisations to rapidly prototype new processes and systems.

One of the most common barriers to the adoption of enabling technologies is the lack of modern, relevant success metrics and little to no enterprise-wide visibility of real progress and change, says Angelique Mohring, CEO and founder of GainX. “Businesses that cannot design and direct information flow across their entire organisation are not going to be relevant in the next economy. Increasingly, the executives I speak to are realising that the metrics that they have been using to measure progress are no longer relevant in today’s competitive landscape.

To succeed, they need to remove any remaining vanity metrics and augment their key measures

“Leaders need to understand how technology will impact their businesses” with deeper analytics driven by the competitive benefits of machine learning. Visibility into their organisational network – meaning strategic information flow and the dependencies between people and projects throughout the organisation, is a non-negotiable must to survive beyond today’s market! With a data-driven network view of people, projects, and the actual adoption of your corporate strategies, leaders can competitively navigate to the next economy.”

For those businesses willing to take this journey, the good news is that disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning

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VIEWPOINT

Embrace a new way of thinking Pelli Papoulidou from interworks.cloud says we should embrace the ideas of young people in order to transform Being a leader is like being a mother. I draw this comparison because working with the younger generations can be frustrating, especially when it comes to digital transformation. These generations are quick to embrace the latest apps and features, and they are very good at absorbing new knowledge.

What I’ve learnt over the last couple of years is that it’s really important to listen to these young people - to reach out to new

are accelerating the potential for businesses to optimise their operational models, says TownesWhitley. “Equipment and devices, once isolated and siloed, can now stay continuously connected – enabling businesses to gather data across a wide, dispersed set of endpoints, draw insights through advanced analytics, and then apply those learnings to introduce improvements that exceed the expectations of their customers.”

This means that organisations can shift from merely reacting to events to responding in real time, or even pre-emptively, to anticipate and solve customer issues before they become issues.

Scott says Malong Technologies is seeing customers adopting a mindset of openness to new ideas, with the understanding that a few of those ideas might not work out.

Essam Makhlouf, marketing director at education services provider ITWORX Education, agrees, explaining that transformation works best when there is freedom to try new things, “A great strategy for business leaders to embrace innovation and empower their employees to innovate is to allow freedom just until the edge of chaos; in other words, to manage at the edge of chaos.”

Not many business environments are set up for this kind of experimentation, however.

“Companies often set objectives and establish reward systems that punish experimentation,” says Wiretap’s Moran. His advice: “Take a hard look at how your organisation rewards leaders

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generations and embrace their thoughts and ideas. Transforming a company’s culture can be a tedious battle, but we need to change the way we think and act upon tasks, projects and the customer experience in order to succeed. It is like teaching your child new things – it needs patience, love and true passion.

Pelli Papoulidou is vice president of Customer Engagement at interworks.cloud

and make adjustments to encourage thoughtful risk-taking.”

Measuring progress is good, but it’s crucial to track the right metrics, says Mohring. “One of the top strategies is to rethink how you measure progress and transformation, and that has to include information flow. It must include measuring your network, which is people.”

Topp advises businesses to accept that complete digital transformation is not likely to occur overnight. “It’s okay to pick an individual business process – whether the most troublesome or underperforming or even the highest performing or flagship process – and apply new digital

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VIEWPOINT

Remotely successful Corey Hynes of Learn on Demand Systems explains why the company has opted for 100% remote working At Learn on Demand Systems we have a 100% remote global workforce with no offices. We rely on online tools like Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams and Office 365 to collaborate 24x7 across multiple time zones.

Blending work and life is crucial to the success of our company. Having an alldigital workforce allows our employees ultimate flexibility (we had one employee who just got back from working for a month in Belize), plus it also grants us hiring flexibility, as there is a larger pool of candidates to choose from. Collaboration occurs naturally across business functions, which helps create a culture of belonging and alignment.

data-driven solutions. This allows a business to apply a test at a smaller, more manageable scale.”

What’s clear is that business culture is imperative to success – and this starts at the top.

“Founders and CEOs need to create a culture where the best people can do their best work,” says Malong’s Scott. “We see Microsoft modelling and encouraging positive corporate culture.

As a young company, we’re inspired by it.”

“Businesses need to set digital KPIs focusing on behaviours with tangible changes proposed,” adds O’Carroll at Mercato Solutions.

“Investment also needs to be made in digital skills and in infrastructure and digital enablement platforms to enable digital culture to reach everyone in the organisation.”

The essence of a company’s culture is not embodied in a list of mission and management principles, says Moran. “True culture lies in the way people interact and work with each other, customers and suppliers. By leveraging connective technology like Microsoft Teams and Yammer, companies can use effective collaboration and cross-functional communication as a secret competitive weapon in their industry.”

A business culture that fosters innovation enables businesses to grow, says Makhlouf. “It’s vital for a

We embrace being 100% remote and constantly strive to keep our culture top of mind (and with our cost savings, every year we bring the company physically together for a team meeting in a tropical location to further reinforce that they are part of a broader team). Our philosophy differs from many, but it works well as it enables us to keep our customers equipped with cuttingedge, constantly-improving solutions to create digital hands-on learning experiences while keeping our employees engaged and fulfilled.

Corey Hynes is CEO at Learn on Demand Systems

successful business in today’s market to be one that is constantly transforming itself through learning.

Organisations should enable their manpower to keep this learning mode up-to-date through corporate learning techniques and solutions.”

The next step is to become ‘future ready’. But just what does such an organisation look like?

According to Moran, the essence of a futureready organisation is that they win – again and again – and it looks effortless. “Employees at those companies don’t think they are ‘innovating’, they think they are doing their job and it looks like magic to the rest of us. The ‘magic’ stems from the organisation’s leadership developing clarity of purpose, a narrow and clear focus, customer obsession, and a culture that rewards and embraces teamwork and collaboration.”

A company’s customers are crucial in equipping it for the future, says Scott. “Its leadership and people look like and think like its customers, and then decisions follow accordingly – its organisational structure, its technology, its marketing strategy and so on. As its customers change, the organisation can change with them – and the converse is also true, that the organisation can offer change that its customers will embrace – because they are aligned and there

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VIEWPOINT

Playing it safe is not an option Essam Makhlouf from ITWORX Education says that businesses cannot afford to wait and see when it comes to digital transformation Digital transformation in itself is a disruptive concept. If organisations approach it from the perspective of updating or enhancing processes, a true digital transformation would not be achieved.

When looking today at ‘young’ companies that are most successful, we can see that they use digital transformation to disrupt the status quo of the service/product lines they operate in.

Therefore, we’re not talking about digital transformation enabling businesses or making them more efficient; we’re talking about disrupting current business models

is mutual trust. It’s what we’re trying to build at Malong Technologies.”

Those organisations that are truly prepared for what’s ahead have already adopted strategies for their own digital transformation, says Topp at ICONICS. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that transformation is complete, but that the ­decision-makers are actively guiding the business culture based on data-driven results rather than clinging to legacy methods. The organisation should have the means of discovering and connecting to all of its available data and would ensure that its business culture remains flexible enough to adapt when new technologies and methods demonstrate an opportunity to improve.”

O’Carroll at Mercato Solutions stresses the need for businesses to balance creativity and innovation with realism. “They have to be open to new ways and understand how their specific industry is changing. Organisations that stand the best chance of being ‘ready’ will merge employee generations, with more senior members bringing wisdom and domain expertise, whilst younger members bring innovation.” However, he cautions, “Senior management have to actively promote innovation, not instantly kill new ideas because of tradition.”

When it comes to enabling businesses to navigate the turbulent waters of modern technology, several thought leaders’ names are frequently

and reinventing new, digital models that are able to drive customers to want to use technological and digital solutions and become willing to pay money to integrate them in their daily lives as they see the value in them.

The most successful businesses today are those that were able to realise what customers’ needs would be like in the future and provided them with solutions for the present.

Essam Makhlouf is marketing director at ITWORX Education

heard in conversation. One of the most popular is Microsoft’s own Satya Nadella, of whom TownesWhitley says, “He is a huge inspiration not only to me, but to Microsoft employees and many leaders across industries. Satya has taught us the power of empathy, not something often embraced in today’s fast-paced, competitive world. But having empathy is critical to helping your employees find and connect to their purpose and passion in order to better understand and meet the needs of customers.

Empathy may not be part of the traditional business toolbox, but in the context of organisations seeking to enable meaningful enterprise-wide change, it could be in for a rise in popularity.”

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VIEWPOINT

How to equip the workers of tomorrow STEVEN ARMSTRONG: BLUE PRISM

The reality of today’s digital world is forcing change – and making a big impact with new technologies that better mesh with enterprise goals

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he time-honoured ways of doing business are known as such for a reason. After all, there’s something to be said for proven techniques that result in positive outcomes.

If only commercial and public organisations worked that way… but they don’t.

Traditional operating models and standard industry conventions for taking today’s enterprises to the next level aren’t sufficient to satisfy the speed of business. Organisations have shifted focus from the status quo to true digital transformation – and that means exploring every facet of business, taking a new look at the way things are, and making the decisions that will transform enterprises in the future.

For many businesses, cost is key – from finding efficiencies that save money to discovering more streamlined ways to drive profits. Indeed, 64%

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of respondents to a 2017 Constellation Research survey said that digital transformation is essential to driving profits.

And, a recent Frost & Sullivan survey looking at end-user perspectives on navigating digital transformation globally, found that improving a company’s digital presence will be a top driver for IT investment over the next two years. Other enterprise goals cited included reducing operational costs, improving the customer experience and aligning IT with business strategy.

Today, every business requires a fundamental, philosophical shift from process-first to ­culture-first – the kind of philosophical change that spurs broader dialogue and deeper collaboration with both partners and customers.

However, as with all change, it is not without risk. True digital transformation requires a concerted, organisation-wide effort. Success depends on determining exactly what changes enterprises want to make, identifying the risks associated with those changes, and using technology in a wise way to help meet overall goals.

Today’s enterprises have a multitude of tools at their disposal to encourage digital transformation, and chief among them is robotic process automation (RPA). Blue Prism coined the term more than 12 years ago, and RPA has become synonymous as the gold standard for enterprise digital transformation.

These completely autonomous digital workers can improve capabilities and help businesses on realise huge efficiencies, as well as free up existing employees for more satisfying, high-value

tasks. Blue Prism’s unique focus on collaboration and innovation gives enterprises a flexible RPA platform that is intelligent, connected, and easy to control: • Intelligent: digital workers that understand context, derive meaning and anticipate change • Connected: bringing people, machines and processes together with such best of breed technologies as AI and machine learning • Easy to control: flexible 24/7 capability with full visibility, control and absolute compliance.

At its most basic, RPA empowers organisations to automate processes. Blue Prism takes that concept to the next level with enterprise-scale dynamic automation and digital workers that possess six key digital skills for intelligent automation.

These skills include: visual perception; knowledge and insight; learning; problem solving; planning and sequencing; and collaboration.

All are critical for enterprise-level digital transformation – and mark a sea change from a workforce-focused approach based on worker knowledge to a customer-centric digital strategy.

“This level of intelligent automation can reproduce the exact actions of a human operator – using the same interfaces, reproducing the same complex decisions, ‘seeing’ what the human operators performing that task manually were seeing, as well as adapting to variations in

“Organisations have shifted focus from the status quo to true digital transformation” performance, environmental factors and changing data,” explains Colin Redbond, Blue Prism’s head of Technology, Strategy and Architecture.

When businesses focus less on process and more on high value work, the path to digital transformation suddenly become much easier, and intelligent automation is just one of the tools that today’s enterprises are using to get there.

Steven Armstrong is vice president and global lead for the Microsoft Alliance at Blue Prism

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INTERVIEW

A powerful combination Angelique Mohring, founder of GainX, tells us how her company uses AI to help global businesses address the complex challenges of transformation

BY JACQUI GRIFFITHS

Tell us about GainX. What inspired you to start the company?

I started GainX because I wanted to help big businesses drive greater returns on their transformation spend. I was in Canada when Blackberry imploded, and I saw the profound economic impact it had on a vibrant community.

As the pace of technological change increases and the lifetime of larger companies decreases, there’s potential for that effect to multiply.

I decided to solve an almost impossible problem – to create an enterprise software platform that leverages advanced network design theory with machine learning, to see into every corner of the company in real time.

The connected transformation mapTM

Blue sky and what-if...

Transformation strategy

Culture and info flow

New projects

New processes and business models

Talent Modern tools

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What key forces are driving change in the market?

Organisations are facing three non-negotiable forces of change: The Age of the Network, digital disruption, and artificial intelligence (AI). Other forces, such as Brexit or regulatory changes like GDPR, have high costs today but they will resolve over time. The three non-negotiables will only accelerate, causing serious disruption to the global workforce and economy and these shifts will not only impact businesses but their customers as well. In this new economy, customers are going to have very different expectations than they have today and organisations must be more agile and responsive to meet those needs.

How can GainX help organisations succeed in the Age of the Network?

In the Age of the Network, businesses will be forced to do more with far less people – but much larger networks. To navigate this continuous cycle of change, it is imperative that they have visibility into their networks and can measure, see and assess how strategic and ­non-strategic information is flowing.

GainX helps organisations to both predict the success of their strategic transformation and manage it. For example, if you want to be more agile or customer-centric, our software can predict where that will not occur in your organisation due to your cultural and operational ‘clay layers’ as well as where you can accelerate adoption. This means you can proactively manage change and see returns on your transformation strategy, faster.

One reason why companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook are so successful is that they can both design and direct information flow across billions of people. GainX lets you do that inside your own organisation. The

result is that you become far more agile and responsive to change.

GainX elevates and accelerates business transformation – whether it’s digital transformation, rolling out Office 365 and Microsoft Azure, doing a merger or acquisition, or restructuring your workforce. The result is millions in savings in just the first year.

What issues does digital disruption raise?

As humans, we can no longer simply sense or see the pace of change in the market to respond competitively. With quantum computing breakthroughs, it is expected that the speed of information flow will become 100 million times faster in the near future. Wow. The complexity of this disruption makes prioritisation nearly impossible. What do you focus on today? Every company will have different answers depending on where they are and where they want to be.

Our platform uses AI to help executives take fast, but smarter decisions. GainX puts intuitive, responsive tools into the hands of executives and frontline managers, simplifying the complexity of prioritisation and decisions.

Because GainX software can measure impact on operations, projects, talent, culture – executives can prioritise the best wins for the company without introducing hidden risks or costs.

What key challenges and opportunities does AI bring?

Although AI and machine learning will create many new jobs that are great for our economy, between 400 million to 800 million jobs are predicted to be displaced in just 12 years.

Regardless of how you look at that – it is a tsunami of change that will impact our economy, our businesses and our customers. My concern is that the grocery bagger, the cab driver and the accounting clerk might not want a digital job – and if we do not find a way to help them matter in this next economy, the consequences will be dire.

This is just one of the important aspects of transformation that GainX helps organisations with – assuring people understand why they matter to your business and our economy. With advanced network design theory, AI and exceptional UX – everyone can easily see where they are in your network, and why it matters to them and to your business.

“It is expected that the speed of information flow will become 100 million times faster in the near future. Wow” What makes your partnership with Microsoft such a success?

Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, is clear about having a growth mindset – and you see it in every aspect of his strategy. Today, Microsoft’s desire and ability to wrap itself around strategic partners is unprecedented. They are happy to work closely with both the customer and us, using their size and strength to remove any barriers customers may have leveraging the GainX platform in a joint approach to digital transformation. We help the organisation drive a greater return on its transformation spend by giving it the visibility and deep analytics on information flow, people and projects. Microsoft brings the most secure cloud platform in the market and world-class enterprise software – it is simply the best at what it does.

Together with Microsoft, we provide our customers the technology, strategic direction and the roadmap to move successfully into the New Economy. We’re now selling to tier one banks, for example, in as little as 45 days. I’ve worked in enterprise software and technology for nearly 20 years – this combination is the most powerful thing I’ve seen in business.

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INTERVIEW

Partnering for success At last year’s Inspire event, Microsoft announced major changes to the way it is working with partners. In an exclusive interview with The Record, Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner organisation, tells us more about these changes and explains the opportunities that will be presented in the coming financial year B Y A N D Y C L AY T O N - S M I T H

Last July, Microsoft made some big, bold changes to how it works with partners. Tell us about those changes and why they were made.

Last year, we set out to make dramatic changes.

At Inspire, we introduced the One Commercial Partner organisation, and transformed how we engage with our partner community by bringing all of our partner facing roles into one organisation. We aligned all of those partner facing roles to three motions: build-with; go-to-market; and sell-with. This has simplified our partner engagement, driven increased collaboration and fostered a culture of work that puts our partners first.

As part of the sell-with motion, we introduced a new role called the channel manager. This role has strengthened the relationship between Microsoft field sellers and the selling teams of our partners. The channel manager role has proven to be invaluable. We have seen some remarkable success this year generating more than 240,000 leads and opportunities for partners.

We also introduced rewards for co-selling third-party solutions from our partners. From that we have closed nearly US$2 billion in revenue for our partners in more than 8,000 customer wins. We intend to continue this programme and expand our co-sell motion even further next year with enhancements to our marketplaces – AppSource and Azure Marketplace. We will also start facilitating opportunities for partners to co-sell with each other.

How are you helping partners to reach more customers?

The top request that partners have made of us is to better connect them to customers. Helping partners take the solutions they’ve built to market and reach more customers will be a significant focus for us going forward. The marketplaces are

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one way we’re doing that, and both AppSource and Azure Marketplace now allow partners to publish both apps and services as offerings. In addition, we have a referrals engine in place that makes it easier for customers to find a Microsoft partner with a solution that meets their needs.

Over the past few years, we’ve made available marketing and sales content and customisable assets that a lot of partners have found valuable, and now we’re making go-to-market services available to partners to better enable demand generation, channel development and more.

We’ve made these moves because we cannot serve our customers without partners. Our partners continue to be a critical ingredient in our business model. Microsoft is squarely focused on enabling partners of all types to deliver services around the world on any platform. This open and cloud-focused approach allows us to provide more value and more choice to customers in four solution areas: Modern Workplace; Business Applications; Apps & Infrastructure; and Data & Artificial Intelligence. Through these changes, we want to help partners innovate more, go to market faster and connect with the right customers at the right time.

Five years ago at the LeWeb Conference in Paris, Satya Nadella said: “Over the next ten years, we’ll reach a point where nearly everything has become digitised.” At the halfway point between prediction and outcome, how do you think Nadella’s quote holds up to scrutiny? Where do you think that Microsoft is leading the way with this digital transformation agenda?

For Microsoft and our partners, digital transformation is more than a trend; it’s a new way of life. The opportunity around

“Helping partners take the solutions they’ve built to market and reach more customers will be a significant focus for us going forward”

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Microsoft will be outlining many new opportunities for partners at this year’s Inspire event

digital transformation continues to be staggering. According to research Microsoft conducted with IDC, digital transformation is now an executive mandate, and more than 60% of enterprises will begin implementing a digital strategy by 2020. By the end of 2019, IDC predicts US$1.7 trillion in spending worldwide to create new business models, products, operational efficiencies and customer experiences.

By 2021, spending on cloud IT and services will more than double and, according to IDC, the Microsoft partner opportunity related to digital transformation solutions will reach more than US$2 billion by 2022.

Digital transformation is at the heart of our amazing partner multiples. In 2017, partners earned US$9.64 in services revenue for every dollar generated by Microsoft, and this growth is expected to continue through 2022. We’re doing everything we can to help partners get ahead of the game, and partner value extension – especially intellectual property – will continue to be key in driving successful customer transformation.

I think one of the most incredible things is how we’re able to help our partners take advantage of this opportunity, to better help customers.

We recently published a new e-book series on digital transformation, with great insight into the market and digital maturity of customers.

It describes business attributes needed for successful transformation and how partners have aligned business strategy with cloud tech (such

as AI and blockchain) to improve operations and monetisation. IDC also confirmed that Microsoft’s digital transformation pillars are a roadmap to aligning customer aspirations.

What are the key areas that offer the biggest opportunities for partners to innovate and to deliver their solutions and services to both enterprise and public sector customers right now?

There are several key areas. First, the modern workplace is empowering employees by giving them new ways of working, communicating and collaborating. Then there’s business applications, which are helping customers to rethink how they run their businesses and optimise their operations, particularly using cloud services. Dynamics 365, for example, enables our partners to extend our business applications into the industries in which they work through our Cloud Embed programme.

Apps and infrastructure also present opportunities, using the scale and security of the cloud platform, the hybrid platform with our new Azure Stack. This enables partners and customers to seamlessly move between their own data centre and the cloud and enables them to unlock their data in new ways.

Data and artificial intelligence also holds huge promise. When partners help customers unlock their data, it generates huge value to the customer’s business. In 2018, every Microsoft partner will be adding new data and AI services into their applications, solutions and services, delivering powerful insights and new capabilities.

Finally, there’s new legislation. Directives such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe are really impacting companies globally. Companies have had to figure out how they get their data out of the manual state and into a common data format, to use it for GDPR. Partners need to be taking advantage of that opportunity to help customers see that they’re not simply complying, but they’re unlocking a set of immense opportunities.

How do you see this landscape evolving in the coming financial year?

We anticipate huge growth and adoption of digital initiatives. By 2019, IDC predicts that 40% of digital initiatives will be supported by AI, big data and IoT. To lead the digital economy, partners must shift training efforts to

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“We want to help partners innovate more, go to market faster and connect with the right customers at the right time”

focus on delivering transformative services.

To help our partners natively build this new capability into their businesses we released an AI Practice Development playbook and a guided practice-building experience on partner.microsoft.com earlier this year. We have taken nearly 4,000 through Microsoft boot camps and virtual training, with more to come in 2018.

As this edition of The Record is published you and your colleagues will be getting ready for Inspire in Las Vegas. What can partners expect from this year’s global gathering?

What are you hoping the event will do to enrich the work that they, in turn, are doing with Microsoft customers?

As always, partners can expect exciting events, panel discussions and news that will help them meet their goals. There will also be a multitude of opportunities for them to network with other partners and Microsoft contacts, as they discover new ways to innovate and go-to-market more quickly.

The road ahead for our partners in the coming financial year is paved with opportunities and evolutions:

1. E xpanding into new businesses 2. Helping customers on their journey to become digital businesses through micro-revolutions 3. Looking for cross-industry cloud innovation to inform customers’ cloud transformations 4. Having a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) strategy 5. Adding customer insights and generating new opportunities through data and AI services 6. Redefining what’s possible for their customers with IoT 7. Rethinking how they’re talking about technology to embrace the new technology buyer 8. Deepening customer relationships by helping them build and manage their cloud applications and services to support business outcomes This year, Microsoft Inspire will be in Las Vegas at the same time as Microsoft Ready, creating opportunities for the first time to bring the internal sales conference and Microsoft sales team together with partners onsite. Together with our partners and customers, we’re going to accomplish a lot together in the year ahead.

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MaaS: turning theory into practice B O R I S K A R S C H : C U B I C T R A N S P O R TAT I O N S Y S T E M S

Mobility as a Service has taken centre stage in discussions about the future of transport. And transit should take the wheel of the conversation

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f there’s one thing all Americans living in large cities can relate to, it’s the collective experience of the dreaded rush hour. Congestion, pollution and traffic coupled with ageing public transit infrastructure and a shortage of funding have, until recently, left little to no alternative for a more effective and pleasurable commute.

But in many cities the options are growing.

Uber, Lyft, Zip Car, car2go, GetAround and Turo are only a few examples of alternative transport services that promise to solve all transportation pains, curb congestion and offer a seamless, integrated, on-demand travel experience.

Those car-sharing and ride-hailing services are often defined in the context of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) – a generally understood vision

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of future mobility that involves a mix of transport modes and providers. Although the idea of MaaS seems to have taken centre stage in conversations about the future of transport, it remains an ambiguous term – widely misunderstood and too often associated with the private sector.

With so many players claiming to be part of the MaaS revolution, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and dismiss the concept as either a fragmented, commercially motivated attempt at getting a piece of the transportation cake or just another way of describing a plethora of new technologies that are shaking up the sector.

Yet, despite the complicated discourse surrounding MaaS, the idea carries true potential to improve the commute and general mobility of citizens. The key to understanding MaaS and its transformative power lies in identifying its key stakeholders and objectives.

Recognising the positive impact that MaaS can make on mobility, many public transit agencies across the US are keen to take tangible steps towards wider MaaS implementation in their region. A good starting point is to adopt the same real-time, cloud-based technologies that allowed alternative transit providers to gain a competitive edge, but to do so in a coordinated, integrated and inclusive way.

That was exactly the approach taken by MiamiDade County Department of Transportation and Public Works (DTPW), which, in 2016, began an ambitious overhaul of its entire public transit network. Keen to reduce road congestion and digitally connect all transportation services

in the county, DTPW partnered with Cubic Transportation Systems, Microsoft and City Innovate to bring an integrated travel experience to users of public and private mobility services.

Cubic modernised the EASY Card revenue management system and migrated DTPW’s legacy back office to the cloud running on the trusted and secure Microsoft Azure platform.

The cloud-based environment allowed DTPW to introduce a range of modern capabilities and payment options that made multimodal travel easier and more convenient. Those include support for contactless bank cards and nearfield communication payments; a state-of-theart mobile application for transit riders, which allows travellers to buy a ticket barcode on their phone and present it at the gate to gain access; and options to add open payments in the future.

The resulting system – the first truly multimodal public transit system in the US – adds a new level of flexibility and choice to the customer experience. It takes advantage of innovative, futureproof technologies and can communicate with other transportation agencies as well as ride-share and bike-share companies for more seamless travel countywide. While DTPW’s Metrorail still serves as the backbone of the region’s transportation network, alternative transit providers, such as Lyft, can now work with the city authorities to fill in the gaps in service and help address first and last mile problems.

By focusing on innovation and partnering with the private sector, DTPW showed true leadership

in reshaping the public transit landscape in the true spirit of MaaS – one that is properly implemented, responsibly managed and well executed; where the city, rather than any other player, influences the development of the multimodal environment and ensures mobility services serve the wider interest of the public.

As the needs of the travelling population change and grow, the time is ripe for local authorities and transit agencies to take the lead in pushing the MaaS effort forward. Examples like DTPW prove that public transit can – and should – play an active role in helping transform our transit networks and city spaces for the better.

Boris Karsch is vice president, strategy at Cubic Transportation Systems

Let’s put transit front and centre of the MaaS conversation If MaaS is to truly make a difference and make transportation convenient, connected and more personal, it must be implemented, shaped and regulated by public transit agencies. Furthermore, for MaaS to effectively address the vision of future mobility, it needs to consider the wider objectives of a city or a region including issues such as congestion, pollution, social inclusion or the need for integrated regulation and policy.

A responsible, people-centred and socially inclusive MaaS increases the density of

travel, makes effective use of existing city infrastructure, limits congestion and the number of vehicles on roads, and caters to all travellers, young and old, able and less able, the wealthy and the economically disadvantaged.

Public transit, as the backbone of mobility, is best placed to realise those objectives, given the level of integration and multimodality already achieved by many agencies around the world, as well as their responsibility to provide transportation services to all types of travellers.

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AI: job creator or destroyer?

M A R I A PA R D E E : D X C T E C H N O L O G Y

Artificial intelligence technology is rapidly reshaping the workplace and automating simple, manual tasks, but it’s also empowering employees to do more

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hen asked how artificial intelligence (AI) will improve our lives, many people think of high-profile examples such as autonomous cars and smart homes. However, AI may be making the fastest inroads where people spend most of their waking hours: the workplace. But how will AI change the nature of work?

DXC Technology believes AI will be key for facilitating the flexible, productive workstyle that today’s workforce expects. AI, robotics and machine learning will shift how people work, replacing highly manual and repetitive jobs on both the factory floor and in the office. However, these roles will be replaced by an equal, or greater, number of jobs in new areas that require more

“AI will be key for facilitating the flexible, productive workstyle that today’s workforce expects” creativity and critical thinking. In fact, a 2017 CCS Insight survey found that almost 50% of the 650 respondents think AI will increase the number of available jobs. When millennials are isolated from that respondent group, that figure jumps to 64%.

Currently filling peripheral roles in the workplace, AI is rapidly working its way towards playing a larger role. For example, IT administrators are using AI to support bring your own device policies by putting guardrails around devices to safeguard corporate data and ensure that everything employees do can be audited. In addition, the technology

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can identify undetected malware and other vulnerabilities, or intervene when users take risks.

AI can make employees more productive by guiding them through various processes. Workers who shift from one device to another throughout the day, for example, might benefit from AI-assisted authentication and automated workflow. This could end the error-prone routine of manually tracking document revisions or e-mailing attachments from one device to another.

How we interact with AI-powered systems is changing rapidly too. Conversational systems provide a natural, easy-to-use interface for user-requested actions. They’re also increasingly capable of monitoring conversations, taking notes, documenting action items and creating calendar entries without prompting, which is ideal for meetings. Meanwhile, chatbots are quickly improving employee and customer experiences by immediately answering simple technical questions and providing step-by-step assistance to resolve common issues. Plus, AI can automatically and accurately translate between languages, which will benefit global companies interacting with customers in multiple countries.

AI has grown exponentially over the past few years and will continue to play a pivotal role for DXC – we’re using it to give employees and customers the power to be more productive and they’re responding eagerly.

Maria Pardee is senior vice president and general manager for Workplace and Mobility at DXC Technology

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VIEWPOINT

How innovation drives digital transformation TA R A S Y O U N G : C O M PA N Y N E T

Digital strategies that account for people and culture alongside processes and technology are driving real organisational transformation

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t’s tempting to believe that digital transformation can happen simply by investing in technology. But transferring outdated processes and broken business models to a new platform won’t make them work – it just makes them outdated and broken in new ways.

Smart business leaders recognise that technology is only part of successful digital transformation. Innovative organisations are considering the employee digital experience, and consistently putting their people and culture first.

The diffusion of innovations model predicts that the bulk of organisations fall into groups known as the early and late majorities. They are happy to carry on as before, doing things how they’ve

“Innovative organisations consistently put their people and culture first” always been done, until the weight of change is so great that they have to acknowledge it.

Whether that business change is rejected, or taken up and transforms the organisation, relies on the groundwork by those leading the innovation. At CompanyNet, we are fortunate to work with a number of forward-thinking organisations who are making a success of this ­culture-first approach, blazing a trail of innovation for the majority to follow.

We work with NHS National Services Scotland (NSS), who provide services critical to supporting

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our national health system. Three foundational principles drive NHS NSS in their goal for digital transformation: technology should provide employees with a holistic working platform; their environment should encourage collaboration, and their culture should support the adoption of a digital workplace.

Underpinned by user-focused service design and more agile development of processes and tools, this strategy is leading to a better employee experience and improved business efficiency.

We also work with Scotland’s national water body, Scottish Water, who practiced a user-centric approach in implementing their ­ new Office 365 digital workplace. Workshops were conducted with a cross-section of staff, leading to the creation of an ‘Early Adopters’ group. This group helped build an intranet based on our Kira platform, and a new Yammer site.

These cornerstones of their new digital workplace were then rolled out to the rest of the organisation. By working closely with staff, and bearing their needs in mind, Scottish Water enjoyed huge take-up of the platform. It is now creating deep business transformation across the organisation.

These organisations are proving that grounding their digital strategy in a user-first, ­culture-first approach is a clear path to wider, lasting transformation.

It’s time more forward-thinking businesses joined them.

Taras Young is marketing manager at CompanyNet

INTERVIEW

A new era of intelligent transformation Co-founder and CEO of LiveTiles Karl Redenbach explains how artificial intelligence solutions will help companies approach digital transformation with a new mindset

BY REBECCA GIBSON

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orldwide spending on digital transformation technologies will hit almost US$1.3 trillion in 2018, according to analyst firm IDC. However, LiveTiles co-founder and CEO Karl Redenbach predicts that many ­forward-thinking and innovative companies will go a step further by embarking on the next phase of technological evolution: intelligent transformation.

“The era of intelligent transformation will see companies approaching digital transformation with a completely different mindset,” says Redenbach.

“Rather than adopting new technologies to update business processes, they’ll focus on implementing technologies that truly meet employees’ needs.”

Redenbach predicts that businesses will adopt scalable and highly personalised artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to further improve productivity, efficiency and user engagement.

“We envisage a world where companies use personalised AI solutions to automate mundane tasks and help their human employees to work to their full potential,” says Redenbach. “This will have multiple benefits, the most important of which will be that employees will be more satisfied because they’ll have more time to focus on ‘human’ tasks such as creative problem solving and improving client relationships.”

An easy way for companies to adopt AI in a simple, yet effective, way is to deploy e­ mployee-facing or customer-facing chatbots. Powered by Microsoft’s natural language processing technology, LiveTiles Bots enables companies to use drag and drop capabilities, rather than code, to quickly and easily create personalised AI assistants that help to solve specific business challenges.

“Bots can be designed for a specific purpose, so an enterprise might have a human resources bot

“Companies will use personalised AI solutions to automate mundane tasks and help human employees” that answers employees’ questions about remaining vacation days, or a bot that schedules meetings, or a retail bot that can surface sales data,” says Redenbach. “Companies can integrate these chatbots directly into their digital environments and manage them from a central platform in much the same way as a traditional organisation chart.”

LiveTiles Bots is already helping multiple companies to embark on intelligent transformation.

A major airline is building an AI assistant that provides flight attendants with access to customer profiles and the information they need to answer passengers’ queries. Meanwhile, a distributor of building materials is creating a sales bot that provides customer notes and information about deals to help staff close sales.

“We’re promoting LiveTiles Bots via Microsoft’s major US sales channels and market responses has been amazing” says Redenbach. “We’re now in a strong position to help some of the world’s biggest organisations address common business challenges using simple AI solutions.”

LiveTiles CEO Karl Redenbach (left) with co-founder and chief experience officer Peter Nguyen-Brown

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DevOps enters the boardroom M A R Y R O B B I N S : R E D G AT E S O F T W A R E

DevOps is gaining ground because it offers significant business benefits. Include the database, and the rewards are even greater

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ou’ve undoubtedly heard of DevOps before. By encouraging collaboration and teamwork, removing the barriers between development and operations and introducing automation, it speeds up software delivery and enables features to move from the fingers of developers into the hands of customers faster.

It’s an important topic to stay current with because software development is no longer confined to the usual suspects like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Virtually every company now relies on technology to support their business efforts, and for many it has become a core part of those efforts.

“Data privacy and protection is a topic that is now discussed across boardroom tables” Think of getting a quote for your car insurance, ordering anything online, making a call to customer support, buying a concert ticket, or any of a myriad of other actions that are now eased and enabled by technology. In each case, introducing DevOps into the software development that drives that technology has been proven to accelerate the process, reduce errors and give companies a competitive advantage.

There’s a new kid on the block too: the database. Behind many of the applications that businesses rely on, there’s a database keeping a record of transactions, online behaviour and changes in

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customer data. When the application is updated, the database often needs to be updated as well.

Companies are now recognising that the same DevOps processes that bring big benefits to the development of applications also need to be introduced to the development of databases, or they become a bottleneck in the process.

As a result, software tools have been created by companies like Redgate which integrate with and work alongside the same infrastructure used for developing applications. So developers can work on updating the application and the database at the same time, in the environment they’re already familiar with, and ensure the speed and efficiency that DevOps brings is not held back.

There’s an additional – and timely – business benefit too. The recent introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the many stories about data breaches have made data privacy and protection a topic that is now discussed across boardroom tables.

Fortunately, including the database in DevOps prevents mistakes reaching production, automates many processes that otherwise introduce errors, and provides an audit trail of changes for audit and compliance purposes.

If you’re undertaking a DevOps initiative, remember to include the database as well. Your business will move faster and at the same time you’ll take a significant step forward in meeting the increasing demands to protect your customers’ data.

Mary Robbins is DevOps product marketing manager at Redgate Software

VIEWPOINT

Achieving a competitive edge with automation A LY S S A P U T Z E R : M E TA F I L E I N F O R M AT I O N S Y S T E M S

Robotic process automation software helps companies stay ahead of the curve by accelerating product development and delivery, reducing costs and enhancing compliance

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o matter what industry they’re in, every company wants to be the leader of the pack.

Achieving that competitive edge can be challenging, particularly now that customers and vendors expect instant gratification, and employees want to be able to complete tasks more efficiently and accurately. Although expensive, robotic process automation (RPA) software is a long-term investment that can help companies meet these aims by aligning business processes with the needs of the people inside and outside of the organisation. RPA automates repetitive tasks, allowing enterprises to deliver information and services to customers and vendors faster and more seamlessly.

Automation makes business procedures more efficient, so employees have more time to work on product development and process improvement.

This means companies can accelerate development or get goods and services into the hands of their customers faster than the competition.

By eliminating manual paper-based processes, RPA also cuts costs associated with manual data entry and physical storage. Companies can redirect this money towards strategic technological investments and put themselves miles above competitors.

RPA also enables enterprises to ensure that they’re complying with record retention and information governance laws. Storing information physically heightens the risk of security breaches, fraud and non-compliance. However, RPA ensures that there’s an audit trail of who worked on a document, what they did, when they did it and what happened to it after it was in their virtual possession.

Enterprises must be more strategic when making business decisions to surpass their fast-moving and tech-savvy competitors and become a household name in their industry. Automation solutions ensure that a company’s structured and unstructured information is automatically received, organised and indexed accurately so they have the intelligence they need to make calculated decisions for continued growth. This includes expanding the RPA solution into other departments within the organisation, such as accounts receivable, legal and human resources. These are all places where automation can make companies even more innovative and efficient, giving them a leg-up over others.

It’s vital that companies embrace opportunities to become best-in-class and RPA software gives them the edge they need to become the go-to for products and services in their industry sector.

Alyssa Putzer is marketing communications specialist for Metafile Information Systems

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VIEWPOINT

A digital blueprint for IT support CAROL RIZIO: DXC TECHNOLOGY

IT issues can quickly reduce employee productivity and impact a company’s bottom line, so businesses should offer instant support via multiple digital channels

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very employee has experienced an IT issue that has prevented them from completing a task and working productively. While employees can easily resolve minor problems – such as resetting passwords – by themselves in minutes, they usually require advanced assistance for complex issues. Traditionally, employees had to telephone the IT help desk and wait for an administrator to resolve the issue, which could take a long time.

Aiming to reduce downtime and enhance the user experience, many companies are using technologies like analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), automation and machine learning to develop end-

“Support solutions must fit the way employees work, not the other way around ” to-end systems that offer instant and contextualised IT support for employees via multiple channels.

When deploying digital innovation, companies should first identify which IT issues are most common and disruptive for employees and take a design-thinking approach to architect a platform around those scenarios. Ideally, the digital IT support system should automate basic processes and monitor the health of employees’ IT environments in real time to predict and address emerging problems before they impact productivity. The support solution must also fit the way employees work, not the other way around. Sometimes a self-service portal or a virtual agent is the best match for the

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employee; other times face-to-face support may be better. All options should offer contextualised support relevant for the employee at the moment they need help, so they can get back to their jobs.

Enterprises should start small, prove success and then extend the solution as technologies mature. This maximises the likelihood of the company enriching the employee experience and simultaneously reducing downtime, thereby boosting revenue.

Recognising that digital transformation is an ongoing journey rather than a quick fix, DXC Technology has created end-to-end digital support services to help companies deliver IT that evolves alongside their employees’ needs.

Built with integrated AI, automation and machine learning capabilities, the service uses monitoring agents and analytics to continually track employees’ individual IT environments, pre-empting IT issues and eliminating them at the root before they become disruptive. It includes individualised self-service via contextually aware options that dynamically adapt to what users need to get work done quickly. The service is powered

by AI, robotics, and natural language processing to provide employees with personalised 24/7 virtual assistance with basic tasks whenever and wherever they need it. These capabilities empower companies to deliver an enhanced and personalised support experience for employees, while optimising IT support costs and boosting their bottom line.

Carol Rizio is the lead principal for Workplace and Mobility at DXC Technology

VIEWPOINT

Reshaping process engineering J O S E P H M C M U L L E N : AV E VA

While process engineering software is vital to various industries, for many organisations many of the tasks associated with procuring, deploying and supporting engineering solutions have resided in the control and responsibility of IT groups. The cloud is changing this

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hile the IT department certainly has a significant role in planning technology investments and securing and sustaining IT solutions for a multitude of enterprise customers, often the IT demand process does not reflect the priority and agility requirements of engineering in favour of other competing IT priorities such as finance, network infrastructure and other IT services.

The onset of Industry 4.0 brings cloud computing. Providers such as Microsoft, with its Azure cloud platform, that partner with engineering software companies such as AVEVA have opened the door to new possibilities by shifting the support model for engineering

“Cloud computing has brought about a fundamental shift in how software is deployed” simulation for design and operations software. These partnerships also provide more security and put control in the hands of the engineering department, while relying less on IT organisation.

Cloud computing means that the actual software resides on a server (or multiple servers) and can be accessed via the internet from various locations. This results in many benefits. It provides a consistent always-on platform allowing users to run simulations at any time, location, or on any device. It allows users to begin

optimising design right away without having to develop specialised skills. And it provides the benefits of engineering software without the overhead of installation, deployment, version control, and hardware maintenance.

What’s more, it increases engineering design agility, eliminates the long IT upgrade and computer refresh cycles and makes it easy to deploy models securely – allowing engineering models to be shared with partners and suppliers.

Cloud computing has brought about a fundamental shift in how software is deployed and how end-users interact with that software.

AVEVA has embraced this trend and is working to remain ahead of the curve as our customers start to adopt cloud computing themselves.

This vision has reshaped the role of process engineering and simulation tools. In the past, depending on the project phase and the responsible party, a variety of different engineering tools were employed. This increased the engineering effort and cost, while inhibiting agility. The old way of process engineering also prohibited the effective use of concurrent engineering, which has been proven to reduce costs and help compress project schedules.

Implementation of process engineering software in the cloud leads to a new way of doing things that streamlines projects and results in a much higher ROI. Joseph McMullen is marketing director for Strategic Partnerships and Sponsorships at AVEVA

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Unblock the barriers to collaboration J E F F S C H U M A N N : W I R E TA P

Many firms in regulated industries put a block on collaboration platforms due to security fears. However, taking steps to unblock the barriers can bring significant benefits

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ompanies across the globe continue to adopt collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Yammer as they search for ways to innovate and increase employee productivity. It’s easy to see why – with increased cross-functional communication, collaboration platforms can raise the productivity of high-skill knowledge workers by 20-25%, according to McKinsey. Furthermore, by leveraging fully implemented collaborative technologies, organisations can unlock between US$900 billion and US$1.3 trillion in value.

When it comes to regulated industries, such as healthcare or financial services, organisations often shy away from full collaboration adoption for all employees. Regulations such as HIPAA, PCI and FINRA, for example, raise additional concerns from a legal and compliance perspective.

It’s fair to say that introducing new communication technology to a regulated enterprise can

expose the organisation to some inherent risk.

Sometimes the task of problem-solving for compliance, risk mitigation, and functionality makes it tempting to say no to adopting collaboration for regulated employees, or even the entire enterprise. However, that could ultimately cost your organisation greatly in lost productivity.

With the potential lift in efficiency, innovation, and disruption, these collaboration tools can give an organisation a huge competitive advantage.

The choice to unblock compliance barriers, versus turn down the opportunity altogether, could transform your company’s path to innovation.

Aware by Wiretap is an AI-infused monitoring, compliance and governance solution that seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Teams and Yammer. The tool enables organisations to maintain compliance with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, FINRA, PCI, CFTC and more.

The easily-configurable, policy-enabled platform safeguards against the transmission of sensitive data; it also offers user data management and retention capabilities.

Don’t let user behaviour and compliance concerns prevent your organisation from a full rollout of Microsoft Teams or Yammer. By leveraging Aware by Wiretap to unblock barriers to collaboration, even enterprises in highly regulated industries can release the floodgates of innovation and open communication for all employees – in time leading to unquantifiable organisational value.

Jeff Schumann is CEO and co-founder at Wiretap

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VIEWPOINT

Fail fast and often COREY HYNES: LEARN ON DEMAND SYSTEMS

Learning companies should focus efforts providing safe sandboxes – let learners use the skills they have to attempt things and, if they fail, let them easily try again

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homas Edison once said, “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Fail-fast is a development methodology that works on the premise of assuming you will fail, finding the failures, and moving on rapidly, often resulting in more stable products and fewer issues.

What if we apply these principals to learning?

The fail-fast learning method is built around the idea of presenting the learner with desired outcomes or challenges. The learner is given a goal – expressed in requirements – and must meet the goal or solve the problem by experimenting. He may or may not be given hints, clues or reference material.

The learning platform monitors his progress in real time and provides him with live feedback on his success or failure on completing the tasks. If appropriate, the platform provides him with the option to try again and again and again, until he gets it right.

This fail-fast method yields immediate results:

1. Learners will very quickly find out if they understand the topic or technology and if existing skills transfer to new products or a new version.

2. This is, without a doubt, the fastest method of establishing a baseline of what a learner knows and what he needs to work on.

3. The platform evaluates the learner’s ability to work in a real environment with access to documentation, tools and working product.

4. The act of failing is an incredibly powerful teaching tool.

Learning companies should focus efforts on providing learners with safe sandboxes. Provide them with a set of goals and let them experiment.

Let them use the skills they have to attempt things and, if they fail, let them easily try again.

Learn on Demand Systems is taking the lead by developing a series of challenge-based learning products that put the notion of fail-fast at the core of the experience. These challenges are presented in our isolated Cloud Slice solution on Microsoft Azure, and they give learners a set of tasks to perform.

As often as they wish, learners can attempt to complete each task and ask the platform to verify that they completed the task correctly.

Learners can choose from challenges in multiple formats and at multiple levels of difficulty with logical paths of progression. The challenges supplement traditional video and instructor-based learning by giving learners both the chance to prove what they’ve learned from training and the opportunity to quickly establish a knowledge baseline that helps them determine whether they require training or can figure it out on their own.

Corey Hynes is CEO at Learn On Demand Systems

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VIEWPOINT

A smooth transition to Microsoft Teams ANDERS LOKKE: PEXIP

In order to effectively make the transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams, companies need to overcome a number of interoperability challenges. This is where Pexip can help

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ast year, when Microsoft announced its plan to retire Skype for Business Online and make Microsoft Teams the new platform for intelligent communications in Office 365, many companies started to think about how to integrate Teams into their ways of working.

As Pexip already delivers a Microsoft-certified interoperability solution for Skype for Business, we were pleased to announce that we will also do the same for Microsoft Teams.

Skype for Business has firmly established itself within corporate communications and positioned itself alongside traditional video conferencing for business meetings. As we all know, these solutions don’t easily work together, so vendors such as Pexip have helped solve these interoperability challenges. In fact, 9 out of 10 requests that we receive from customers are related to interoperability in one way or another.

Our priority in making video teleconferencing (VTC) interoperability available for Teams

is to ensure continuity of functionality for customers, making it seamless and easy for organisations to start using Teams. Companies that already use Pexip will be able to use a single application for VTC interoperability with both Skype for Business and Teams without the need to run parallel environments. Moreover, as a cloud enterprise application, Pexip gives customers complete control of their conferencing environment – with audio, video and content in dedicated cloud application instances rather than sharing services with other organisations as is the case with standard software-as-a-service solutions. With dedicated instances comes full control of IT administration rights, versioning, quality of service, and integrations, which is extremely important in today’s complex communications environments.

Pexip Infinity is a cloud enterprise application that enterprises use to overcome their video communications interoperability challenges, and to extend the use of video to everyone inside or outside their organisation. With focus on scalability, control, and ease of use and integration with other systems, it is used by leading organisations worldwide.

If you are already familiar with Pexip Infinity video interoperability for Skype for Business and want to benefit from the same functionality for Microsoft Teams, it will be as simple as performing an upgrade and applying appropriate licensing keys when it becomes available – this results in a totally painless transition.

Anders Lokke is head of marketing at Pexip

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VIEWPOINT

Empowering Microsoft partners S I M O N O ’ C A R R O L L : M E R C AT O S O L U T I O N S

Software developers are in huge demand. In order to bypass shortage issues, Microsoft partners now need to look towards low-code platform environments to easier consume new technologies

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artnering with Microsoft is a safe bet at the moment. After putting a lot of focus and support behind the partner network over the last couple of years, it is currently working through a massive reorganisation with divisions to focus on AI, the cloud and what it calls ‘experience and devices’. It is obvious to see that grouping cloud and AI makes sense when competing against the likes of Amazon and Google, whereas the new ‘experiences and devices’ team is set to unify how Microsoft is developing its products for consumer and business users, including mobile, Windows and Office 365.

Since taking the reins at Microsoft, Satya Nadella has been shifting the company’s focus to future technologies: cloud; AI; and bots – and all with great success.

“With every good story there’s also an additional twist. In this case, it’s the global shortage of software developers” So, with all this innovation and demand for future technologies, how can Microsoft partners stay relevant to deliver beyond their standard Microsoft cloud offerings with AI, machine learning and cognitive services, whilst still consuming existing data, legacy systems, and other non-Microsoft systems?

In a recent keynote speech, Scott Guthrie said: “The expectation for a developer to know all these new technologies and the expectations a company has for its developers to deliver these breakthrough technologies has never been higher.”

However, as with every good story there’s also an additional twist. In this case, it’s the global shortage of software developers. According to ManpowerGroup’s 11th-annual Talent Shortage Survey, demand for IT skills specifically, has skyrocketed: IT personnel – including developers, programmers, database administrators and IT leaders and managers – has jumped from the ninth most difficult to fill positions to the second on a global scale.

Microsoft partners now need to look towards low-code platform environments such as Mercato’s KnowledgeKube to easier consume these new technologies and bypass developer shortage issues.

Low-code platforms empower n ­ on-developers to build futureproof applications by using agile implementation, automating processes and expanding connectivity to easily incorporate new technologies.

With the advanced connectivity built into platforms such as KnowledgeKube, users can join together Microsoft systems and services as well as connecting to over 70 other technologies within minutes, straight out of the box.

Partnering with Mercato provides access to platforms that empower Microsoft partners to extend out their offerings following either a ‘you build’, or ‘we build’ approach, meaning partners can start delivering ground-breaking solutions to their clients from day one.

Simon O’Carroll is marketing director at Mercato Solutions

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VIEWPOINT

Create your own cloud ecosystem S TA M AT I S B A R B O U N A K I S : I N T E R W O R K S . C L O U D

The interworks.cloud platform empowers distributors in the Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers programme to effectively manage their reseller relationships

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ompanies of every size and from every part of the planet are rapidly adopting cloudbased solutions, so they can capitalise on the benefits and the advancements of new technologies that are now easily available, such as internet of things and artificial intelligence. Cloud adoption rates are rising rapidly, so technology distributors and their resellers are facing both significant opportunities and major operational challenges.

Those who successfully adapt to the new software delivery landscape will grow their business, but those who fail to adapt may lose business.

Distributors in the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) programme are facing increasing demand for plans for Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Azure and several other carefully selected cloud services from their third-party vendors. To successfully deliver these plans, distributors need to provide their resellers with easyto-use technology and automated services that will

enable them to buy and manage cloud services on behalf of their customers. This technology should also be able to help resellers send accurate bills for subscriptions and enable them to publish their own branded marketplaces that consist of a mix of cloud solutions and other services and products.

To address this need, the interworks.cloud platform combines the flexibility of a complete cloud management platform with the power of a Microsoft CSP automation solution. It includes a customisable marketplace, an automated provisioning engine, a powerful billing engine, modules for customer relationship management, business reporting, resellers management, notifications and more. As a Microsoft CSP automation solution, the interworks.cloud platform also offers special tools designed to relieve many of the day-to-day issues faced by CSP partners. These include automated Microsoft Catalogue update, automated subscriptions reconciliation, Microsoft Azure consumption forecasting against customers’ credit limit, subscription price protection, connection to multiple Microsoft Partner Centre accounts and more.

Best of all, the interworks.cloud platform makes it easy for distributors to deliver all of these services and capabilities to multiple resellers and their end customers in multiple geographies in roughly five minutes. This means interworks.cloud puts distributors far ahead of their competition and at the heart of the new business-as-a-service ecosystem.

Stamatis Barbounakis is vice president of sales at interworks.cloud

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MAKE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION A REALITY. DXC CAN HELP YOU MIGRATE THE RIGHT WORKLOADS TO THE CLOUD, MODERNIZE APPLICATIONS AND SIMPLIFY TRADITIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE, SECURELY AND EFFICIENTLY. www.dxc.technology/KickApps

© 2018 DXC Technology Company. All rights reserved.

VIEWPOINT

Office 365 tailor made NEIL THOMAS: CLARANET

The importance of designing training around users’ specific needs, so your Office 365 rollout goes to plan

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’ve had a few conversations recently that have started in the same way: “We’re going to move to Office 365, but we need to organise some training for our users”. Of course, training is a key part of any change programme and is a key part of driving adoption of the tools available in Office 365. But if it’s not considered carefully, it can be of minimal use and even counter-productive.

To address this issue, we always advise customers to start by thinking about the business outcomes they are trying to achieve. Simply inviting teams to generic training (even once you’ve selected a tool that is likely to be used from the vast array available within Office 365) isn’t going to get much interest. However, tell colleagues how you are going to provide them some training that will help them to do part of their job in a better way (such as the capability to collaborate online with colleagues on the next monthly report they need to produce so they can get it done quicker and without version control

issues, for example), and you’ve set an outcome that aligns to their goals, not yours.

There is even more to consider, such as which users are going to work with which tools, how you are going to set them up, the order that each tool will be rolled out, and how much ‘experimentation’ you plan to allow.

All these elements need careful thought to ensure any training is specific and relevant. You may also want to develop very detailed rules about what documents are stored where on SharePoint, who can access which folders and what rights different users have to change structure/create teams for example. If your training doesn’t consider your own set up and policies, its value can be significantly less.

There are likely to be tools that you’ll adopt company-wide, such as Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and tools only used by some teams or roles across your organisation (Planner, Forms etc.). Even then you will have some key decisions to make, especially with the changes in the collaboration tooling and the rise of Microsoft Teams. Are you going to jump straight to Microsoft Teams now, or are you an existing Skype for Business user and you want to stay put with that, at least for the time being?

Getting all of these things right is normally beyond the skill set you’ll find in an IT team. It needs cross-business support, and often bringing in a specialist consultant to help.

Microsoft’s modern collaboration tools can make a big impact to the efficiency, productivity, and creativity of your organisation, but only if the implementation and adoption is well considered.

Neil Thomas is marketing and communications services director at Claranet

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INTERVIEW

How to migrate DNS successfully Magnus Bjornsson outlines how the Men & Mice software suite makes it easy for organisations to move domain name system management to the hybrid cloud

BY REBECCA GIBSON

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n the past, organisations managed domain name systems (DNS) in traditional homogeneous on-premise IT environments. Today, they want to take advantage of the scalability, redundancy and cost benefits of the cloud by moving to hybrid infrastructures. However, this process is far from simple – companies often have issues with vendor lock-in, software incompatibility, variations in APIs, retaining established DNS zones during the migration, and handling different management consoles between platforms and services.

“Existing on-premise DNS deployments can’t simply be moved to a cloud infrastructure and managing multiple platforms simultaneously can lead to DNS vulnerabilities,” says Magnus Bjornsson, CEO of Men & Mice. “Understanding the migration process between on-premise and cloud environments is imperative for a smooth transition to a hybrid infrastructure.”

Building on decades of experience with on-premise DNS, dynamic host configuration ­ protocol (DHCP) and IP address management (IPAM), Men & Mice has developed a suite of solutions that helps companies to address issues of compatibility and visibility across DNS networks when migrating to a hybrid environment.

The Men & Mice Suite is an agnostic overlay software for network management that automates business processes and increases the stability, performance and scalability of IP infrastructures. It also offers native support for Microsoft Azure DNS, so it’s easy for companies to migrate or import their DNS zones into Microsoft-based networks.

“The Men & Mice Suite allows network managers to manage data through APIs and use a single interface to access various platforms, track any changes and see all cloud DNS zones and

“Men & Mice provides organisations with all the tools they need to successfully manage DNS operations” on-premise DNS deployments across multiple subscriptions,” says Bjornsson. “IT administrators can save time and resources – and increase security – during migrations by using workflow extensions to automatically tag DNS zones.”

The Men & Mice Suite also offers a holistic approach to IPAM, enabling customers to gather IP address data from multiple sources across multiple platforms. Plugging in private cloud and hypervisor orchestration is similarly easy and seamless. Built-in xDNS redundancy also defuses the impact of distributed denial of services attacks and other DNS incidents, ensuring more than 99.99% uptime.

“The Men & Mice Suite provides companies with all the tools they need to successfully manage complex enterprise DNS operations and migrations,” says Bjornsson. “Our specialised industry knowledge and close collaboration with the Microsoft Azure team ensures that we can offer high service levels, improve network security and increase uptime for customers’ critical network resources.”

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PROFILED: DIMENSIONS

Using technology to help those with autism How GCI has deployed Skype for Business and Teams across 750 sites for UK charity Dimensions

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imensions is one of the country’s largest not-for-profit organisations geared towards helping those with learning disabilities, autism, challenging behaviour and complex needs. With over 7,000 members of staff supporting people and their families across 750 sites, Dimensions plays an active part in helping communities UK-wide.

The huge challenge of supplying IT and network services to 750 sites across the UK was catching up with Dimensions’ ageing network infrastructure. With slow and sluggish bandwidth, the network was becoming insufficient.

Legacy systems and poor network infrastructure were negatively impacting the support it could offer to those under its care, as well as the efficiency of its staff.

ICT company GCI stepped in to provide the help that was required. GCI upgraded Dimensions’ network infrastructure and deployed 1,750 Skype for Business seats which run fully from the cloud. This was further enhanced by the deployment of 80 Enghouse contact centre seats, wall boards and integrated operator consoles at all regional centres, delivering an omnichannel solution that is fully integrated with Skype for Business.

Dimensions now has a robust network infrastructure with high-speed connectivity, with staff reporting that line speeds are already 100 times faster. Its omnichannel unified communications solution and fully scalable contact centre allows the company to deliver a more streamlined customer experience.

An unexpected cost-saving benefit was that, by using Skype for Business to deliver its training, Dimensions has reduced the amount spent on this crucial task by two thirds. Additionally, the use of Microsoft Teams to upload and update complex documents such as care plans means

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that staff members can fill in these forms in their own language, with Teams translating questions and answers as necessary to help avoid mistakes.

Best of all for Dimensions, by consolidating all its suppliers and selecting GCI to manage all its services, multiple challenges could be addressed at once whilst striving for maximum cost efficiencies, safe in the knowledge that the company is supported around the clock.

“This was no ordinary tender; we provided an exhaustive brief, containing 72,000-line items across 750 sites,” explains Mark Verrier, head of IT at Dimensions. “We didn’t want to have ‘suppliers’ anymore – of which there were over 40 – and instead wanted to work with just one partner that would truly understand our needs, culture and desired outcomes. GCI were the only company that we considered able to demonstrate this, and we felt that GCI wanted to do a good job for us, rather than just make money.”

PROFILED: ARUP

Successful collaboration using video With help from Pexip, Arup’s thousands of employees across 38 countries are able to use high definition video, voice and data collaboration

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rup, an independent firm of designers, planners, engineers, consultants and technical specialists, employs over 11,000 people operating across 38 countries. The company relies on approximately 400 video-enabled meeting rooms to connect its global workforce. But, with the amount of team collaboration Arup requires, the company ran into challenges with capacity and meeting sizes and had to limit the number of people it could simultaneously allow to meet and collaborate in virtual meetings – turning employees away and hindering the collaboration process.

Arup sought a new solution to bridge the gap between its video conferencing rooms and software solutions, both increasing its video conferencing capabilities, while also bridging its various technology platforms, specifically Skype for Business and its Cisco video infrastructure.

“Initially, within our proof of concept for next generation virtual meeting rooms, we were evaluating bridging solutions from three different vendors. However, we found these to be more complex than needed – they also required proprietary hardware and could not achieve satisfactory interoperability and HD video integration with Microsoft Lync at the time,” explains Chris Ellen, Unified Messaging team lead at Arup.

A solution from Microsoft partner Pexip promised to solve the problem. “Pexip Infinity was brought in through a revised vendor list. It met our requirements for a software-only solution and we had it working globally in less than two hours. We were really impressed.”

By deploying the Pexip Infinity scalable software platform worldwide, Arup’s thousands of

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staff across 38 countries are able to use high definition video, voice and data collaboration.

Arup’s traditional video conferencing rooms are now able to seamlessly connect to Skype for Business meetings via the Pexip interoperability gateway. Arup staff are issued with a personal virtual meeting room with a PIN number for security. Individual users can control their conferences and view presentations from their own mobile phone or tablet.

The company now has no capacity constraints.

“Our existing video infrastructure was physically

restricted by the number of hardware boxes in our network. With Pexip Infinity, there’s no restriction on the number of people that can use the system. The platform is always on and always available, which enables the team to connect instantly whenever collaboration is required in their workflow,” said Ellen. “For Arup, minimal to no investment is required to start deploying the solution as we can utilise existing infrastructure. Being virtual also means conferencing capacity can be increased within minutes and the platform is inherently redundant.”

Using Pexip Infinity means users can dial in and use the same PC or device for a video call but at increased quality. “We don’t have to license additional software clients either, which is an attractive value proposition,” explained Ellen.

Arup can also extend the solution to incorporate client meetings. “We can now use the Pexip functionality for external meeting participants. In the past we had to ship a copy of Cisco Jabber and provision a user account.

This was cumbersome for everyone involved, it introduced a delay and had a cost attached to it. With Pexip Infinity we now just email a URL and external callers can experience professional quality video via their web browser,” explained Ellen.

“At Arup, we aim to introduce new, forward thinking, innovative and simple to operate technologies into our business. The deployment of Pexip Infinity will not only reinvent how our company communicates internally but will also change how we communicate with our external clients,” explained Roy Salfarlie, visual collaboration specialist at Arup.

This is just the start of the Arup and Pexip relationship. “The way in which Arup has deployed our technology is testament to the simplified, interoperable and virtualised way in which our Infinity software helps people to collaborate,” concluded Anders Løkke, head of marketing at Pexip. “We look forward to enjoying a partnership with Arup for many years to come.”

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PROFILED: CODETWO AND DENK IT

Adding value to Office 365 By becoming a CodeTwo partner, Denk IT has expanded its product portfolio with tools dedicated to Office 365 and has become more competitive in the cloud services market

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enk IT is a German company that provides a wide range of tailor-made IT services. As a Microsoft cloud solution provider, it also offers Office 365 to its customers. With the ever-increasing popularity of cloud technologies, Denk IT wanted to expand its product range by including tools dedicated to helping organisations using Office 365 to be more competitive in the cloud services market.

“Companies interested in Microsoft cloud computing solutions want to make sure they can get the most out of them,” says Axel Denk, Denk IT’s managing director. “In response to their needs, we began looking for proven and secure applications designed specifically for Office 365.”

While searching for such applications, Denk IT came across CodeTwo, which provides a range of solutions including CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365 – which allows users to create and centrally manage e-mail signatures and disclaimers for all Exchange Online users – as well as other solutions dedicated to Office 365 including a secure and reliable offline backup application and a fast and solid migration tool.

“CodeTwo software has been perfect for us,” says Denk. “Its solutions integrate seamlessly with Office 365 and further enhance its features.

On top of that, these programs are also compliant with German data protection law, which is also very important to us. It was only natural that we became CodeTwo’s official reseller.”

As it turned out, the demand for CodeTwo software was great. “We’re already certified

by CodeTwo as a Platinum Reseller,” explains Denk. “I’m also very satisfied with the CodeTwo Partner Program. We appreciate all the assistance we receive from CodeTwo, and we can always count on its top-notch 24-hour customer support team. Over the years we’ve developed a

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“We believe that our solutions are a great addition to Office 365 – just like ketchup is to hot dogs” very close relationship with CodeTwo, so much so that we consider them to be friends.”

CodeTwo’s business development director Szymon Szczęśniak says that joining the Partner Program is a win-win deal. “We sell more products, and our partners have instant access to great products used by more than 64,000 companies around the world that meet the highest security and reliability standards imposed by Microsoft. We also offer our resellers very attractive margins and free in-house licenses.

“We believe that our solutions are a great addition to Office 365 – just like ketchup is to hot dogs. If you sell hot dogs, you should also offer them with ketchup, right?” Szymon concludes.

S O L U T I O N S P O T L I G H T : C H A R I S M AT H I C S

Don’t make security suffer The Virtual Smart Card solution from Charismathics offers security no matter where you are when accessing your company data

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he networking and digital transformation of business processes is in full swing. This requires a large number of users – employees, business partners and customers – to have access to your company’s systems and applications. To ensure that business operations remain steady, IT systems must be sufficiently resilient, and it’s imperative that they be protected against malfunction and unauthorised access.

This often presents business travellers, and especially senior management, with a dilemma.

Since the username and password combination is nowhere near sufficient these days, a company’s security policy requires secure two-factor authentication with smart cards. This is fine for a desktop in the office or with the smart card reader on your notebook, but it’s impractical for business trips. These procedures are then often abandoned, and as a result, security suffers. But let’s not forget that the highest level of security is necessary with sensitive information – regardless of where the user is and when they need to access their computer.

With its Virtual Smart Card, Charismathics provides a solution that offers the same level of security of a smart card but does not require an additional physical authenticator. It offers usability, additional security and value for money. Customers receive sophisticated technology and support for the latest Microsoft operating systems.

A true virtual smart card like that from Charismathics implements the full smart card stack, including a personal computer/smart card reader driver, smart card platform and applet or profile down to the protocol level.

This ensures security, interoperability with existing applications and manageability.

It uses the built-in trusted platform module or Intel Software Guard Extensions on your PC to secure cryptographic keys and execute secure functions. Both support secure storage of cryptographic keys, secure execution of cryptography, and anti-hammering of the user PIN. Support for Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 comes as standard, and the solution is fully integrated with CSSI, Charismathics’ enterprise smart card middleware software.

It also offers support for the Windows Crypto API as well as the PKCS11 standard, for the widest possible application support.

All this is achieved with optimal cost of ownership – the Charismathics Virtual Smart Card lowers the cost of issuance, maintenance and replacement of credentials.

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C O M M U N I C AT I O N S AND MEDIA

B O B D E H AV E N : M I C R O S O F T

New developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are shaking up businesses operating in every sector – and the communications and media industry is no exception. AI technologies promise to transform the lives of content creators and content consumers alike, managing the brunt of time-consuming manual tasks and facilitating greater creativity.

Those companies that act fast and embrace new AI-infused solutions will reap the rewards.

Read on to find out how.

F E AT U R E

Transforming the media industry with

AI

Artificial intelligence offers huge promise for media companies – yet success to date has been reserved for the pioneering few. Here we discover what needs to be done to overcome challenges and ensure the benefits are felt right across the industry

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rtificial intelligence (AI) promises to transform the media and entertainment business – impacting everything from content creation to the consumer experience.

“AI will influence all parts of the media value chain, helping content creators to be more creative, helping content editors to be more productive, and helping content consumers to find the content that matches their interests and current situation,” explains Rainer Kellerhals, Microsoft’s Media and Entertainment industry lead for the EMEA region. “It will assist human creativity and human curiosity by taking a lot of the leg work out of finding relevant content, navigating large amounts of content, and re-formatting and re-purposing content.”

Lorenzo Zanni, IABM’s lead research analyst, agrees. “Media companies can leverage AI throughout their content supply chains to automate operations, drive decision-making and personalise the consumer experience,” he says, pointing towards automatic metadata tagging and extraction as an excellent example of one of the most effective use cases of AI today.

“Through techniques such as image recognition and speech-to-text transcription, metadata tagging is the most widespread application of AI so far. The metadata automatically created by the

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AI algorithms can then be used to drive content monetisation strategies.”

And this is just the start. Zanni says that media companies can also use AI to strengthen their predictive capabilities. “For example, AI tools can be used to predict demand to adjust resources (in on-demand cloud models) or to predict possible disruptions in the content

Using AI for advanced media production Media and entertainment software provider Avid has unveiled Avid On Demand, a set of cloud services and solutions that enable content creators to efficiently edit, manage and deliver content and to collaborate across sites and organisations in a completely secure environment with controlled access.

The new Avid AI suite forms part of these services and applies machine learning and cognitive services to production workflows in a media-savvy way. For example, users can leverage Microsoft’s Cognitive Services to auto-index content using machine learning algorithms such as facial detection, scene recognition and speech to text indexing, creating a library of rich metadata that can be readily searched.

Photo: Netflix

B Y L I N D S AY J A M E S

C O M M U N I C AT I O N S

supply chain (such as a content supplier failing to meet a deadline). These use cases could bring sizable savings to media companies.”

When it comes to distribution, AI can personalise the consumer experience, driving title recommendations and curating content based on consumer preferences. “This is consistent with the transition from a ‘one-to-many’ to a ‘one-toone’ model,” Zanni notes.

Despite this potential, Zanni believes that true success to date has only been achieved by the pioneering few. “Although media companies are already using analytics tools to analyse operations and audiences, they are just starting to harness the power of more sophisticated tools such as deep learning algorithms,” he says.

There are a number of reasons for this, most of which revolve around data. In supervised learning algorithms, datasets need to be labelled by humans to train the model, making the process expensive and cumbersome for large datasets.

“The availability of training data is a particular challenge,” explains Kellerhals. “Many AI methods use some sort of machine learning, and in most cases, AI can only be as good as the data which is used to train it.”

“Deep learning algorithms produce the most accurate results only when they are fed with millions of observations,” Zanni adds.

“Therefore, media companies need to manage different types of data in a unified manner to power effective AI-driven decision-making.

This data includes audience data, operational data and content data (metadata).”

To succeed, media companies need to deploy technologies and implement strategies to gather data at scale. Zanni says that a “data-first” approach is necessary – something that heavy users such as Netflix and some of the niche over-the-top players are adopting. “Most of these companies have moved data processing workflows to the cloud, as this allowed them to scale up resources if

Netflix has already adopted a data-first approach

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F E AT U R E

VIEWPOINT

Using AI to stay ahead of the curve Jon Vink from StreamingBuzz explains how AI can help to meet consumer expectations Now that personalisation is becoming a standard client expectation, artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to be an integral strategy for keeping pace with consumer demand. After all, predicting what a user wants to watch is a key part of a media company’s business model.

But implementing AI requires a new way of thinking. Media companies – who generate a massive amount of data – really need to re-invent themselves so that AI will improve each and every way we produce and consume media.

Microsoft Azure can help with this.

The cloud platform offers flexible services and analyses unique data

to help media companies grow their business. Partners like StreamingBuzz cater for telcos and operators, as well as companies operating in travel, leisure, automotive and the military industries, with a complete end-to-end solution that is complemented by Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Services, Azure Bot Services and AI. These technologies can help drive personalisation, recommendations, and new interaction models, facilitating levels of audience engagement that have until now been very difficult to achieve.

Jon Vink is founder of StreamingBuzz

VIEWPOINT

A successful personalised promotion strategy Stephan Visarius from Segment of One explains how AI is enabling companies to create more targeted media campaigns Target, Walmart, Albertsons and Amazon are all companies that understood the enormous value of using data to create more targeted media campaigns. They have implemented programmatic, data driven media platforms that, for example, can tell Coca Cola that a particular consumer has bought a Pepsi. Coca Cola can then plan its next advertising campaign more effectively.

The true success of these platforms will be determined by the performance of their targeting engines and their ability to make users buy at minimal costs. Coca Cola might target heavy, medium or light Pepsi buyers differently. It might run or skip ads, if it knew how likely a consumer would be to purchase Coca Cola anyway, or how much it would increase customer lifetime value. And Coca Cola might go for promotional offers, if the consumer would react to (an individual) discount only.

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Targeting engines answering these questions on a consumer-individual level will truly push the ROI of future advertising. Segment of One (SO1) offers just that: a white label programmatic promotion network (PPN), powered by artificial intelligence, that autonomously understands latent product properties; consumer preferences; individual customer’s willingness-to-pay per product; and the purchase likelihood at a given time.

This enables users to create personalised media campaigns, delivering highly relevant offers at perfect discounts. Retailers offering a shopping-historybased targeting might thus challenge existing media companies. But it’s a first mover game: only true pioneers applying AI-based targeting engines will monetise their data treasure.

Stephan Visarius is director of customer acquisition and success at Segment of One

Photo: Netflix

MEDIA

needed by the size of the information analysed,” he explains. “This leads not only to what all media companies are looking for at the moment – a better return on investment – but also to a greater responsiveness to market changes. What’s more, as they move to the cloud and establish direct to consumer connections, they’ll be able to gather more data on operations and audiences.”

This is where the Microsoft Azure cloud comes into its own. It offers powerful machine learning, real-time analytics, cognitive and bot capabilities through open APIs, which enables companies operating across the media and entertainment industry to transform their content and audience data into a competitive advantage.

“Azure Video Indexer, for example, builds upon media AI technologies to make it easier to extract metadata from video, including timecoded transcripts, faces, speakers, objects, actions, brands, keywords and sentiments,” explains Kellerhals. “Our audience insights function, meanwhile, uses the Microsoft Azure Data Platform to capture data about user interactions with online media, building user profiles (also of anonymous users) that in turn are used to power recommendation engines, personalisation, ad targeting and inform content investments.”

With these types of solutions, the potential for media and entertainment companies is huge.

And, according to Guy Finley, executive director at the Media and Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), it’s an opportune time to make use of this potential. “As an industry we are beginning to build a direct relationship with the consumer for the first time and we’re already working to automate and digitise existing workflows and processes,” he explains. “For example, when contracts become smart, and we migrate from what was once called a ‘­one-button transcode’ to an AI-enabled ‘­no-button’ transcode, we will begin to see how fluid this entire process can become.

Redundancy will be further reduced in our supply chains by smarter, data-driven systems and AI will ultimately drive the globalisation of our enterprises, enabling production and distribution to meet a growing, but still localised, demand for our content.”

Possibly most significantly, AI will be at the forefront of creativity – the force that ultimately drives the media business. “Artists equipped with an AI-enabled feedback loop based on realtime, consumption metrics will up their creative batting average, which will thus increase production and commercial ROI,” Finley concludes.

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VIEWPOINT

Transforming media production in the cloud C R A I G D W Y E R : AV I D

Cloud-based workflows are helping to meet the operational and financial challenges of media’s rapid digitisation, dramatically increasing production capacity and easing the financial burden of content creation and distribution

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irtualising content production through cloud-based solutions offers many benefits: access to the best talent regardless of location; increased agility and scalability; and the ability to produce and distribute more immersive, dynamic and relevant content. Access to content anytime and anywhere also extends to consumers. Cloud workflows keep consumers connected, content more engaging and personalised, and brands competitive.

Delivering on the cloud’s promise is all about abstracting a system’s physical components, such as storage, networking, computing, tools, facilities and files, into pools of logical components that can be flexibly arranged and accessed. For large media organisations, the role of the cloud and virtualis-

“One way to see the cloud’s power at work is for breaking news” ation has been focused around connecting content pipelines, sharing resources and higher utilisation.

For media production, the cloud is central to collaboration and asset centralisation, function virtualisation and remote production capabilities, while reducing hardware and capital expenses.

The process starts with an open and connected media platform like Avid’s MediaCentral, which is optimised for cloud and collaboration and enables content creation, distribution and monetisation. The MediaCentral Cloud UX portal takes that capability even further, giving easy

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access to projects, tasks, media and other tools through a simple, user-friendly graphical interface. Available as a web client and mobile apps, it simplifies complex media production workflows. Media services can be shared across the production ecosystem, client applications can be accessed from any device or operating system, and integrated, end-to-end workflows can be deployed across enterprises, around the world and everywhere in between – via the cloud.

Keeping connected to meet demands that range from viewing dailies from an African film shoot to laying down tracks in London to covering a football match in Rio requires the cloud computing support of Microsoft Azure. Together, Avid and Microsoft are making the cloud’s benefits available to all, easily and cost effectively.

One way to see the cloud’s power at work is for breaking news. Imagine an event like the recent eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano. As soon as teams on the ground gather footage of lava flowing, that footage must get to affiliates immediately. Through MediaCentral Cloud UX, users everywhere have a unified view of all media, regardless of where it’s stored, where they’re located, or what device they’re using.

From there, users can access different apps to complete required tasks, like browsing, logging, searching and editing. They can monitor ongoing processes or publish content to social media and preview how a post will look across platforms.

With Azure, it’s easy to get content securely into the cloud and make it available around the globe.

Once on the platform, anyone can access content,

MEDIA

work with it, repurpose it, and publish it across any of their distribution platforms.

Now, let’s imagine an affiliate on the west coast wants to broaden the volcano story and see how people are interacting on social media.

Avid’s ecosystem of apps, services and solutions further taps into the power of the cloud. With x.news, an Avid alliance partner, journalists, directors, and producers can watch as a story develops and incorporate related social media into their coverage. The app integrates all posts about the volcano story – including Facebook, Twitter, websites and news agencies – so users can choose which to integrate into their story.

Avid On Demand cloud services and solutions are an extension of the app ecosystem, allowing media organisations to easily deploy required capabilities on a per-project basis with optimal elasticity – and without a drawn-out deployment phase or large capital outlay.

One such service is Avid AI, which uses machine learning to automate content indexing and provides unprecedented accuracy for facial and scene recognition. A combination of Avid tools and Microsoft Cognitive Services solutions, it gives flexibility to enhance and create searchable content accessible from MediaCentral.

You can search for a specific word or phrase in an audio clip. So, when you search for ‘volcano’ not only do you get volcano footage, but you can also hear where the reporter says the word. You can search a person’s name, metadata, audio, faces or text on the screen to locate what’s needed almost instantly.

Avid’s cloud-powered platform doesn’t just apply to news and broadcast applications. It can also transform documentary and feature film workflows.

Today’s exploding OTT market and the rise of Netflix, Hulu and other streaming services requires closed captioning and language verification as well as content distribution in multiple formats – and sometimes multiple languages – which is then discoverable online. A time-intensive process but one that can be automated with MediaCentral and cloud services.

Uploaded content is automatically encoded and packaged for both on-demand and live streaming delivery. Functions like captioning verification, video description and languages are all handled

by Avid Illuminate On Demand. Results can be tracked directly in MediaCentral Cloud UX, saving the time, expense and stress of content validation.

Best of all, these services can be triggered on-­ demand when needed. Avid services like Editorial on Demand, mean users only pay for what they use. When it’s not in use, they’re not being charged.

It also eliminates the need for expensive hardware.

We’ve arrived at the reality of full-scale media production in the cloud. Companies can make the most of new monetisation and distribution capabilities as they connect with audiences in more powerful, memorable, and profitable ways. All of this is achieved at scale while offering the ease-ofuse vital to inherently complex productions.

Avid’s cloud solutions were demonstrated at the 2018 NAB Show

Craig Dwyer is senior director for Avid’s Global Centre of Excellence

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VIEWPOINT

An easy way to integrate AI STEVEN ARMSTRONG: BLUE PRISM

By infusing artificial intelligence into a digital workforce platform, communications and media companies can boost innovation and become more creative

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productive, adaptable, scalable and secure digital workforce should be able to effectively collaborate with human colleagues; efficiently and cost-effectively execute ­mission-critical business applications; and identify opportunities for both cost savings and financial gains.

This workforce should ideally be part of an organisation’s DNA – it is the starting gate to enterprise digital transformation. But communications and media companies are realising that automation alone is not enough.

Rather, it takes a foundation of intelligent automation to enable such cognitive technologies as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and sentiment analysis. Beyond that, strong technology partnerships are the glue that binds these technologies together to give organisations the AI functions and insights they want.

For example, at Blue Prism, we’ve developed a robust technology ecosystem of technical alliances

that complement our comprehensive robotic process automation (RPA) platform. We see AI as an augmentation of the digital worker – not a new breed of automation – that expands those abilities.

As part of our cloud-based AI initiative, we’ve partnered with Microsoft Cognitive Services to make it easier to integrate AI into our digital workforce platform. The AI aspects add yet another layer to our partnership with Microsoft, which also includes Blue Prism as the only RPA vendor to achieve both Microsoft Gold Certified partner status and offer a certified cloud reference architecture for Microsoft Azure.

Several global customers, including telecommunications conglomerate Telefonica O2 are now using our digital workforce in concert with native access to Microsoft’s Cognitive Services and AI platform – including such features as text analytics, text and speech translation, language understanding intelligent service, and computer vision.

Blue Prism’s integration architecture also allows customers and partners to reach out to any solution and technology, allowing for much more innovation and creativity on solution design. For example, for text analytics and elastic search, we can automatically mine big data and archival records to extract historical data research and business intelligence (BI) analytics. And, for machine learning, we can enhance chatbot capabilities by predictive responses based on current and historical datasets.

This is just the start of an exciting future.

Steven Armstrong is vice president and global lead for the Microsoft Alliance at Blue Prism

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PROFILED: AIRFI

MEDIA

In-flight entertainment made easy Using StreamingBuzz’s BuzzOff solution, global in-flight entertainment provider AirFi is enabling airline passengers to stream offline digital rights management protected content to their own mobile, tablet or laptop

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lobal in-flight entertainment (IFE) provider AirFi serves over 55 airlines operating across the world, delivering solutions that aim to delight passengers during their flight.

Recognising that traditional IFE solutions are costly to install, expensive to maintain, incur heavy additional fuel burn and quickly become out of date, the company sought an alternative solution that would offer its airline customers all of the benefits of a state-of-the-art IFE system, but without the cost and complexity of installing hardware.

Microsoft partner StreamingBuzz stepped up to the mark. Its BuzzOff solution, which has been designed to meet all the security requirements without needing an online connection in-flight for authentication, enables airline passengers to stream offline digital rights management (DRM) protected content to their own mobile, tablet or laptop – all without the need to download an app.

Now approved by five major Hollywood studios – including Warner Bros, Disney and Paramount Pictures – the technology enables users to access the latest Blockbuster movies and hit TV shows. What’s more, by leveraging machine learning, it can make suggestions based on user preferences, delivering a more personalised user experience.

“Blockbuster movies still command one of the highest rates of usage and of course are essential for airlines offering longer flights,” said Job Heimerikx, CEO at AirFi. “Being able to access the enormous movie and TV show catalogues from the biggest distributors is a game-changer.”

“Our research shows that browser-based systems create up to 10x more passenger

engagement than app-based streaming systems,” said Jon Vink, CEO at StreamingBuzz.

“We are delighted that AirFi is using our technology and are happy to provide the full back-office support required to enable passengers to access the biggest and best content selection from leading worldwide distributors.”

AirFi serves airlines operating across an increasingly broad range of countries, languages and cultures. “Having the ability to access global Hollywood content is a crucial piece of the jigsaw to create the best in-flight entertainment experience for all of our passengers,” Heimerikx concludes.

Airline passengers can now access in flight entertainment from their own device

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JANET LEWIS: MICROSOFT

The level of transformation happening across the retail financial services landscape is truly remarkable. Not only are new regulations shaking up the industry, but a raft of startups are entering the market and innovative technologies are promising greater efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Navigating this changing landscape is no easy feat – but it’s vital to the success of many of today’s biggest banks and insurance companies. Read more about how I see things evolving in a special interview on page 82. There’s also a fantastic feature about how cloud is enabling success for insurers in this issue, plus the usual mix of executive insight from across our partner community.

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F E AT U R E

Cloud-powered

insurance Insurance firms are leveraging the cloud to manage risk, increase efficiency and enhance the customer experience – and Microsoft solutions are making this possible

BY JACQUI GRIFFITHS

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n a world of rapid technology innovation, seamless engagement across web, mobile and social media has transformed the way people connect socially, professionally and as consumers. This rich mix of digital engagement yields volumes of valuable data for businesses, while driving everhigher consumer expectations for a faster, slicker and more personalised customer experience.

Insurance companies are leveraging the cloud to gain the insights and efficiency they need for success in an increasingly dynamic industry.

“Insurance firms know they need to make every aspect of their business more c­ ustomer-centric to attract and keep customers,” says Dennis Vanderlip, director of worldwide financial services at Microsoft. “They understand the value of good data, and they know they need fast, deep and accurate insights if they’re going to deliver timely products that meet customers’ needs. As they look to compete successfully in this environment, insurers are taking advantage of the cloud in three key areas: risk modelling, core systems in the cloud and customer experience management.”

Today’s global risk and regulatory environment has brought increased demand for risk modelling and driven insurance firms to look beyond on-premise compute capability for the compute power they need for actuarial and catastrophic workloads. “Insurers face a fast-moving risk landscape in which they need to manage growing quantities of data and complex parallel computations – with time-critical spikes in demand

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often exceeding available on-premise compute power,” explains Vanderlip. “By moving actuarial and catastrophic risk modelling workloads to the cloud, insurers are empowering the business with faster real-time insight into risk exposure.”

Munich Re, a pioneer in risk models to simulate possible natural disasters, exemplifies the power of the cloud in a data-driven business.

The company is testing Microsoft Azure to enable deep and comprehensive analysis of huge volumes of data. With the help of in-memory processing, it has reduced the time it takes to calculate weather and climate data scenarios. Data has become a strategic success factor for Munich Re, as the capability for increasing data analyses

“Insurance carriers are investing in bots, cognitive services and machine learning to enhance the customer experience” D E N N I S VA N D E R L I P, M I C R O S O F T

and ­collaboration enable it to better understand climate change and provide support to help minimise risk and build resilience to disasters.

Insurers are also gaining strategic benefits by moving their core systems to the cloud. “Moving core systems to the cloud enables insurers to respond to market changes with new products

  INSURANCE

VIEWPOINT

Innovation and expertise Cloud technologies are transforming the insurance industry, says Dionisis Poulis from Diastasys Insurance organisations can gain a huge advantage by adopting new technologies in their operational model. Automating sometimes cumbersome internal processes requires altering existing core insurance systems and infrastructure. Modern core insurance solutions can be deployed on cloud or in a hybrid model and offer unique agility in process automation combined with virtually unlimited scalability.

Investing in systems that support sales, marketing and customer service functions is fundamental to manage multiple communication channels aligned with the 360-degree view of the customer that is the unquestionable basis to build meaningful customer relationships. Finally, insurance companies can leverage cloud to empower analytics, sourcing from internal systems, social channels and external data sources, to measure performance and feed AI applications to further automate processes and manage risk.

Transforming insurance organisations requires a solid combination of innovation and deep industry expertise. Diastasys combines state-of-the-art Microsoft technologies with deep insurance industry know-how to deliver robust solutions for core insurance, CRM and insurance analytics solutions that provide unprecedented value and unmatched return on investment.

Major traditional insurance sectors already incubate transforming innovations such as autonomous transportation, smart property management, AIpowered maintenance functions and global data networks that revolutionise research and services. In addition, the disruption of existing economic models through the aggressive penetration of AI and robotic automation in most industries will further boost growth in the cyber-insurance sector over the next few years.

Dionisis Poulis is business development director at Diastasys

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INSURANCE

VIEWPOINT

Unlocking operational efficiency The cloud is powering back-office capabilities to enable insurers to deliver the experience today’s customers expect, says Stephen Hollands from Willis Towers Watson More insurers are embracing innovative solutions and ‘insurtech’ to deliver better customer experiences, unlock the potential of advanced analytics, and drive cost savings across the insurance value chain with greater operational efficiency.

The cloud allows insurers to run financial models faster and more easily, as well as introducing new sophisticated security features. It gives life insurers on-demand access to scalable computing power as and when they need it, without high ongoing costs when they don’t. With an ability to achieve quicker results and execute more complex run scenarios it makes it easier for insurers to respond to changing regulatory requirements and internal pressure to improve business performance.

Our innovative vPlace and vGrid solutions help insurers maximise their technology investment. Both are based on Microsoft technology and leverage the power of Microsoft Azure. vPlace is our SaaS online platform that gives

insurers the flexibility to run and access our analytical software products in the cloud. It is designed as a one-stop actuarial workplace that can accommodate a range of our market-leading software products and supplementary actuarial programmes, to enable them to work seamlessly together. This allows users to work remotely, improves the speed of the software and enhances cross-tool collaboration to ensure a more consistent user experience.

Combined with vGrid (our virtual cloud-based grid solution), vPlace users can also benefit from pay-as-you-go, scalable, on-demand processing power to accelerate their financial modelling processes – building the ultimate flexible, efficient and costeffective solution for their actuarial processing needs.

Stephen Hollands is global leader of Cloud Technologies Insurance Consulting and Technology at Willis Towers Watson

VIEWPOINT

Empowering business productivity Cloud-powered business productivity applications empower insurance firms to maximise opportunities in a connected world, says Pat Renzi from Milliman The opportunities facing insurance firms are enormous, but it is all based on giving the customer what they want. Using digital to provide a more efficient process for customers is critical, but a really exciting opportunity is being able to reach new markets in a cost-effective and broad way, providing financial security to millions of people who do not currently have access.

We started our cloud journey in 2010 and at that point, the primary value we saw was computing capacity. With regulatory changes around the globe requiring onerous calculations once a quarter, the idea of scaling up and down and paying for what you are using was very attractive. However, we

recognised that the cloud would also provide a good opportunity to provide a collaborative, governed and highly automated platform so we built a native cloud application rather than simply porting our existing application to run in the cloud. This has allowed us to continually take advantage of new services in Microsoft Azure, providing more rapid development and allowing us to continually add value to our clients to have access to important tools like machine learning, a highly scalable big data platform, huge scale in computations, and innovative visualisation tools.

Pat Renzi is principal, Life Technology Solutions at Milliman

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INSURANCE

VIEWPOINT

Customer-focused core systems A cloud-based, unified core and digital platform is the key to a customerfocused business model says Glenn Lim from EIS Group Our digital-connected world is forcing numerous changes on insurers. Most importantly, insurers are implementing customer-focused business models to mirror those of digital platform giants like Amazon, Facebook and Alibaba. However, the underlying core technology of many insurers is product- not customerfocused and it was not designed for digital connections.

Insurers who want to play in the digital economy are building new cloud-based business platforms that will support consistent and engaging customer experiences at each point in the customer journey.

The cloud is a key enabler of the new digital insurance platforms insurers need to easily connect to new B2B and B2C ecosystems, opening new channels and marketplaces. Cloud-based infrastructure and services can give insurers affordable, reliable and scalable support for business applications and access to markets, while providing greater security and business continuity.

and services,” says Vanderlip. “It also improves time to market for those new products and services because carriers can develop, test and deploy new technology in the cloud much quicker. At the same time, it reduces costs.”

It’s a principle that has been put into practice by direct auto insurer GEICO. By adopting a DevOps strategy that unifies development with operations, and moving its product development to Microsoft Azure, the company has enabled more personal and dynamic engagement with customers. Moving to the cloud has empowered it to increase efficiency, improve application availability and lower costs – all essential elements for success in the fast-moving digital insurance marketplace.

With customer-centricity top of the agenda, insurers have also been quick to grasp the cloud’s potential in customer-facing roles, and they’re harnessing sophisticated artificial intelligence tools to make a big impact. “Insurance carriers are investing in bots, cognitive services and machine learning to enhance the customer experience,” says Vanderlip. “Research by Celent

Insurers need business platforms that provide speed and agility to respond to the market and customer expectations. To enable them to do this EIS Group has committed to building a unified core and digital platform of insurance applications based on cloudnative architecture. We have also implemented a cloud-based continuous integration/continuous delivery application on a DevOps model that allows insurers to get new capabilities to market much quicker than traditional approaches. Microsoft Azure supports these applications at several of our customers.

New innovations in cloud technologies are happening at an unprecedented pace. Over the next few years, they will enable insurers to take advantage of advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital channels and advanced analytics systems.

Glenn Lim is executive vice president and chief marketing officer at EIS Group

shows that 20% have already invested in machine learning and 35% have invested in bots or will do soon. More than half of insurance firms either have or are considering investment in sentiment analysis tools, too.”

The burgeoning popularity of bots in this industry is not surprising, given the benefits insurers are seeing. “Bots enable insurance carriers to follow the customer, to meet each customer wherever they are online rather than only on insurance websites,” says Vanderlip. “That’s especially important given that insurance customers rarely download insurance carrier apps – they want to engage using their channels of choice. Bots also help to reduce costs by allowing insurers to shift less complex enquiries and transactions to automated channels. These technologies are ideal for engaging with a new generation of customers who want immediate answers and information.”

Flo, the conversational chatbot created by auto insurance provider Progressive, shows how bot technology can add a new dimension to the customer experience. Built using Microsoft Azure

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INSURANCE

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Moving insurance forward Digital advances are empowering the insurance industry, says Steven Armstrong from Blue Prism The digitally transformed world is driving advances in the insurance industry. For example, a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services wanted a more seamless workflow process across multiple platforms with a unified user interface for staff onboarding and leaving, time and expenses.

Blue Prism digital workers combined with TrustPortal’s intuitive front-end interface to reengineer processes and facilitate new services.

Now, the company can systematically manage the onboarding and leaving of staff, and the TrustPortal platform prompts employees for information throughout the process. Expense rules were embedded within Blue Prism and, with cognitive checks, TrustPortal can dynamically change expense templates to meet specific user needs. Back-office processing of timesheets has been reduced by 90%, and the time to process like-for-like expenses went

Bot Service and Cognitive Services, Flo engages with customers through Facebook Messenger and its own Facebook page – where the chatbot’s millions of followers prove its popularity. Flo has become more than just a robot: designed with a distinct persona, this bot has become an iconic spokesperson for the company, answering customer questions, providing quotes, and even offering witty banter.

“Bots’ capabilities for human-like interaction enable insurers to deepen customer engagement through natural and personalised conversations at scale,” says Vanderlip. “Bots can uncover new insights by reasoning over new customer interaction data. And because bots enable more efficient business processes, employees are free to focus on handling more complex queries and creating personalised products and services that really enhance the customer experience and bring value to the business.”

As insurance firms look to the future, the cloud is already proving essential to gaining a competitive edge. “The elastic capacity of the cloud, combined with the capabilities of advanced

from 90 minutes per week to 30 minutes for every consultant.

Another global company, offering insurance, investment management and other financial products and services, needed a comprehensive solution that could offer compliance, risk mitigation, efficiency, cost reduction, customer retention and improve customer experience. It chose Blue Prism to automate processes more cost effectively and at greater speed than a traditional IT project.

As a result, the company has improved the customer experience, helped mitigate risk and reduced costs by eliminating a re-underwriting backlog. The company has also achieved over US$3 million in annual run rate cost reductions, and a one-time cost avoidance of US$500,000.

Steven Armstrong is vice president and global lead for the Microsoft Alliance at Blue Prism

analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, gives insurers the tools they need to innovate, engage and respond to the changing expectations of customers, employees and regulators,” says Vanderlip. “These tools and technologies are transforming the industry today, and empowering insurance businesses to deliver the experiences that will set them apart in the future.”

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INTERVIEW

Accelerating digital transformation Having settled into her new role at Microsoft, Janet Lewis, vice president of Global Financial Services, tells us how she is realising her vision to empower financial firms to transform

BY JACQUI GRIFFITHS

What led you to Microsoft and what have you found to be most exciting about the role so far?

I’m excited to work for Microsoft at this pivotal time in the industry. No other vendor today has what Microsoft has. We have the most complete offering in the market, from infrastructure to applications, and an established ecosystem of ISVs and fintechs that can utilise our technology to create game-changing solutions for financial services. Our ability to support regulatory compliance – which is critical in financial services – is unrivalled. Even more exciting is to be part of this cultural transformation, learning from outstanding leaders like Satya Nadella and Amy Hood. It’s a great time to be at Microsoft.

What are the main drivers for transformation in the financial services industry?

The financial services industry today is subject to the kind of change no one has seen for over 200 years. The confluence of a dynamic regulatory environment, non-traditional players entering the marketplace, and evolving customer expectations has led to a tipping point. Institutions recognise the importance of digitally transforming their business processes to address these challenges; many are weighed down by legacy systems that hinder agility.

What are your key focus areas for the coming year?

We see opportunity in financial services in several key areas: customer experience; financial crime and compliance; risk management; and core systems and payments modernisation.

Customer experience is critical in a ‘switching economy’ where younger generations of

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financial customers lack loyalty to financial brands. Accordingly, financial institutions need to up their game, and they need technology to make the customer experience smarter and more personalised.

Financial crime and compliance is also key.

Banks have paid over $280 billion in regulatory fines since 2009. The ability to track and ensure compliance is critical for financial institutions.

Successful management of risk is central to a financial institution’s business. Incumbents are vulnerable to competitive pressure where, as McKinsey notes in ‘The future of risk management in the digital era’: “aggressive fintechs, some prominent non-bank lenders, and ­early-adopting incumbents have enhanced their customer offerings, largely automated their processes, and made their risk models more precise. As a result, they can undercut traditional banks on price.”

McKinsey’s research found that digital attackers’ cost/income ratio is 33%, compared with 55% at incumbent banks.

Core systems and payments modernisation is another priority area. According to a September 2017 Forbes report, only 25% of firms have adequate levels of operational flexibility. Financial services institutions must establish modern infrastructures to enable business agility, as well as lowering IT cost ratios.

How do you see the industry evolving in terms of regulation, compliance and overall culture?

Financial services is in the midst of a major transformation, and we will begin to see major transformation in the next 18-24 months. Financial services are fundamentally built with technology, and a raft of innovation will continue to be applied

FINANCIAL SERVICES

“The financial services industry now sees AI as a key enabler in accelerating digital transformation”

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to make services smarter and more personalised, and to make financial institutions more profitable.

Most specifically – artificial intelligence (AI) will come to the foreground.

The revolution brought by AI – a blend of three advanced technologies: machine learning, natural language processing and cognitive computing – has profound implications and most banks have by now taken a glimpse at the transformative power of AI in the form of chatbots, r­ obo-advisors, and robotic process automation (RPA). The financial services industry now sees AI as a key enabler in accelerating digital transformation. However, it is important to understand the steps of the journey necessary to create significant value, from streamlining and automating financial process tasks to delivering data analytics and insights that allow bankers to make informed decisions – with speed and accuracy – that will result in more profitable growth, less risk, business model scale and provide customised service to the always-on customer; and will enable them to stay ahead of the game and keep up with the pace of environmental changes driven by regulators, changing customer preferences, and advancing technologies.

How is Microsoft empowering financial firms to thrive as the industry evolves?

Financial services companies are embracing Microsoft cloud and AI technologies as they transform their business. Nedbank, for instance, has deployed an intelligent bot using the Azure Bot Framework and Language Understanding

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Intelligent Service to instantly answer investment clients’ questions in a conversational way, on their channel of choice.

Barclays Bank is using Blue Prism RPA technology integrated to Microsoft Analytics to enable continuous improvement of processes, with full data recording for analytics and discovery.

Increased recovery rates, decreased risk levels and improved regulatory compliance are among the benefits the bank has seen.

Another great example is Novum Bank’s AdviceRobo psychographic credit scoring model, which runs on Microsoft Azure analytical suite and applies big behavioural data and machine learning for automated thin-file credit scoring. It has helped the bank increase its acceptance rate by 18% while decreasing default rates by 38%.

Visitors to Sibos 2018 will be able to discuss how Microsoft can help them address the industry’s major trends

What can we can look forward to from Microsoft at this year’s Sibos event?

We’re excited to go to Sibos this year to talk with our customers about how we can help them address these major trends. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help institutions address their most pressing issues and digitally transform their businesses. Only Microsoft has the secure and compliant cloud, AI platform, and expansive partner ecosystem that financial institutions need to better manage risk across the enterprise, optimise compliance operations, drive to modernise realtime payments, core banking and insurance and infrastructure, enable a modern workplace, and deliver differentiated customer experiences.

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How to transform insurance processes L O R I M U R R AY : D X C T E C H N O L O G Y

Companies should look to incrementally implement technologies that enhance their existing IT environments, rather than ripping out and replacing their legacy systems

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stablished industries, such as the insurance sector, are often associated with being secure, reliable, responsible and trusted. Although a few individual companies may not fit this description, overall people trust the insurance sector because of its positive legacy. However, there’s a flip side to being in business for decades. Often legacy infrastructure means that systems and applications have been bolted on over time and strung together like a bowl of tightly woven spaghetti that cannot be easily untangled.

Today is the ‘Age of the Customer’ and the 24/7 convenience, mobile and self-serve solutions demanded by the “I want it when I want it and how I want it” society rarely match up with l­egacy

“Transformation enables insurance companies to leverage their existing infrastructure” systems. For years, insurance companies have struggled to overcome the disparity between the systems they have and the ones they need to best serve their customers. This challenge is not easily fixed. Often product vendors try to convince companies that the only way is to completely replace these legacy systems and applications. Not only is this a costly and time-consuming undertaking, but it may also hinge on unrealistic expectations that can result in failure.

DXC Technology often recommends that clients adopt an incremental approach to modernisation,

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rather than ‘rip and replace’ tactics. Transformation is an ongoing process that enables insurance companies to leverage their existing infrastructure investments, rather than scratching everything they’ve done before. By focusing on key areas that can improve the customer experience – such as enhancing user interfaces, getting the right data to the right people, or automating processes – companies can implement initiatives that deliver the biggest impact.

The key is to start small and build on this success. Companies should find a technology partner that has strong expertise and solutions that can provide enhanced functionality and an improved customer experience, without requiring them to rip out and replace entire legacy systems all at once. Working with a partner that can integrate solutions without completely disrupting the existing IT environment can help companies to reduce risk.

Implementing technologies incrementally can help companies enhance the customer experience and thereby increase revenue. It also decreases expenses because companies can eliminate manual workarounds and exception processing, which contributes directly to the bottom line and ensures success. Once a specific improvement has been successfully completed, the company can work with their partner to map their ongoing transformation journey.

Lori Murray is global product leader for Banking, Capital Markets and Microsoft Business Applications at DXC Technology

VIEWPOINT

  INSURANCE

Is digital transformation so hard to achieve?

D I O N I S I S P O U L I S : D I A S TA S Y S

The insurance industry is lagging behind other sectors when it comes to digital transformation. But this can change with help from the cloud

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xpanding markets, new sectors and revolutionary distribution models are fuelling growth in the insurance industry. However, entering a new sector or market, launching a new product or enabling tailor-made services with custom underwriting and pricing is usually beyond the reach of existing IT systems.

Studies show the insurance industry globally has been a laggard in digital transformation as pressured margins push for cost reorganisation policies that hinder investment in systems modernisation.

It is a recurrent problem: legacy systems yield high maintenance costs, directly affecting operational expenses while cumbersome technology obstructs business transformation requirements.

“Embracing cloud is the only way to achieve success via digital transformation�

Embracing cloud is the only way to achieve success via digital transformation and it is a huge opportunity for mid-sized insurance organisations to capitalise on their agility and outgrow competition. The first step is to streamline internal operations. Organisations implementing a new core insurance solution like Navins, a certified for Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution from Diastasys, have been able to replace systems that hinder their growth with a cloud solution that will evolve to their future needs. Implementing Navins on Microsoft Azure also has excellent time-to-market ability and

requires minimum investment due to its cash-flow friendly subscription model, which often proves comparable with existing maintenance investment.

Modernising internal organisation based on highly available and scalable Microsoft Azure infrastructure also frees resources, so the company can focus on strategies to broaden the customer base and build loyalty. Dynamics 365 empowers mid-sized insurance carriers to execute their growth plans supporting advanced social and multichannel capabilities embedded in sales, marketing and customer service functions including crucial core insurance information derived from Navins integration.

Accumulating correct and interrelated data from both a core insurance system and CRM allows the business to leverage Power BI to analyse its position and measure success. Nowadays, mid-market insurance providers have easy access to technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and the internet of things that were once out-of-budget even for larger organisations. Microsoft, provides a sure path for transforming insurance applications from underwriting to risk management, fraud detection and customer service automation.

Success in insurance has always been about selling policies, establishing effective claim operations, managing risk and excelling in customer satisfaction. The good news nowadays is the cost efficiency and availability of advanced technology tools that can enable success.

Dionisis Poulis is business development director at Diastasys

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Why insurers’ digital strategies depend on the cloud MIKE DWYER: EIS GROUP

Successful customer-focused insurance business models require embracing the ubiquity of cloud innovations and leveraging the power of cloud-native design for enterprise applications

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nsurers are finally embracing the cloud with conviction. A key reason is that it is abundantly clear that operating in the cloud is an essential part of an effective digital strategy. Cloud platforms and services support a host of digital innovations that are pivotal to the next generation of insurance. Another no less compelling reason is the growing realisation by insurers that they will never fully benefit from their investments in more customer-focused business models if they don’t design their enterprise applications to take full advantage of the cloud.

“Cloud computing is a vital vehicle for digital innovation” Cloud computing is a vital vehicle for digital innovation that promises to dramatically change the insurance industry. Digital channels, self-driving cars, blockchain, wearables and ­ advanced analytics systems, to name a few, all depend on cloud technology.

Looking forward, the very ubiquity of cloud, cloud tools and innovation is the foundation for the emerging B2B and B2C ecosystems that will radically change insurance distribution. These ecosystems are networks forming around fundamental human and organisational needs such as

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health, housing, mobility and wealth protection.

Insurers need a cloud-enabled business platform to participate in the new ecosystems.

What is a cloud-enabled business platform?

It is one thing to have your enterprise applications running in the cloud and claim they are cloud-enabled, and another thing to have your operations supported by applications built on cloud-native services.

A large number of insurers still rely on decades-old mainframe systems and legacy ­ applications. Some have been able to take their legacy core applications and with a ‘lift and shift’ approach host them in a cloud environment. The results of this process are mixed. While real savings can be gained in reduced infrastructure cost, the applications are their same old selves. What’s more, converting old code to run in the cloud can be complex and expensive, making it one of the biggest hurdles for modernisation. To take full advantage of the cloud, insurers will need software designed for it: a cloud-native architecture.

Without adopting a cloud-native architecture, insurers will likely never fully benefit from their gung-ho investments in building more ­customer-focused business models. Many will struggle to compete against or leverage the market agility and penetration of digital natives like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Alibaba to distribute insurance in the emerging ecosystems.

INSURANCE

They may also find themselves outflanked by ‘cloud-born’ insurance start-ups.

A business platform of cloud-native apps, with cloud infrastructure and operating systems, underlies the ability of companies like Netflix and Facebook to quickly get new capabilities into the market, hundreds every day. Those benefits are in sight for insurers.

What we are talking about when we say ‘cloud-native’ is the act of designing applications with an architecture that can ‘natively’ take advantage of the cloud. The central cast is microservices and reactive-based software design coupled with a DevOps and continuous integration/ continuous deployment (CI/CD) approach to delivering applications.

The lead actor is microservices, a software design approach that focuses on ‘smaller is better’. By breaking core business capabilities – such as quote, issue or claim submission – down into smaller pieces, microservices make it easier to fine-tune the larger capability by replacing or upgrading only the relevant microservice.

Critically, microservices architecture mirrors the structure of the cloud: apps are being built as a distributed collection of services, which pairs up perfectly with the distributed nature of the cloud.

Another advantage? Microservices are reusable, meaning, for example, the same bill generation module can be used across lines of business and even outside of insurance.

In tandem, the cloud-powered CI/CD approach to integration and testing gets new ­microservice-based capabilities into production in a more agile fashion.

Why so important? The answer is that the holy grail of customer-centred business models is support for insight-driven, real-time customer and user engagement.

The separate footprint of operational and analytical systems creates a lag that hampers the ability to quickly gain advantage from analytical insights.

Cloud-native architectures and new serverless cloud services can remove that gap, leading to integrated solutions with no constraints on performance or data size that could support the application of insights at point of sale or point of interaction. This is where the combination of new digital channels; event processing to include serverless technologies; and advanced analytics with artificial intelligence/ machine learning can enable the agility required for real-time interactions. With real-time insight, for example, an insurer can immediately identify a fraudulent claim, an imminent risk, or a timely product or service to offer to a policyholder.

To play on the main stage, in full view of their customers, insurers will need digital strategies that fully embrace the power and universality of the cloud.

Mike Dwyer is CTO and executive vice president, Engineering at EIS Group

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VIEWPOINT

The power of UFE in banking Ö Z K A N E R E N E R : V E R I PA R K

Unified front ends offer banks the ability to unify all of their applications into one single screen, allowing them to serve customers faster and more efficiently

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man comes running into a bank branch and says to the receptionist: “I’ve lost my wallet and I need to cancel all my cards, please help me.”

The receptionist calmly asks the man to take a service ticket from a machine and 15 minutes later, he finally manages to speak to a customer service representative (CSR) who says the bank can cancel his cards if he is able to give the card numbers. Giving a look of clear exasperation, the customer responds: “I don’t know. I lost them. I was hoping you would know.”

The CSR must then log in to the bank’s systems to find the customer’s card information. If the CSR was lucky, the bank would have had a sys-

“UFE turns the bank from being product centric to customer centric” tem that offered a 360-degree overview of all the customer’s information on one screen, so it would have been quick and easy to cancel everything in one go. However, the bank does not have this system, which means that the CSR has to open the credit card application, find all the cards, cancel and then replace them one by one, before going through the exact same process in the debit card application. The CSR then has to log in to the core banking application to charge the customer a fee for replacing all of the cards. Unsurprisingly, the customer objects to the fees, so the CSR has to load up another screen to waive the charges and

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chase down the branch manager to approve the charge waiver flag.

Although banks frequently receive requests from customers to cancel one or more lost cards, most banks aren’t able to do so quickly. For example, at one bank that VeriPark worked with, the CSR had to open three separate applications and navigate through 11 different screens to complete the operation, before printing out four paper forms for the customer to sign. In this instance if a customer walked into the branch to request a card cancellation, they would be lucky to leave in 30 minutes.

Unfortunately, this picture is common in our industry. However, there is a solution: unified front end (UFE). This is a single, unified interface to all of the applications that branch staff need to use to cancel cards, which means that that they would no longer need to launch multiple applications to get the job done. Unlike in the above scenario where the CSR takes 30 minutes to cancel a card because they need to log in to three applications, navigate 11 screens and print out four pages for the customer to sign, the UFE allows the CSR to log into one application, look at one screen and print out one page in less than 300 seconds.

UFE turns the bank from being product centric to customer centric by ensuring that the customer’s needs are satisfied within five minutes.

Although this concept is so simple that it should be a no-brainer, UFEs in the banking industry are as about as common as UFOs. So, what prevents banks from building UFEs? I think I know the answer.

R E TA I L B A N K I N G

VeriPark is currently discussing implementing a UFE with one of our customers. The bank needs to build 1,600 screens for its branch UFE by using code, but they need 200 developers to carry out the work. While this would be easy for a software company like VeriPark, it’s not so achievable for a bank whose core business is not software development.

UFEs are among the most complex types of software applications to create because they need to encapsulate core banking, credit cards, loan origination, investments and more. Banks have hundreds of applications and thousands of screens, so building a UFE using code should be their last resort. Instead, the UFE screens should be built using no-code development environments.

Luckily, software tools are giving us multiple no-code development options, but which one should we use? The debate usually shortlists business process management (BPM) systems, plain old development environments and customer relationship management (CRM) systems as contenders for building these UFEs. If the UFE was only supposed to make transactions, print statements and process bill payments, I would opt for plain old development environments or even a BPM screen builder.

However, these front ends are complex.

Banks want UFEs to help them cross-sell, to fix compliance issues, alert them if a customer is missing a declaration and more. Banks want these front ends to do more than just cancel lost cards on a single screen, they would like to be able to sell, serve and solve client needs in that same screen. If the customer visits the branch or the contact centre to cancel a lost card, that screen is a great place to offer insurance protection against future theft of the new cards, or to trigger a complaint if there was a disputed transaction. It is also an ideal opportunity to double check if the customer’s address and mobile number are still the same. A UFE does the job it’s supposed to, but also does so many other things under the hood.

Only CRM systems have the feature set to cross-sell, ensure data quality, service agreements, provide a single view of the customer and more. BPM and plain old development environments don’t have these features in their DNA. For this reason, CRM systems are a great candidate to build UFEs that can turn banks into true customer-centric businesses. Özkan Erener is CEO at VeriPark

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VIEWPOINT

Putting the platform first ANDREI CHARNIAUSKI: FINASTRA

Pioneering banks are recognising the benefits of a platform as a futureproof architecture for innovation and collaboration in banking

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hat do the world’s most disruptive banks have in common? They have platform at the heart of their strategy. Accelerating pace of technology evolution and regulatory challenges require banks to be receptive to change through agility and ­collaboration – and that is precisely what platform delivers.

At the heart of every great platform is an integration layer, which connects a bank’s entire IT landscape and functional capabilities using open application programming interfaces (APIs) to let processes run through software components in real-time. Using open APIs means following industry standards on con-

“Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud platform is changing the way applications are developed, deployed and consumed” nectivity with no custom knowledge – which is basically speaking the same language as innovative fintechs and the entire digital economy. Coupling this with a low-code environment for development and integration based on graphical tools and libraries of pre-built ­well-documented objects and open APIs, will provide best time-to-market and agility.

What truly defines the quality of the platform, however, is the variety of pre-integrated

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applications. Platform provides access to the ecosystem of innovation and makes it easy to consume. With various parties – including banks themselves, fintechs, non-financial players, systems integrators and universities – developing applications on the platform, it broadens banks’ options in terms of business strategies, target audiences, product features and customer service. The ability to run these applications instantly in the cloud is crucial – banking capabilities should be as easy to install and run as consumer apps on smartphones.

Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud platform is changing the way applications are developed, deployed and consumed in financial services.

According to Martin Haering, our chief marketing officer, it “allows banks to innovate at an incredible pace and enables fintechs to collaborate with banks like never before. We provide them with the right platform and tools to be successful.”

Building the bank around a platform is undoubtedly the only approach to manage, run and scale the bank’s participation in the world of open banking and the new digital economy – platform is the new standard and a pre-requisite of success. Most banks are still in the beginning of their journey to the platform, but adoption should no longer be difficult as all new capabilities can be delivered instantly in the cloud.

Andrei Charniauski is in the Product Strategy and Market Intelligence team at Finastra

VIEWPOINT

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Protecting customer data J A M E S VA R G A : T H E I D C O .

In an increasingly regulated operating environment, retail financial services companies need to find new ways of dealing with data. The ID Co. is helping to revolutionise the way people share their personal information through open banking data

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he ID Co. set out to establish a trusted way for customers to be recognised online, without the risk of data being compromised. Identity validation online remains one of the biggest problems facing the internet, creating opportunities for cybercriminals, slowing down simple tasks and preventing people from doing business safely online.

By using cutting edge data identity technology, leveraging the power of open banking and our many years of industry experience, we have set out to revolutionise the way people share their personal information on the internet.

Seven years ago, we were ahead of the curve and we still are. If you think about it, your bank

“By leveraging the power of open banking, we have set out to revolutionise the way people share their personal information on the internet” holds detailed knowledge about you – and that knowledge can become a secure way to operate online. Our mission is to use the data we already share with banks to provide the convenience we all want – to be able to sign up to new products and services in seconds.

When we started talking about using bank data in the UK, some people laughed us out of the room. This was always going to be the

case when you are several steps ahead, but for us it just redoubled our efforts. Along with 100 leading professionals, I was involved in the UK’s Open Banking Working Group, chairing the data sub-group. The thinking we did there is part of a revolution in what is now called open banking and which is having an impact across the globe.

Open banking has since become a tsunami wave of change, with all nine of the UK’s main banks having to embrace the approach. As a small Scottish fintech, we are now scaling and working with these banks to help them keep on top of the open banking revolution.

While we are based in Edinburgh, we are active around the globe. We work with our customers across a range of geographies and use cases to create the tidal wave of change that’s transforming the banking sector. Our DirectID business products help achieve this by removing friction caused in the application process by current risk, compliance and fraud challenges or regulations. The products we provide solve business pains such as assessing a customer’s affordability whilst verifying their account information to offset credit risk.

The pace of work does strange things to your perspective on time. We moved into Norloch House in early 2018 and, while it has gone past in a flash, we look back on everything that has happened since and it feels incredible how time has flown by.

James Varga is chief executive at The ID Co.

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VIEWPOINT

Optimising the invoicing process J O N R U S H TO N : B OT TO M L I N E T E C H N O LO G I E S

Machine learning technology can help companies to increase the efficiency and accuracy of their automated accounts payable solutions

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anual invoicing is time-consuming, inefficient, costly and open to human error because companies often don’t have a clear overview of which invoices have been received, processed, approved and paid. Hence, they may miss outstanding payments and incur financial penalties, damaging relationships with suppliers and customers.

Automated accounts payable (AP) solutions offer an easy way to accelerate, and increase visibility into invoicing processes. Research company PayStream Advisors found that 71% of organisations are either implementing or con-

“Automatic capture technology uses machine learning to locate and extract vital information from invoices” sidering this type of solution, while Aberdeen Group indicates that well-implemented AP systems can reduce time and costs by 75%, decrease error rates by 85% and improve process efficiency by 300%.

Whilst Microsoft has provided a great starting point by adding new invoice automation capabilities to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, more can be done to optimise AP automation. Delivered via the cloud, Bottomline Technologies’ new Invoice Automation for Microsoft Dynamics 365 uses machine learning to maximise the efficiency of AP software throughout the invoicing process.

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During the initial ‘invoice scan and import stage, automatic capture technology uses machine learning to locate and extract vital information from invoices. As a multi-tenant solution, Bottomline’s Invoice Automation optimises invoice capture for each supplier which means that all customers benefit from these improvements.

Machine learning also optimises the ‘invoice review and approval’ stage by creating templates that assign specific codes to invoices from certain suppliers and route them to the right person for approval without human intervention. The technology also learns how the user interacts with the AP solution and gradually builds up layers of rules to reconfigure the process so that less manual intervention is needed with each subsequent invoice.

In the document management stage, users can view the original invoice and supporting documents while they’re coding or approving an invoice. They can also quickly access the original documents from within Microsoft Dynamics 365 for auditing purposes, ensuring compliance with document retention regulations.

Companies and users benefit from being able to manage the entire invoicing process from within Microsoft Dynamics 365, with approvals via mobile or e-mail platforms. This, combined with overviews of outstanding tasks and analytical insights via intuitive dashboards, enables companies to maximise AP processing efficiency and reduce time and potential errors dramatically.

Jon Rushton is a commercial product management director at Bottomline Technologies

VIEWPOINT

INSURANCE

Same tune, different key S T E P H E N H O L L A N D S : W I L L I S T O W E R S W AT S O N

For all the disruptive changes that may arise from technological and data innovation, the core requirements for underwriting risk haven’t really changed so much

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hether you’re a digital apostle or a reluctant fellow traveller, there is no getting away from digital’s anticipated future impact — both potentially positive and threatening. While there are associated challenges, these can be considered an extension of the business fundamentals that have existed in (re)insurance over the centuries.

From the time when merchants first started meeting up in Lloyd’s Coffee House in London to underwrite marine cargoes, a few key things have helped set successful insurers apart.

Critically, there is the ability to pool and offset risks. No (re)insurer has flourished for any length of time with an overconcentration of risks or with-

“No (re)insurer has flourished for any length of time with an overconcentration of risks” out an underlying understanding of the customers and risks they’re taking on. Over time, successful insurers further differentiated themselves by their use of data to quantify and qualify those risks.

That applied as much to the tacit realisation in the past that the Bay of Biscay was a perilous route for shipping as it does now to auto insurers processing huge volumes of telematics data to offer usagebased insurance policies that reward safer driving, or to life insurers’ use of mortality assumptions.

And without exception, insurers have relied on smart people to drive businesses forward.

Quite simply, technology makes it necessary to bring those same qualities to bear faster, even more astutely and in a more fluid competitive environment. These are the practical realities of the disruptive changes the industry faces. Not all will be up to the task or have the funds or resources to deliver their aspirations. Some consolidation is inevitable, although new partnerships and investment models (often involving the entrepreneurial insurtech businesses sprouting up within and around the sector) also offer ways forward.

Insurers have alternative paths they could pursue that will heavily dictate approaches to technology and analytics, and the changing mix of smart people needed to translate ambition into reality.

Market strength is likely to be derived from choosing a course and setting clear parameters for how companies develop and experiment with emerging technology and analytics capabilities, and who they need to work with along the way. For example, they could go big, targeting the biggest possible customer base by enhancing the ability to process and crunch masses of data. Others will prefer to go deep to best position themselves in particular niches. In between, there will be companies that target superior insight as a basis for market positioning.

In all cases, insurers need to align their efforts and retain a clear vision of how technology supports long-established, fundamental insurance success factors.

Stephen Hollands is global leader of Cloud Technologies Insurance Consulting and Technology at Willis Towers Watson

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M A N U FA C T U R I N G AND RESOURCES

Ç A Ğ L AYA N A R K A N : M I C R O S O F T

Technology is increasingly challenging the status quo for manufacturing business, facilitating a shift from building products as standalone offerings to providing services that enhance existing products.

It’s this evolution that we investigate in this issue’s feature, where Bill Moffett outlines how Microsoft is giving manufacturers the flexibility they need to truly prosper.

Plus, there’s some fantastic insight from across the industry as well as in practice examples of our solutions at work.

F E AT U R E

A new

manufacturing

landscape

Huge transformations have swept across the manufacturing landscape, challenging traditional processes and operations. Success will depend on manufacturers’ ability to up their game, and this will only be achieved through the implementation of new technologies

BY JACQUI GRIFFITHS

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roducts of all kinds have become increasingly complex in the digital age, as a rapid succession of digital technologies has enabled ever faster, more agile and intelligent product design. At the same time, mobile devices have put a world of social connections, work tools and leisure activities in the palms of people’s hands. This combination of influences is driving consumer expectations for new products that deliver an up-to-the-minute, personalised experience – and manufacturers are under pressure to find faster, more efficient ways to produce high quality products and respond to market trends.

“The manufacturing industry is shifting its focus from building products as standalone offerings to providing services that enhance existing products,” says Bill Moffett, senior global industry product marketing manager, manufacturing at Microsoft.

“In doing so manufacturers are not only providing a product but nurturing a relationship that is built on feedback and trust. This has become increasingly important as the expectation for mass customisation has become the norm. Manufacturers need the flexibility to create customised products for a segment of one if they are to succeed.”

Success depends on manufacturers’ ability to reach out to the marketplace and connect with key

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partners across intelligence, product development, operations and services. “Creating a successful product demands in-depth customer knowledge and seamless communication with engineers, suppliers and other partners,” says Moffett.

“Obtaining and then understanding feedback is critical whether it’s with vendors, customers or even within your own organisation. The insight gained from that feedback provides significant gains across the supply chain and internal manu-

“Manufacturers are not only providing a product but nurturing a relationship that is built on feedback and trust” facturing operations. Whether it’s improved and expedited delivery modes, changes in packaging or various forms of product innovation, timely and quality feedback is the core to the overall ability of a manufacturer to not only provide what the market wants, but also to anticipate market changes. From product innovation to packaging changes, timely, quality feedback is core to the overall ability of a

M A N U FA C T U R I N G

VIEWPOINT

Data-driven decisions

The industrial internet of things has allowed for real-time collaboration at each stage of the product lifecycle, says Melissa Topp from ICONICS

manufacturer to provide what the market wants – and to anticipate market changes.”

To achieve that level of flexibility, manufacturers are embracing ways to enable everyone involved in the product lifecycle to share the same, up-to-date information across innovation, design, production and end use of the product.

Increasingly, they are leveraging the internet of things (IoT) to enable rapid, intelligent and data-rich processes throughout the product lifecycle. “IoT is not only enabling up-to-the minute insights,” says Moffett. “Combined with capabilities like machine learning, advanced analytics and 3D printing it is giving manufacturers the flexibility to respond rapidly, enabling new mass customisation business models that weren’t possible in the past. By harnessing these capabilities and integrating IoT with computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering systems, manufacturers can transform their processes, anticipate market trends and deliver successful products to market in record time.”

The industrial internet of things (IIoT) has affected product lifecycles from planning to manufacturing to maintenance.

The integration of industrial gateway hardware with comprehensive IoT-focused software suites has made a recent impact. Previously, manufacturers had to plan to install new machinery with IoT connectivity built in or pay to replace older equipment. Now they can utilise lower-cost ‘edge’ devices, along with integrated software such as ICONICS’ IoTWorX, that can be connected to existing equipment to provide the needed IoT protocol communications and security to fully take advantage of the IIoT. In addition, ICONICS provides digital tools that can be used throughout product lifecycles including data visualisation, analysis, historical archiving/retrieval and mobilisation. ICONICS has also recently released a cloud-enabled energy management SaaS offering in its new Smart Energy AnalytiX® product.

In the next few years different types of sensors, that can provide status and additional data over the IoT, will be included in products where it makes sense to do so. Such sensors can initially aid in providing data for design and testing before sales and, with end users’ permission, post-sales throughout a product’s lifetime. These additional points of data accumulation provide information that can be visualised, stored and analysed by cloud-enabled tools, allowing manufacturers to make datadriven decisions on a product line’s future.

Melissa Topp is senior director of global marketing at ICONICS

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Ahead of the curve Robotic process automation is a great way to get ahead of the competition, says Alyssa Putzer from Metafile Information Systems When manufacturers are trying to manage data manually and not utilising innovative technologies, it’s possible that they’re missing out on crucial business information that could help their organisation gain a competitive advantage. Robotic process automation (RPA) provides relevant information and instantaneous insight into the status of business processes, from order management to inventory control, fulfilment and AR. It’s also crucial for optimising additional business technology investments, like Microsoft Dynamics.

In today’s market it’s important to be ahead of the curve and embrace opportunities to become best-in-class, and RPA is a great way to surpass the competition. With RPA, manufacturers have experienced the ability to: • bring products to market faster • reduce costs due to increased efficiency and decreased physical storage • experience higher levels of control and compliance • eliminate human error due to manual processes • increase visibility • expand into other departments • reallocate employee time to more crucial tasks.

RPA helps manufacturers improve relationships with vendors by speeding up processes, allowing them to get paid faster. Additionally, RPA captures and indexes the influx of information constantly coming into organisations, from vendor data to customer data and product information. The right tools are crucial for making you a top competitor in the market.

Alyssa Putzer is marketing communications specialist at Metafile Information Systems

As experience becomes the key differentiator, manufacturers are looking for ways to surround their traditional products with value-adding services and solutions. Moffett says this ‘servitisation’ has emerged as one of IoT’s most exciting impacts.

“To overcome the challenges presented by commoditisation and deliver on today’s shifting customer demands, manufacturers must create new customer-centric business strategies,” he says.

“The convergence of physical and digital systems enables new business models, such as product-asa-service, that offer new avenues for differentiation and customer satisfaction. Analysts highlight investments in servitisation as a key strategy to differentiate and increase market share.”

Field service and predictive maintenance are two key points of differentiation in this environment, for domestic appliances and on an industrial scale.

“IoT, together with machine learning, gives manufacturers visibility into performance by connecting and remotely monitoring devices,” explains

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M A N U FA C T U R I N G

Efficiency through simulation

Moffett. “Manufacturers can minimise downtime by creating alerts and automated workflows that enable predictive maintenance, automatically notifying maintenance staff when issues occur – and before they become full-blown problems.”

The benefits are three-fold. “When maintenance is needed, manufacturers can minimise costs by optimising schedules to dispatch the right technician and ensure a first-time fix by equipping technicians with information, mixed reality tools and remote guidance targeted at the job in hand,” says Moffett. “In addition, with sales integration, technicians can capitalise on upsell and cross-sell opportunities on-site to ensure customers achieve their desired results.

Ultimately, manufacturers can transform their products and services by gleaning insights from repair, performance and utilisation data.”

Cloud-powered technologies like real-time data capture, advanced analytics and 3D modelling and prototyping are enabling manufacturers to maximise the value of these insights and others from multiple internal and external sources. With a wealth of up-to-date information across the organisation and its partners, everyone involved has the tools they need to innovate, assess and refine products at a rapid pace, making better decisions and creating competitive advantage.

In this arena of data-driven creativity, Microsoft and its partners are helping manufacturers to reap the benefits of IoT throughout the product lifecycle. “Technologies like mixed reality, AI, machine learning and IoT are integral components of an intelligent manufacturing future,” says Moffett.

“Each manufacturer has unique needs, and as the

As part of the LOCOMACHS research and development project led by key European players in the aircraft industry, Prodtex needed to improve the efficiency of the wingbox assembly process and the entire assembly line for an aircraft wing.

The company chose Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE platform, including DELMIA for Digital Manufacturing, to virtually plan and simulate the wing fixture and assembly line.

Virtual simulation with DELMIA helped drastically reduce the time associated with the shimming process, improved the costefficiency of composite structural part assembly, and enhanced human safety, ergonomics and feasibility.

“Modelling a virtual factory provides many benefits,” says Magnus Engström, technical director of LOCOMACHS and project leader at Saab Aeronautics. “Simulating the physical flow and work environment in which both robots and humans interact highlights details that are easy to miss in a static 2D drawing. For example, we can detect and correct accessibility and safety issues, improve ergonomics, and decide how materials should be handled.”

“In EU projects, it is important to demonstrate the potential of the developed technologies and how they can be implemented in products and production,” says Maria Weiland, LOCOMACHS project coordinator, Saab Aerostructures. “In LOCOMACHS, we chose to implement the most promising technologies in the virtual wing factory of the future to show the possibilities and efficiency of these technologies.”

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The best of enterprise technology on the Microsoft platform ISSUE 8: SPRING 2018

ISSUE 9: SUMMER 2018

£9.00

£9.00

Empowering employees How to foster worker productivity in a new operating environment

Cultivating tomorrow’s enterprise Making the shift from ‘process first’ to ‘culture first’

Microsoft’s Richard Peers explains the opportunities presented by open banking

PLUS:

PLUS:

Why modern productivity tools can transform manufacturing

Why microservices enable a seamless omnichannel retail experience

How Microsoft is helping many of the biggest telcos win the race to 5G

How artificial intelligence is transforming the media industry

Schuster Janet outlines Microsoft’s vision to We take an in-depthGavriella look at how AI is explains how TheMicrosoft tech that’s shaping theLewis connected renewing its commitment togovernments partners empower financial firms to transform changing the face ofisthe retail industry of the future

FREAEL

The technology that is helping to create a new manufacturing landscape

DIGIT

EDITION

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M A N U FA C T U R I N G

Embrace digital selling with DriveWorks DriveWorks brings together engineering and sales teams to allow manufacturing companies to offer customisable and configurable 3D products as part of their digital strategy. This is often referred to as ‘configure, price and quote’ (CPQ). A DriveWorks configurator uses rules in the background to automate SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD – this means it generates all the sales and 3D manufacturing data quickly and accurately. This ultimately helps companies to be more competitive and win more orders.

Learn more about DriveWorks Design Automation and Sales Configurator software by visiting www.driveworks.co.uk

competitive arena continues to evolve they need the agility to respond quickly to opportunities and create new business models. Microsoft’s network of partners has the deep industry expertise to leverage these technologies to deliver specific business outcomes, with solutions that combine the best thinking from manufacturing experts and Microsoft software engineers.”

As the industry looks ahead, Moffett concludes, these new technologies are set to transform the competitive landscape. “Product lifecycle has become cyclical, as consumers’ changing expectations and demands for product-as-a-service look beyond the product itself,” he says. “Enabled by cloud and IoT technologies, manufacturers can extend services and reap insights that build value for their customers and for the business, informing the next generation of products and connecting with marketing intelligence to anticipate new trends. As the manufacturing landscape transforms, the wealth of data and insight enabled by these technologies is empowering manufacturers to target their efforts in a much more accurate, collaborative and efficient way – ultimately differentiating themselves from their competitors.”

Make Your Building a Smart Building ICONICS Smart Energy AnalytiX® empowers you to make educated building automation decisions with actionable data. Use interactive charts and trends to cross-compare buildings and filter metrics by location and time range.

Empower your organization to save energy and money. Request a demo today! iconics.com/SmartEnergyAnalytiX

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INCREASE YOUR COMPETITIVE EDGE THROUGH DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Digital Transformation is the key to smarter ways of doing business. It’s about speed, agility and efficiency that drive new and better customer experiences.

All while maximizing value creation across asset and operations lifecycles to improve profitability and maximise return on capital.

There is a tremendous new force in industry - Digital Technology including: Cloud-based Technology Industrial Internet of Things Predictive Analytics Augmented and Virtual Reality Discover how digital transformation can improve your competitive edge.

Learn more at sw.aveva.com/digital-transformation

PROFILED: SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

Consolidating to improve performance DXC Eclipse helps energy management and automation solutions provider reduce licencing complexities and costs by moving two business units to one Microsoft Dynamics SL platform

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ounded nearly 180 years ago, Schneider Electric provides energy management and automation solutions and services for use in residential and commercial buildings, data centres and other infrastructures.

Over the years, the company has acquired different business units, which meant it had multiple enterprise resource planning solutions across its various residential, business and partner departments. For almost a decade, two of the acquired business units, Schneider Electric Buildings America (SEBA) and Mission Critical Systems (MCS), used separate customised versions of Microsoft Dynamics SL 2011 to manage projects and financial operations with the support of two different partners. When mainstream support ended for Microsoft Dynamics SL 2011, Schneider Electric decided to upgrade to a new version and, at the same time, reduce licencing and support costs by creating one integrated system for both business units.

SEBA’s original partner – DXC Eclipse – was chosen to manage the project and move both business divisions to the consolidated Microsoft Dynamics SL 2015 platform. The go-live date for both business units was initially the same, but operational differences meant that MCS required more customisations, so it went live a few months after SEBA. Data changes were minimal so there was no disruption for users.

“DXC Eclipse discovered a way to have users log in to their respective division and only see the information that applies to them, greatly cutting down on change management,” says Amanda Moore, Schneider Electric’s director of IT, Services and Solutions for North America.

“There’s no indication to the end user that it’s a merged system, but we benefit financially and on the back end. Although the MCS go-live was

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delayed, we ended up with a much more elegant solution than what was first proposed.”

Moving to one platform has given employees access to new mobile Web App capabilities and other simple customisation tools, which have bridged the gap between project management and accounting processes. There have also been financial benefits.

“The shared licencing model from Microsoft is less expensive and has simplified support for us,” says Moore. “We were able to combine our support staff and take advantage of an upgraded system. We’re fully under Microsoft support again.”

Most importantly, Schneider Electric has found a long-term partner in DXC Eclipse.

“DXC Eclipse has good people who know the systems and has a good rapport with my team,” says Moore. “The company never wastes our time like other partners have and it put the right team in place from the start. DXC Eclipse functions as an extension of our team, which is what we were looking for…a true partner at every level.”

VIEWPOINT

M A N U FA C T U R I N G

Augmenting reality M E L I S S A TO P P : I C O N I C S

A combination of new technologies can help businesses handle both remote operations and predictive maintenance

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ndustrial companies often struggle to find the right technology or application for handling remote operations and predictive maintenance effectively and efficiently. Microsoft partner and industrial automation software provider ICONICS has come up with the ideal solution: combining multiple new technologies together.

ICONICS has combined the cloud technology of its IoTWorX internet of things (IoT) software suite with the predictive maintenance capabilities of its Facility AnalytiX solution, the energy management functionalities of its Energy AnalytiX tools and its new holographic machine interface (HMI) augmented reality capabilities. This allows users to perform various tasks using a headmounted, hands-free computing device such as a Microsoft HoloLens device.

In collaboration with Microsoft, ICONICS has displayed its new amalgamated software at SPS IPC Drives, Hannover Messe and its own Worldwide Customer Summit. Customers were able to see how the software can be used in various industrial applications to bring the possibilities of

mobile, hands-free, cloud-enabled augmented reality to their companies.

One scenario ICONICS showed was how Microsoft HoloLens could be connected to ICONICS IoTWorx through Microsoft Azure to create a collaborative robot (cobot). Using a Microsoft HoloLens, customers were able to manage a cobot as it performed a simple task.

ICONICS also showcased how its fault detection and diagnostics software Facility AnalytiX and its advanced energy management software Energy AnalytiX can be used via the ICONICS IoTWorX cloud to allow technicians to perform maintenance tasks using a Microsoft HoloLens running ICONICS’ HMI software. The field service technician can wear a Microsoft HoloLens and use the solution to locate the machine that needs maintenance and call up superimposed schematics – such as a repair manual and a 3D representation of the machine – and associated augmented reality graphics to fix the problem.

In addition, ICONICS has developed features to combine these technologies. They include a remote mentor/expert mode where onsite maintenance technicians can use a Microsoft HoloLens to share their natural field of vision with a co-worker in another location. The co-worker could wear a heads-up display, or watch real-time video on a mobile device to provide immediate guidance.

The combination of IoT, analytics, holographic machine interfaces and mobile augmented reality technology has already delivered benefits for remote operations and predictive maintenance applications. ICONICS’ solutions will help more promising use cases to be piloted every day.

Melissa Topp is the senior director of global marketing at ICONICS

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REPORT

Game-changing approaches for modern manufacturers Digitalisation is revolutionising the way manufacturers innovate, produce, sell and service their products, according to Dassault Systèmes

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igitalisation is enabling a reinvention of manufacturing. It’s a core component of a new industry renaissance – the merger of automation, the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), business processes, big data and cloud computing. It’s reshaping how manufacturers innovate and respond to customer demands.

Customers want more personalised products in today’s on-demand economy. Manufacturers that embrace digitalisation can transform from a traditional mass production model to mass personalisation.

In doing so, they embody the four key characteristics of modern manufacturing.

First, modern manufacturing is creative. It enables new business models with c­ ost-effective mass personalisation. Traditional manufacturers are bringing high-tech, innovative products to market with the help of advanced technologies such as 3D printing, IoT, AI and robotics.

In the past, complex, unique products required time-consuming changes to the design and operation of a manufacturer’s production system. Now, everything about designing, engineering and building a product can be digitalised and synchronised with the actual physical production assets. Dassault Systèmes calls this digital environment the 3DEXPERIENCE Twin.

Second, modern manufacturing is smart, improving speed and agility with real-time learning. The term ‘smart manufacturing’ is often used interchangeably with automation or IoT, but truly smart manufacturing uses data to build predictive models that help manufacturers optimise their business strategy and increase operational agility.

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The latest simulation tools now include behavioural functionality that supports the most powerful human knowledge attributes, according to Dr Michael Grieves, co-director of the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Innovative Design at the Florida Institute of Technology. They include conceptualisation, comparison and collaboration.

“Taken together, these attributes form the foundation for the next generation of problem solving and innovation,” Grieves writes.

Value is the third key characteristic of modern manufacturing. Connecting value end-to-end from ideation through manufacturing to ownership, and eliminating unwanted waste, is a game-changing approach.

Smart, creative manufacturers drive value for their customers, suppliers and employees. They maximise value creation when they have end-toend connectivity from product ideation to ownership. True end-to-end visibility requires digital continuity. Grieves describes this as when everyone and every system across the organisation receives “singular or the exact same information.”

Digital continuity within the product lifecycle is particularly critical. It ensures the operations team has the information it needs from engineering to meet design specifications. It also means information is fed back to designers, so they can continually assess and improve products. In addition, increased visibility into how different functions impact each other helps manufacturers adapt to customer needs.

Finally, manufacturing in the digital age is human empowering collaboration and augmenting human creativity. Digital transformation

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means roles across the organisation will change.

Analytics, artificial intelligence and automation tools are going to provide plant workers with more autonomy and actionable insights. While many manual tasks will disappear, workers will be freed to focus on more value-creating activities.

Digital transformation opens the doors to creativity. Employees have the tools and information they need to be more engaged and drive ­bottom-line results. Digitalisation provides a lab of opportunities and possibilities to investigate and validate all the possible ways to improve the business and industrial processes that manufacturers want to optimise.

It also helps address skilled workforce challenges.

If manufacturers want to attract the best talent, they need to demonstrate they have the technology, know-how and creativity of a modern manufacturing environment. Unlike deployments of standard, transactional systems, digitalisation cannot be an IT-driven initiative. Executives must be the champions of change because they’re the only people who can articulate how everyone in the organisation will benefit and how their roles will evolve.

Leaders must assess where the company stands, how much change is possible and the steps involved. They should focus on quick, incremental improvements to demonstrate the benefits of change immediately. Communication is critical

during this stage because middle management will transition from a role of information ownership to data sharing. They will be responsible for leveraging the data to drive results.

Digitalisation is advancing at such a rapid pace that markets are undergoing a ‘technology renaissance’. Digital continuity strategies are already having a major impact on the way manufacturers design, produce, sell and service their products – so what’s next? We can expect digitalisation strategies to continue driving improvements in five key areas, including innovation, customisation, continuous improvement initiatives, supply chain management and workforce engagement.

To remain competitive, manufacturers will need to adopt at least some form of digitalisation and transform. Frost & Sullivan predicts that B2B digital platform commerce could result in sales of $6.7 trillion by 2020, double the amount it projects for B2C business. Leaders will differentiate themselves with innovative products, improved productivity and exceptional service. They will be more agile and able to meet customer demands for customised, on-demand products.

Modern manufacturing is creative, enabling new business models with cost-effective mass personalisation

This article is based on the Industry Week and Dassault Systèmes eBook, ‘Digitalization and continuity: 4 game-changing approaches for manufacturers’

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VIEWPOINT

Creating a new smart manufacturing culture M I K E J A M E S : AT S G L O B A L

Manufacturers are negotiating the change from process-first to culture-first in the age of Industry 4.0

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key topic headlining this issue of The Record is that companies are changing from a process-first to a culture­-­first approach when it comes to digital transform­ ation. In the manufacturing industry we are drilled to follow process – if the process is perfect the product will be perfect. So, how does the manufacturing industry move from a p ­rocess-first approach to a culture-first approach? And is such a change beneficial?

Let’s look at one aspect of digitisation: internet of things. When our machines are connected we can distribute real-time data to consumers of that data anywhere in the world. This is where we are treading into a potential Alice in Wonderland world. Many large IT companies are peddling services to provide real-time manufacturing data to mobile users. It’s exciting, but is it useful? A CEO visiting Japan can see

The Manufacturing Operation Management Institute runs events for manufacturers and provides a platform to discuss actions that can be taken today: 19 July 2018 14 – 17 August 2018 Special Edition: Smart MES/MOM Methodologies Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 Certificate of Competency San Jose, California Johannesburg, South Africa 25 – 26 July 2018 19 September 2018 Smart Manufacturing and Manufacturing Maturity to Industry 4.0 Improve Performance Mumbai, India Haarlem, The Netherlands

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that production is down in Turkey. What is she going to do? She’d probably call the local plant manager to find out why so she can be prepared to tell the bad news to her boss. However, this process is pointless, so both the CEO and the plant manager are wasting their time.

Perhaps a more valuable approach is to figure out how to use the data for decision making. The digitisation tools are available and many companies are investing in them, but who is thinking how best to deploy them? Usually it’s manufacturing engineers and managers who follow a process to implement solutions. Many follow the Lean Six Sigma methodology, which leads to a culture of learning. It’s a process expressed over and over again in the classic Lean and Six Sigma step-by-step programmes.

It would therefore seem that there is already a culture-first attitude close to the shop floor.

Now, we need to mix this with the new opportunities offered by smart digital transformation, but not forget that process is critical to great deployments. Executives should trust their teams to use this combination of culture and process. Executives should also motivate teams by asking for applications that will actually help the company to improve the business, rather than making them feel as if they are in control. Get executives in a room with engineers and they will feel the power of smart digital transformation.

Mike James is chair of the board of directors at ATS Global

PROFILED: ARIZONA PUBLIC SEVICE

RESOURCES

Transforming training with simulation Electric provider uses cloud-based simulation tools from Schneider Electric to deliver remote training to operators at its power plants across Arizona

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rizona Public Service (APS) has been delivering safe and reliable electricity to residents in Arizona, US for over 130 years and currently serves around 2.7 million people in 11 of the state’s 15 counties using a balanced energy mix that is nearly 50% carbon free. As such, APS has a substantial renewable energy portfolio and owns and operates the Palo Verde Generating Station, the top producer of power and largest producer of carbon-free energy in the US. Like most power companies today, APS faces several challenges because of its changing workforce and highly distributed energy plants. The first is that approximately 52% of the personnel staffing its power plants are eligible to retire. The second challenge is the large geographical area that APS serves. There are more than 800 miles between the company’s two most distant plants, so it takes a full day to transport operators from one plant to another for training, and then another to take them back. The third challenge is the change in power generation mix from coal to gas. Operators need to be trained to ensure they are prepared for the switch, but providing this training is costly and time consuming.

To overcome these issues, APS wanted to implement a comprehensive training solution for effective knowledge management across all facilities. The company opted to work with AVEVA to take full advantage of its cloud-based simulation and training software.

Now, APS uses advanced computer-based training tools called Operator Training Simulators to help give operators the skills they need to run a process or plant. Operators learn how to manage a process in a virtual control room through the use of a DYNSIM Dynamic Simulation that behaves exactly like the plant by mimicking the plant control system.

Using cloud-based simulation and training gives APS the flexibility and easy-to-use tools it needs to address its three main problems. For example, APS can now use simulators to train its operators remotely on the new gas-powered plants. This means that APS can transfer knowledge and operational experience from older operators to new operators before they all retire is a mass exodus. Using the cloud to eliminate the need for operators to travel from plant to plant increases the return on investment on training and limits the time that operators are away from their plant.

Arizona Public Service is preparing for the future with cloudbased simulation and training software

“APS can use simulators to train operators remotely on the new gas-powered plants” 111

™

Make it simpler and safer to manage your highly-regulated logistic processes Ready for Microsoft Dynamics for Opera 365 tions

The AX for Pharma Advanced Warehouse Management module integrates with Microsoft Dynamics AX to support the needs of highly-regulated industries.

To excel in today’s highly competitive market, your company needs a flexible and integrated warehouse management solution. AX for Pharma supports all industry-specific logistic processes, helps you receive, pick, pack and deliver your products easily and quickly, with fewer errors along the way.

Having an advanced warehouse management system that also integrates with your ERP system has been an ultimate desire for this industry. The AX for Pharma Advanced Warehouse Management module makes this desire a reality.

The module integrates with Microsoft Dynamics AX, the ERP suite from Microsoft, and makes it simple to manage complex activities; helping you to boost productivity, reduce costs, shorten order fulfillment times, and increase customer satisfaction in a GMP-compliant way.

Complex logistic processes can only be managed efficiently and safely if all required functionalities are integrated within one reliable system and if data is available in real-time. AX for Pharma guarantees information flows easily through your organization, giving you better business insight, control, and supports your growth. On top of that, the Advanced Warehouse Management module is fast to deploy, easy to use, and very scalable.

The Advanced Warehouse Management module supports your logistics processes with extensive functionality for product receipt, put-away, picking, transfer, consumption against production orders, label printing, and real-time information for inventory on hand and lot/container status. It also integrates seamlessly with the AX for Pharma Weighing & Dispensing module.

The fundamentals of warehousing never change, but the need for real-time information, efficiency and mobility have never been greater. The Advanced Warehouse Management module enables a completely paperless warehouse and supports all your logistics processes. It gives your company: • Faster order cycles • More control over the movement of materials • Improved visibility of inventory • Reduced inventory and labor costs • Increased data and order accuracy • Streamlined processes • Shorter (and more accurate) cycle counts and physical counts • Improved warehouse reporting.

Solution Benefits Inventory control and management The Advanced Warehouse Management module makes inventory management a faster, easier, and safer task by providing real-time information. It is designed to control all of the warehouse’s activities, in order to track every unit in the warehouse at any stage of the order. Because of this, companies are able to respond quickly to the demands of their customers with exact information on their product.

Streamline processes and inefficiencies The Advanced Warehouse Management module covers both inbound and outbound processing.

This includes sales orders, purchase orders, and transfer orders. In addition, warehouse operations

are supported for cycle counting, inventory movements and adjustments, weighing and dispensing, and production operations.

Reduce operational costs The Advanced Warehouse Management module can ensure that expiring or perishable inventory is picked up first, thus saving products from going to waste. By ensuring that all the products are stored correctly and used in the right order, waste can be minimized. leading to a more balanced inventory.

Strengthen logistic compliance Whether materials are entering the warehouse, being shipped out, or being moved around, companies have to meet increasingly stringent

codes of compliance. The Advanced Warehouse Management module strengthens these capabilities, ensuring companies are able to comply with regulatory mandates while being able to trace specific components.

Reduction in inventory paperwork Implementation of the Advanced Warehouse Management module will significantly reduce the paperwork associated with warehouse operations, as well as ensure timely and accurate flow of inventory and information. Reports, tickets, packing lists, etc., can all be maintained electronically.

www.axforpharma.com

P U B L I C S E C TO R

T I M T U R I T TO : M I C R O S O F T

Leaders are looking to technology to re-engineer the modern city, doing less with more at the same time as bringing innovation to all areas of the sector. This is where Microsoft’s CityNext strategy is proving an invaluable resource for those looking to innovate.

In this section Kat Willson shares the advances being made by Microsoft in bringing the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge to fruition. We also shine a light on many of the developments being made by our partners operating across the globe.

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Connecting the cities of the future Delivering public services efficiently is a growing challenge for cities today. Civic leaders are looking to technology to help them reengineer their cities, allowing them to do more with less

BY MICHELE WIT THAUS

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s more of the global population come to live in cities and megacities, cloud services are proving vital to help manage the pressures on resources, says Kat Willson, director of Cities Solutions at Microsoft.

“The cloud brings the ability to analyse urban systems, transport, electrical grids, water systems and building stock, along with the human aspects of cities, such as social care and education systems,” says Willson. “It makes things far more efficient and reveals opportunities to deliver new services that maybe we hadn’t thought of because we weren’t looking in the right way.”

The ability to get new information from existing data is a major benefit of cloud services in the administration of urban systems, she says.

“The possibilities are really quite stunning in

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GOVERNMENT

VIEWPOINT

All about connection Melissa Topp from ICONICS explains how cities can use digital tools to manage resources

terms of being able to extract insight from the tsunami of data that our world is now creating.”

City decision makers are increasingly troubled by the prospect of demand for services outpacing supply – and it’s already happening in some US cities, says Willson. “We are seeing people leaving California; they just don’t want to spend four hours in their car every day trying to get to work because they can’t afford a house any closer. It’s going to have an impact on San Francisco and Los Angeles if people start to leave, and that will affect the sustainability of the cities.”

Fixing the resource problem is not a simple matter, but Willson believes that the cloud and in particular the Internet of Things (IoT) will be crucial in this process. “By taking the

Digital tools now exist that can allow city officials to connect to needed data points as well as provide the public with information showing proper allocation of funds and resources for public works projects.

‘Smart cities’ are able to connect data points over the cloud and, by doing so, analyse the provided data in order to make informed decisions. When all city project data points are connected (for visualisation, management, analyses, etc.), this provides a basis for shared dashboards and reports. Automation software helps these cities ‘make the invisible visible’, uncovering data that may have been previously hidden or untapped.

It’s possible to provide energy management data specific to a single room in a building, to an entire floor, to the building itself, to a campus of buildings, up to an entire city. The captured data can then be used to determine where savings can be made in relation to costs, carbon output and overall consumption.

Another ‘smart city’ innovation from ICONICS is its IoT software suite, IoTWorX, which provides a low-cost way, in tandem with hardware ‘edge’ IoT gateway devices, to cloud-enable an organisation’s applications.

Software solutions from ICONICS can be utilised in Microsoft’s CityNext functional area portfolio.

Melissa Topp is senior director of Global Marketing at ICONICS

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VIEWPOINT

Software drives vibrant cities Cities need to invest in future-proof infrastructure, says Johannes Petrowisch from COPA-DATA In the coming decades, the ageing critical infrastructure in so many of our cities’ electricity grids, sewerage networks and public buildings will be further challenged by rising capacity utilisation due to increasing population as well as extreme and unpredictable weather events, such as heavy storms or flooding.

In response, municipalities need to find the right balance between modernising existing infrastructure and introducing new systems to meet emerging demands. Many cities also lack appropriate IT infrastructure, such as stable superfast broadband and secure local data centres, posing a threat to their future economic growth.

In order for cities to function more effectively, governments and municipalities need to invest in tools and infrastructure that increase overall efficiency and save valuable resources. COPA-DATA supports local and regional governments with Smart City solutions based on our zenon software and the

Microsoft Azure cloud platform. We make it possible to bring together all data from the heterogeneous landscape of a city, visualise the findings in meaningful KPIs on user-friendly dashboards and indicate where it is necessary to take actions with a real impact.

These analyses can power predictive analytics, enabling maintenance staff to detect and fix flaws before they become a problem and reducing maintenance and operational costs. The flexible scalability of a cloud infrastructure is ideal for this kind of analytical work. As well as flexing computing and data-processing capabilities, the scalability of cloud services helps to mitigate the pressure on urban resources as more people choose to live in our cities and megacities.

Johannes Petrowisch is head of corporate partnerships at COPA-DATA

VIEWPOINT

Easy integration in the cloud Transportation solutions can work well in the cloud, says PayiQ’s Tuomo Parjanen Some of the biggest challenges facing cities are minimising pollution, improving public transportation usage and starting to use shared vehicles for travel.

Cloud services will make integration easier with all services and technology providers.

That means we can handle all methods of transportation and provide multimodal travelling chains. With that, we can lower CO2, improve the sharing economy, prevent traffic jams and minimise car parking spaces in cities.

Microsoft’s CityNext technology portfolio provides a good cloud-based integration

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platform for all solution providers to improve sustainability in cities. Our solutions include multimodal transportation with tickets combined into one transaction (travelling, events and other services), as well as integrated digital maps for route planning and location-based services. Users can make payments using digital payment methods that they have learned to use for other purchases. We are also starting to use big data to support city planning and maximise route efficiencies.

Tuomo Parjanen is CEO at PayiQ

GOVERNMENT

computational horsepower available in the cloud and adding to that the capabilities of the IoT, we can harness data scattered throughout our environment. Devices are becoming more intelligent over time, able to process data locally, for example within a traffic light or autonomous vehicle.”

The resulting possibility of enhanced situational awareness enables city planners to make informed decisions, says Willson. “Artificial intelligence, computer vision and machine learning offer techniques for turning data into something useful.

Those are tools for insight we need to make systems run better than they do today.”

Microsoft’s CityNext technology portfolio has much to offer city planners in tackling the specific local challenges they face, she says.

“If you’re a city leader, you’re responsible for a lot of things: health, transportation, safety, water systems, buildings and infrastructure, services out of city hall, finance, tourism, recreation and culture. We’ve devised a portfolio of solutions from all over the world that spans 50 solution areas. Cities can find solutions and partners for their unique needs.

“In the UK, they might want to focus on social care for the elderly, while in Delhi they may need to really focus on traffic – or in the US, on emergency response in hurricane season. Cities have common problems but don’t always want to work on the same problem first.”

CityNext helps planners see how everything is connected in the real world, says Willson.

“Transportation systems are connected to the

zenon software for the smart city  Integrated software system for energy applications  Reliable water distribution through intelligent processing and supply  Secure control and monitoring of transport infrastructure

Winner

Microsoft Partner of the Year: 2016 Public Sector: CityNext 2017 Internet of Things (IoT)

 Smart building automation for improved sustainability www.copadata.com/smartcity

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How higher education will help make smart cities The digital campus brings many learning benefits, says Andrew Taylor of Collabco As urbanisation accelerates worldwide, cities must adapt to new challenges. Smart cities harness the underpinning ethos of efficiency through digital data.

Real-time information enables decisions to be made so resources can be used in the most effective way. This can be complicated – for example, how do you implement

the kind of changes that enable you to automatically adjust traffic-light patterns to manage traffic?

If technology is the cardio-vascular system of a smart city, the people are the lifeblood, and this is where higher education is crucial.

Smart cities mirror the digital campus and Collabco’s cloud-based student portal ‘myday’ is the cornerstone of the digital campus. Merging the physical and digital environments of a university produces pioneering graduates already expert in the kind of technology required to make smart cities a reality. Digitising the campus is the best way not only to cope with increased demand, but to thrive with it. Students living on a digital campus become the population of graduates ready to innovate cities to be smarter and become farsighted leaders prepared to drive society forward.

Andrew Taylor is sales and marketing director of Collabco

VIEWPOINT

Shift right – from project to process Organisations can benefit from a new way of looking at change, says Philip Mercer from PowerON Platforms As Microsoft and vendors continue to evolve the means by which customers consume their solutions, we are seeing an ever-growing need for organisations to ‘shift right’, which means moving from traditional fixed projects that recur every 3-5 years, to embedding a process of continual change to their operational management.

This shift can be seen in many areas, with Windows 10 probably front of mind right now. There is a lot of speculation and uncertainty within organisations regarding what Windows 10 will do for them, as well as what it will do to them. Many are trying to find a way of sticking with traditional

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methods of handing the changes. This means typically a range of activities, such as looking at using the specialist systems option of Long Term Servicing Branch, for core business users. However, this will introduce more risk.

Where we are seeing customers gaining strong benefit is where we have supported them to establish an update to their operating model. This allows them to leverage tooling designed to support the new process, delivering a modern management approach.

Philip Mercer is managing director at PowerON Platforms

GOVERNMENT

VIEWPOINT

Planning for demand on the grid Cities must plan for the impact of electric vehicles on the grid, says Paal Christian Myhre from Meshcrafts With the increase in global populations living in cities, cloud services are essential for making planning of both infrastructure and communications easier and more sustainable, to avoid congestion and overload on the infrastructure. Sustainable cities are dependent on intelligent IoT solutions with real-time information about everything going on.

We believe that the increase in the number of electric cars will cause challenges and congestion on the grid infrastructure when power is required for charging. As Norway is the market with the highest penetration of electric cars so far, we are seeing some of these challenges already, especially in smaller communities. We are developing solutions and systems to avoid this, using the Microsoft Azure platform, which is very stable and scalable as well as being secure in all respects. It’s all about planning the distribution of power in a better way to avoid

built infrastructure which is connected to the electrical grid, and public safety systems flow through it all. Having a portfolio that provides that kind of breadth helps us connect digital infrastructure so we can access data, analyse it and solve problems.”

The concept of ‘smart cities’ already has a history, she points out, and city planners need to be ready for the next stage in its evolution.

“The world has been having this conversation for going on 15 years now. Cities are not just starting to adopt solutions but have been doing so for decades, even in the old ‘siloed’ systems before the internet. Yet even now, with the IoT and the barrage of devices and wave of data coming at us, we’ve got a myriad of solutions designed to address one problem, not connected to anything else. We now have to bring together all these isolated solutions and this firehose of data.”

So what’s the next wave going to look like for Microsoft? “We’re talking about the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, to maximise the value of data we can share between systems with data privacy maintained,” says Willson. “For

downtime on the grid and infrastructure, while at the same time giving enough power to all the actors. In effect, it is a form of just-in-time delivery.

Paal Christian Myhre is co-founder and CEO at Meshcrafts

example, if the traffic lights have a relationship to autonomous cars and emergency response vehicles, then we will get more efficiency out of the system. Over the next 10-20 years, the next wave is going to be: how do we connect these systems together so that they operate as a fabric and give us even more insight?”

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Keeping score with a data-driven jail ROY MINNEY: DXC ECLIPSE

New data-driven management systems are helping management teams to reimagine processes and develop new services that will forever change the way jails operate

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hen it comes to football, you don’t have to be an avid fan to know which teams are winning or losing.

Referees keep score and statisticians analyse players’ performances. Good teams proceed to the playoffs where the winners are awarded trophies. Players and coaches are paid based on a statistical analysis of their performance.

Meanwhile, the losing team reviews game footage to analyse the strengths of the winners and make personnel changes to boost its odds of winning in the future.

But what would happen if we didn’t keep score or have statistics to show us which players performed well, and which ones did not? A

“Data gives true insights into the best ways to manage a jail, prompting leaders to analyse existing processes and question long-held beliefs” scoreless season would allow any team or individual player to claim that they were better than any other. Fair compensation would be almost impossible without performance measures.

Without data, chaos would reign.

Today, many jails operate much like a scoreless football season. Management teams assume they know how things work because they’ve been doing things the same way for a long time.

However, they don’t have data, so they don’t

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know. Without data, leadership teams are unable to compare the jail’s current and past performance, benchmark themselves with other jails, or manage operations effectively.

New jail management systems – such as the Microsoft Dynamics-based DXC Offender360 solution – will forever change the way jails operate. Task lists remind staff to perform necessary duties and well-designed software electronically captures vital information in permanent digital logs, rather than a paper-based log. Microsoft Power BI and analytics tell shift commanders about trends in jail populations and available bed space. Real-time monitors push booking data out to staff, showing workflow backlogs, which booking tasks have been completed and which still need to be done.

Dashboards provide high level reviews of all jail functions.

Data is already reordering an area of law enforcement that has been largely reactionary.

Analysis of jail populations, for example, has spawned the growth of pre-trial services. Data gives true insights into the best ways to manage a jail, prompting leaders to analyse existing processes and question long-held beliefs.

Employees who are attuned to the benefits of data will find innovative ways to apply new solutions. Jails are late to the data/information party, but they’re here now and DXC is at the forefront of this change.

Roy Minney is the justice and public safety product manager at DXC Eclipse

Imagine ...

A changing workforce that enables every employee to be an innovator -- not just a processor.

That uses automation to break business transformation barriers -- and drive the convergence of computer intelligence and business process orchestration across your enterprise.

Imagine no more.

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Robotic Process Automation Software

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I

blueprism.com

VIEWPOINT

Taking a COTS approach ANDREA RUOSI: AX FOR PHARMA

Commercial-off-the-shelf software offers multiple benefits to pharmaceutical companies who want to cost-effectively manage their production processes, while remaining compliant with industry regulations

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nvented as the ‘language’ to give instructions to computers, software has long been the backbone of every successful organisation. Initially companies invested in software to automate repetitive manual processes and thereby speed up, and improve the quality of, their operations.

To differentiate themselves from the competition, some companies contracted IT vendors to develop software solutions that were customised to their specific needs. Over time, these IT vendors identified patterns in the software requirements for each industry and began to create customer-independent (or standardised) ­commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions.

Developed and maintained by one vendor, COTS software offers standard features that have been extensively tested for general use by any company, which means it can be quickly scaled and validated when it is implemented by

“AX for Pharma Dynamics 365 is the only COTS solution that covers all the needs of pharmaceutical manufacturers” a business. COTS solutions can be more easily updated and revalidated whenever a new version of the software they’re built on is upgraded, which means that companies face significantly lower costs and fewer compliance issues. COTS solutions designed for a specific market have the added benefit that their standard features can be configured to meet a company’s specific needs without extensive programming. For example, one organisation could configure a

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standard COTS solution to offer one step item approval process, while another could configure it to provide a more complex approval ­process by involving different departments.

The first COTS software was designed to address basic business needs, such as sending written communications electronically and performing calculations. These COTS solutions included operating systems, integrated development environments and individual productivity applications (such as spreadsheets and word processors). Next, IT vendors created COTS software that automated industrial business processes, such as financial management, accounting, and sales and purchasing. These solutions saved companies time, increased quality and user satisfaction, and generated business performance data. Financial management systems evolved into enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which can be integrated with other external systems and applications to provide all the functionality a company needs to operate successfully.

The International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineers’ Good Automated Manufacturing Practices (GAMP) subcommittee adopted the COTS concept to develop and implement software solutions that complied with the pharmaceutical industry’s Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) guidelines. The guidelines provided in GAMP 5 are used to classify software into various categories, including Category 4 configurable COTS solutions that can be parametrised to meet a company’s needs without coding.

Today, there are multiple GAMP 5 Category 4 configurable COTS solutions that can be implemented by pharmaceutical companies, but there’s not yet an end-to-end solution that

PHARMACEUTICAL

covers all their IT needs. Consequently, pharmaceutical companies often purchase separate Category 4 COTS systems (usually from different vendors) for ERP, laboratory information management, weighing and dispensing/manufacturing execution, warehouse management/ handheld devices and other processes. Some companies operate each system in insolation, while others ask vendors to partially stitch them together using manual operations and interfaces. However, there’s a risk of incoherent data and human error if documents and data need to be managed in multiple systems. The complete stitched together solution is more difficult to test and maintain over time, and the interfaces between applications cannot be regarded as GAMP Category 4 configurable software. In addition, ERP platforms weren’t specifically built for the pharmaceutical industry, so they don’t fully comply with guidelines and regulations such as GAMP 5, GMP and US Food and Drug Administration 21 CFR Part 11.

How does a pharmaceutical company achieve compliancy and validation with such a plethora of disparate solutions, without hiring dozens of additional quality assurance and IT personnel?

AX for Pharma for Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the only global solution that covers all these needs and meet the requirements to be considered as GAMP 5 Category 4 configurable software. It offers modules for various manufacturing and quality control processes, in compliance with GMP and other industry guidelines and regulations. Since inception, AX for Pharma has been built on the Microsoft Dynamics platform using Microsoft-dictated standards, so it’s easy to test, validate and keep up to date when new versions of Microsoft Dynamics are released.

Following standardisation approaches like the International Conference for Harmonization, AX for Pharma Dynamics 365 tries to align with pharmaceutical requirements in North America, Europe and Japan and global requirements in general. It’s the only COTS solution available worldwide that covers all the needs of pharmaceutical manufacturers with a GAMP 5 Category 4 approach, evolving with Microsoft Dynamics, while always focusing on the pharmaceutical industry’s specific requirements.

AX for Pharma for Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the only COTS solution that covers the needs of pharmaceutical manufacturers with a GAMP 5 Category 4 approach

Andrea Ruosi is CEO of AX for Pharma

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Transforming digital experiences

The only platform that puts Digital Content, Commerce and Marketing in one screen - all in the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

Episerver Digital Experience Cloud help you deliver experiences that matter to your customers, while driving sales growth for you. With 8,800 customers in more than 30 countries, we influence $18BN in omnichannel revenue, and have a thriving community of 34,000 developers.

For more information on Episerver and how you can increase your omnichannel revenue today, find us at www.episerver.com

R E TA I L A N D H O S P I TA L I T Y

TRACY ISSEL: MICROSOFT

For many retailers, today’s ‘always-on’ culture is still in stark contrast to many of their legacy systems which cannot easily integrate with multiple sales channels that are often required to span international boundaries to deliver products and services.

Success requires change, and this is something that pioneers like Asos are achieving through cloud-based microservices. Discover more in the pages that follow.

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F E AT U R E

Breaking

the retail

monolith

Microsoft’s Vic Miles explains why microservices offer retailers the perfect way to provide customers with a personalised and seamless omnichannel retail experience

BY REBECCA GIBSON

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K-based online fashion retailer Asos aims to become the world’s number one shopping destination for ‘fashion-loving 20-somethings’. If 2017 figures are anything to go by, the company is certainly well on its way to achieving that goal. Each week it added 4,500 new products to its website (there are 85,000 available at any one time) and a total of 15.4 million customers from around 240 countries generated almost 1.9 billion sales (a rise of 34% from 2016), while Asos’s website received more than 1.6 billion visits and its social media platforms amassed just over 20 million followers.

What’s the secret behind its success? Asos has replaced its monolithic core software with a new flexible and scalable e-commerce platform that uses microservices running on Microsoft Azure.

This has enabled it to develop an omnichannel shopping platform that empowers customers to shop in their own language, choose their payment and delivery options, and receive personalised product recommendations via a mobile app.

Asos is not the only major retailer to have joined the microservices revolution. Amazon, eBay, fashion retailer River Island, and UK grocery store chains Tesco and Sainsbury’s have all replaced their monolithic platforms with microservices to deliver a seamless omnichannel customer experience.

“Today’s customers expect the same instant, personalised, connected and consistent retail experience whenever they interact with a brand – regardless of whether they’re shopping in a store, online, via a mobile app, or moving between channels,” says Vic Miles, director of Retail Technology Strategy at Microsoft. “If retailers truly want to deliver services to their customers in a fluid manner across all current and future channels, they must move away from monolithic legacy systems and on-premise multichannel platforms. Cloud-based microservices are the next evolution of enterprise systems development and they’re ideal for helping retailers create omnichannel platforms that have a full 360-degree view of all customers.”

“Essentially, retailers identify what business capabilities they are missing and then plug in a microservice that fulfils that need” VIC MILES, MICROSOFT

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VIEWPOINT

Right offer, right time Stephan Visarius outlines how Segment of One’s artificial intelligence solution helps retailers to provide personalised content and relevant promotional offers to customers Designed to provide a single specific business capability, microservices break down traditional monolithic applications into their core functions – such as search, product catalogue and payments. Each microservice is built and deployed separately with its own database, but all of them are connected to the retailer’s central IT system via the same application programming interface so they can work together on the cloud as a complete commerce solution. This means that retailers can simply plug in (or unplug) a microservice whenever they want to add (or remove) new customer-facing features or back-end capabilities, rather than having to rebuild their entire commerce system like they would with a monolithic commerce platform.

“Essentially, retailers identify what business capabilities they are missing and then plug in a microservice that fulfils that need – it could be anything from personalisation to inventory management, product catalogues, loyalty programmes, pricing and promotions, customer payment methods and fulfilment rules,” explains Miles. “Often, customers want simple services – for example, they may want to be able to collect loyalty points for a particular retailer through a third-party mobile app. It would probably be too expensive and time-consuming for a retailer to re-engineer a traditional monolithic commerce system to add this feature, but it would be easy

Customers expect to receive highly relevant offers and personalised content, but few receive it because most retailers are still using inefficient mass-marketing strategies and ineffective loyalty programmes. Although they have all the data they need to succeed, retailers are lacking the tools to exploit it, so they’re targeting the wrong customers and leaving them dissatisfied. This is also reducing retailers’ profit margins and 59% of promotional campaigns do not break even, according to global measurement and data analytics company Nielsen.

Segment of One (SO1) has built an artificial intelligence solution to enable grocery and drugstore retailers to create personalised promotional experiences across all customer channels. The solution can be integrated into a retailer’s existing tools. It understands consumer behaviour and other contextual data – such as weather, trends and inventory availability – to provide real-time recommendations for relevant content and suggest optimal discounts according to consumers’ willingness to pay certain prices. SO1 also avoids substitution of planned purchases, helps retailers to streamline campaign management and suggests the ideal communication channel for each customer.

Major German retailers have already implemented SO1 and reduced promotional expenditures by 40-60%, increased customers’ basket size by 10-25% and increased customer satisfaction by five to eight times.

Stephan Visarius is director for Customer Acquisition and Success at Segment of One

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VIEWPOINT

How to adopt omnichannel Ed Kennedy from Episerver highlights the ways retailers can transform their operations by moving to omnichannel platforms In 2016, omnichannel was a ‘nice to have’ platform for retailers and now in 2018, it’s a must have. To develop omnichannel platforms, retailers must find a way to balance enhancing the customer experience with improving business outcomes.

Rather than obsessing about omnichannel, I recommend retailers start by using data from one channel to enhance another. For example, they could increase units per order and store conversion rates by displaying inventory data from multiple stores on the product pages of their websites to help consumers decide how and where to purchase the product.

Retailers can also reduce operational expenses by decentralising web order fulfilment. Murdoch’s Ranch & Home Supply, for instance, closed its dedicated e-commerce warehouse and now fulfils all web orders from its physical stores by using Episerver’s Microsoft Azure platform-as-a-service environment. Alternatively, retailers could create endless aisles in their physical

stores by integrating Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Retail with Episerver’s commerce solution and enabling store associates to send personalised offers to consumers based on inventory availability in warehouses and stores.

Episerver’s Digital Experience Cloud Platform runs thousands of retail ecommerce websites on Microsoft Azure; combining an ecommerce platform, personalisation suite, campaign management, and site search together.

Ed Kennedy is senior director of commerce at Episerver

VIEWPOINT

A new retail model Claranet’s John Hayes-Warren explains how big data, cloud platforms and managed service providers empower retailers to provide omnichannel experiences According to a 2017 survey of 46,000 shoppers that was published in the Harvard Business Review, 73% of consumers now regularly shop in more than one channel, so it’s clear that omnichannel is now the required business model for retailers. The capability to engage with customers across multiple channels and touchpoints is essential, and retailers who offer this service are seeing higher customer spend and support for their brands.

Retailers are adopting various technologies that enable them to deliver a seamless, consistent experience across all in-store, online and mobile points of sale. Key technologies include big data for improving decision making and cloud platforms, which give retailers a flexible infrastructure, allow

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them to scale for peak performance during the industry’s seasonal swings, and enable them to bring new features to market quickly. Cloud also offers new ways to improve collaboration and customer services because it can be integrated with hosted voice and contact centre solutions.

Many retailers are turning to third-party managed service providers like Claranet to manage their critical IT application infrastructure. The specialist skills these partners offer have become increasingly important for an industry that is so reliant on speed, connectivity and responsiveness to customer demand.

John Hayes-Warren is head of Vertical Sectors at Claranet

R E TA I L

and cost-effective to plug in a microservice from a third-party provider.”

Not only does using microservices make it easier for retailers to bring services to the market faster and scale their operations at a fraction of the cost, but they also create opportunities to develop new customer touchpoints.

“A retailer could ask a digital advertising agency to create advertisement boards with sensors that are connected to a set of microservices so that when a customer walks past, they automatically receive a personalised notification about a promotion,” says Miles. “This creates a new level of engagement that satisfies customers and sets the retailer apart from its competitors.”

Microsoft has built a broad set of cloud infrastructure services that can be used by its commerce partners to develop microservices that make it quicker, easier and less expensive for retailers to deliver the types of features, services, products and experiences their customers want.

“Our commerce partners can use the scale of Microsoft Azure cloud and the deep learning capabilities of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform to significantly enhance the commerce microservices they provide to retailers,” says Miles. “For example, if one of our partners has developed a microservice for inventory management, they could connect it to the Microsoft AI Demand service and use the contextual data it collects from the Bing Knowledge Graph – such as information about weather, upcoming events and trending topics – to make it even easier for the retailer to accurately predict customer demand for certain items.”

Currently, Microsoft is working with several independent service vendors (ISVs) in the commerce space. “Often, retailers need to work with a combination of different ISVs to get the capabilities they need to create a full 360-degree customer engagement program, which is why the microservice approach works so well,” says Miles. “Microsoft’s solutions and services are helping Adobe to provide digital asset management microservices, Episerver to deliver managed core commerce and personalisation services, and SAP to create services for enterprise commerce delivery.”

Miles predicts that microservices have the potential to completely transform the retail experience.

“Imagine if a retailer could give each consumer a single shopping cart and wish list that

is automatically updated in real time whenever they pick products in stores or online,” says Miles. “Alternatively, retailers may be able to use microservices to duplicate the types of features customers can use online – such as adding or deleting items from their baskets, or adding coupons – in physical stores. We’re inviting our partners to use our AI and cloud solutions to develop the microservices that will make our vision of true omnichannel retail a reality for everyone.”

VIEWPOINT

Making retail personal Retailers must implement solutions that aggregate online and in-store data to provide a truly personalised omnichannel experience for their customers, says Cegid’s Samir Belkhayat Accustomed to the highly personalised nature of online shopping, consumers now expect to receive the same tailored encounters in physical stores. They also want retailers to bridge the gap between their online and offline channels. To gain a single view of customers and provide these personalised services, retailers need to aggregate online and in-store data.

From beauty and fashion retailers like Sephora and L’Oréal, to electricals and department stores like John Lewis, we’re seeing store associates that are being empowered with digital tools that give them a 360-degree view of customers. These associates are more well-trained and fully engaged, which is enhancing human interactions in stores and thereby increasing sales conversions and repeat visits. Physical stores are becoming connected hubs that provide high levels of service and convenience.

Cegid’s latest in-store omnichannel solution, ‘Shopping’, turns sales associates into brand ambassadors by giving them a single view of both the customer and inventory via multiple devices. It also offers customers all the omnichannel services they now expect – such as click and collect, store-to-home delivery and store-to-store delivery – enabling store associates to drive value through personalisation and conversions through convenience, so they never miss a sale.

Samir Belkhayat is director of Cegid’s Northern Europe operations

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VIEWPOINT

Microsoft: leading the way in e-commerce ED KENNEDY: EPISERVER

Microsoft’s strong cloud platform, artificial intelligence tools and business applications will enable it to become the key e-commerce player by 2019

M Hawes & Curtis has grown revenue by using Episerver Personalization to improve its website

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icrosoft is back. Although the technology giant didn’t really go anywhere from a business productivity perspective, the advantage Microsoft enjoyed in the e-commerce platform space in the early 2000s dissipated over the following decade. It was Microsoft’s vision of e-commerce, however, that got us to where we are today – with 79% percent of Americans now shopping online, according to Pew Research.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, companies were either building their own custom e-commerce websites or selecting from a few ­ enterprise vendors, but Microsoft was already on its third version of is Commerce Server solution

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by 1998. Hence, it’s no wonder that analyst firms like Forrester noted the company as a strong performer. By 2012, however, Forrester dropped Microsoft from its commerce evaluations because the company had divested the Commerce Server platform to Ascentium in 2011.

Today, Microsoft is poised to once again become a dominant technology, services and software provider for the buoyant e-commerce industry because of three key factors.

1. The cloud Microsoft is a major force in the cloud industry between Google and Amazon because it’s invested heavily in enabling companies to power largescale business systems on Microsoft Azure. The company is now a credible power player in the e-commerce platform space with clear competitive differentiators because it makes up for what both of its cloud competitors lack: solutions that meet the needs of real businesses. Microsoft Azure can be integrated easily into retailers to scale their business systems and provide a foundation for them to compete by effectively selling online.

The phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is also playing out to the tune of millions of dollars for Microsoft Azure. Retailers like Target and Walmart standardise their operations on Microsoft Azure to avoid using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and filling the pockets of their biggest competitor: Amazon. Walmart has even forced its suppliers to move their IT systems off AWS too.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s independent software vendors (ISVs) like Episerver can use Microsoft

R E TA I L

Azure to provide additional cloud-based e-commerce solutions for retailers. Episerver’s Digital Experience Cloud is offered in a platform-as-aservice model so retailers can take full advantage of Microsoft Azure. They benefit from flexible code deployments, integration to blob storage, automatic failover, zero-downtime deployments and autoscaling using a single Microsoft Azure web app.

Competitors like SAP, IBM, Salesforce and Oracle simply do not deliver the same portfolio of cloud tools, while Google and AWS are non-­ existent in the e-commerce software market because they only provide the infrastructure.

Therefore, Microsoft can own both the infrastructure and software sides of the commerce solution message.

2. Artificial intelligence (AI) In the early days of e-commerce, increasing consumer demand for personalised experiences, combined with poor data quality and difficult-to-use e-commerce platforms stretched merchandising teams thin. Now AI, and more specifically machine learning, has been applied to thousands of e-commerce websites so retailers can personalise the content and product recommendations for each consumer based on their behaviour and assumed preferences. This has had great business impact – British shirt retailer Hawes & Curtis, for

example, has increased revenue per session by 32% by using the Episerver Personalization solution.

Microsoft has been working on the foundational tools for businesses and independent software vendors to deliver AI-powered personalisation capabilities in their e-commerce solutions.

Microsoft Azure’s Cognitive Services group provides a set of machine learning tools that processes large data sets and tunes personalisation models.

Episerver uses these tools in its own personalisation capabilities and is beginning to use AI to run predictive models on customer behaviour on its thousands of e-commerce websites.

3. Complementary business applications Customers who standardise their operations on Microsoft business suites will see lower total cost of ownership and benefits like a unified data model across channels. This will give them deeper analytical insights, the ability to use data from one channel in another and standardised integrations, which will save costs and headaches.

Together, Microsoft’s cloud foundation, AI tools and strong business applications give everyone the opportunity to build scalable experiences that attract and retain customers.

Ed Kennedy is senior director of commerce at Episerver

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VIEWPOINT

Make omnichannel work for you STEVEN ARMSTRONG: BLUE PRISM

Speed, efficiency and accuracy are key to achieving omnichannel success and meeting the ‘always-on’ expectation from consumers

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he convenience and sophistication of online shopping has led to many customers taking for granted how easy it is to order what they want, whenever they want, and get it delivered within days – and sometimes even hours.

For many retailers though, this ‘always-on’ expectation is still in stark contrast to legacy systems that don’t integrate easily with multiple sales channels that are often required to span international boundaries to deliver products and services. This disconnect has led to less efficient operations, as well as considerable lost revenue – in fact, industry analyst IDC recently identified

“Retailers using Blue Prism’s robotic process automation (RPA) and digital workforce solutions can lead their own omnichannel transformation” up to US$94 billion of additional revenue available to retailers willing to invest in technology that effectively manipulates their business data.

Retailers using Blue Prism’s robotic process automation (RPA) and digital workforce solutions can lead their own omnichannel transformation without having to engage in a costly and risky project requiring API integration between legacy retail store systems and omnichannel applications.

For example, Blue Prism’s integration with CyberArk means that each Blue Prism digital

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worker can be credentialed – just like a store employee – and store operations can track every action, as well as fast-track costly and ­time-intensive IT security audits.

Operations running on scalable, secure cloudbased platforms such as Microsoft Azure can easily host the omnichannel integration, greatly reducing the implementation and support time.

And, by capturing real-time data across all stores, store operations can have a snapshot of the status of omnichannel fulfilment across an entire base of stores.

Blue Prism customer Shop Direct – one of the UK’s largest pure-play digital retailers – is just one example of how RPA has affected their entire operation. The company’s core metric has always been returning hours back to the business, so that Shop Direct employees can use their time in more valuable ways.

To date, Shop Direct has automated 130 processes, and continues to return 328,000 hours annually back to the business, with a very low footprint and total cost of ownership to operate the Blue Prism Digital Workforce Operating System. And, automating a single process alone, generated more than £16 million (US$21.3 ­million) of incremental revenue.

For Shop Direct, cost savings, productivity increases, error rate reductions, regulatory compliance enhancements and revenue generation are all vital quantifiers of business value.

Steven Armstrong is vice president and global lead for the Microsoft Alliance at Blue Prism

don’t want to throw it away, can we eat it instead?

Nutritious packaging – a dream our software could bring to life.

Innovative thinkers everywhere use INDUSTRY SOLUTION EXPERIENCES from Dassault Systèmes to explore the true impact of their ideas. Insights from the 3D virtual world enable manufacturers to investigate new ways to package their products that improve both their commercial and environmental performance. How long before they’re improving their taste too?

It takes a special kind of compass to understand the present and navigate the future.

3DS.COM/CPG

VIEWPOINT

Airport of the future JOHN TSUCAL AS: DXC TECHNOLOGY

Analytics, artificial intelligence and biometrics are just some of the digital technologies that will enable airports to become the centralised hub of the entire travel industry

C

atching a flight is challenging. Travellers must arrive at the airport, check their baggage in, pass multiple security checks and find their boarding gate, all within a short time frame. To enable travellers to do this, airports need to keep processes running smoothly and planes flying on schedule. They must also ensure passengers have plenty to entertain them while they’re waiting for flights. This will be much easier at the airports of the future, which will be powered by multiple digital technologies – from internet of things networks that collect operational and passenger data, to drones that inspect runway safety and industrial machine learning systems that automate logistics planning.

Two of the most pivotal technologies will be analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Airports can use analytics can track weather patterns so airports can predict, and prepare for, adverse conditions. Alternatively, analytics can be used to pinpoint the destinations that are most popular with passengers so airports know which airlines to partner with. Analytics can also allow airports to identify passengers’ personal preferences – such

as what food they buy – so they can provide the optimal mix of retailers and food outlets.

AI helps airports put these insights into action, automating tasks and powering proactive services that enhance and personalise the passenger experience. For instance, AI solutions could track unattended baggage and enable airport staff to swiftly reunite passengers with misplaced items.

Meanwhile, AI-enabled smartphone apps could send passengers directions to their gate, personalised discount coupons for their favourite restaurants, or notifications about expected delays. In addition, location-aware AI systems can instantly alert staff to security threats, or send safety information to passengers during emergencies.

Airports and airlines could even combine AI with biometrics to automatically identify passengers, eliminating long security queues. Delta Air Lines has piloted an AI kiosk that enabled passengers to self-scan their bags and boarding passes, then confirm their identity via facial recognition screens connected to the US Customer and Border Protection database. Passengers found this more convenient than today’s processes.

Initially, analytics, AI and other digital technologies will help to optimise airport operations and make air travel a safer, faster and more enjoyable experience. Over time, these digital technologies will allow airports to better understand passengers’ needs and enable them and their key stakeholders – including airlines, retail stores and food outlets – to integrate their IT systems with the wider infrastructure in smart cities. Once they’ve done this, airports will become the centralised hub of the entire travel industry.

John Tsucalas is industry chief technologist at DXC Technology

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PROFILED: EASON

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Achieving omnichannel success Episerver’s e-commerce platform has helped Ireland-based book and stationery retailer to personalise its website and automate promotional campaigns

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ounded in 1819, Eason sells books, stationery, newspapers and magazines at more than 60 stores across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Facing stiff competition from large online competitors, Eason wanted a platform that would enable customers to enjoy seamless and personalised omnichannel shopping experiences in store and on its website. This platform had to seamlessly integrate with the Microsoft Dynamics AX system that Eason used for managing customer, order and product data. It also had to be delivered quickly to enable the company to capitalise on the peak retail period between Black Friday in November and the January sales.

“We looked for a new e-commerce platform that would work seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics AX and would provide our marketing teams with the agility and capabilities they needed,” says Michael Robinson, Eason’s IT manager.

Eason chose Episerver’s e-commerce suite, including its Content Management System, Commerce, Perform, Campaign, Find and Insights components. Working with Episerver’s implementation partner Made to Engage, Eason’s team used Avensia Storefront Connectors to integrate product and customer data from its existing Microsoft Dynamics AX platform with Episerver’s solution. The project started in July 2017 and the new website went live in October 2017, ahead of the Black Friday deadline.

Today, Eason has a robust omnichannel solution that connects its in-store and online operations, while providing the marketing and e-commerce merchandising agility it needs to personalise content and automate promotional campaigns.

Episerver Find provides Eason’s customers with intuitive search functionality so they can quickly locate products, while Episerver Commerce has streamlined the checkout process. Eason can use

analytics from Episerver Insight and the machine learning and behavioural merchandising tools from Episerver Perform to personalise communications and automatically recommend products and content to customers based on their past searches and purchases. The Episerver Campaign module supports automated marketing and promotional campaigns.

Thanks to Episerver’s platform, Eason boosted revenue by 60% on Black Friday, 49% over Christmas and 75% during the January sales, compared to the previous year.

Made to Engage will continue to work with Eason to help it optimise the Episerver e-commerce solution so it can provide a truly omnichannel experience and drive value for every customer. This year, it will develop a click-and-collect offering and integrations with Eason’s gift card processes.

“We can now confidently say we have the strong foundation in place to support our continuing roadmap for a customer-centred omnichannel strategy and to establish Eason as the market leader in its space,” says Robinson.

Episerver’s platform supports Eason’s new click-and-collect offering

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Transforming digital experiences

The only platform that puts Digital Content, Commerce and Marketing in one screen - all in the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

Episerver Digital Experience Cloud help you deliver experiences that matter to your customers, while driving sales growth for you. With 8,800 customers in more than 30 countries, we influence $18BN in omnichannel revenue, and have a thriving community of 34,000 developers.

For more information on Episerver and how you can increase your omnichannel revenue today, find us at www.episerver.com

F E AT U R E D PA R T N E R S

Welcome to the featured partners section of The Record.

Our intention is to highlight a selection of Microsoft partners and provide information on the innovative solutions and services they are delivering to help meet your enterprise technology needs. For each partner we indicate their industry specialism using the below key, representing: communications and media; financial services; manufacturing and resources; public sector; and retail and hospitality.

CM

FS

MR

PS

RH

We hope that you find this a valuable insight into the Microsoft partner community and look forward to spotlighting more partners in future editions. Please visit www.technologyrecord.com for a comprehensive partner directory and the latest news and views from hundreds of Microsoft partners across all business sectors.

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AVEVA Joseph McMullen, Marketing Director for Strategic Partnerships and Sponsorships Tel: +1 484 4676168 joseph.mcmullen@aveva.com www.aveva.com AVEVA is a global leader in engineering and industrial software, driving digital transformation across the entire asset and operations lifecycle of capital-intensive industries. Following the recent merger with Schneider Electric’s industrial software business, the company’s expanded engineering, planning and operations, asset performance and monitoring and control solutions deliver proven results to 16,000 customers across the globe. Its customers are supported by the largest industrial software ecosystem, including 4,200 partners and 5,700 certified developers.

AVEVA is headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with more than 4,400 employees at 80 locations in over 40 countries.

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AX for Pharma Massimo Crudeli, Global Presales Director Tel: +1 813 3583364 info@axforpharma.com www.axforpharma.com AX for Pharma produces enterprise resource planning (ERP) software named AX for Pharma based on Microsoft Dynamics AX and Dynamics 365. It is targeted at pharmaceutical, speciality chemical and life sciences companies.

AX for Pharma is the only Microsoft Dynamics AX-certified ERP solution for pharmaceutical companies. It also offers additional functionalities that are not available in standard ERP solutions, such as Advanced Quality Management and Weighing and Dispensing modules. This allows AX for Pharma to blend business domain expertise and rigorous development and consulting skills.

The software is fully compliant with Good Manufacturing Processes guidelines and Microsoft Sure Step Methodology.

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Blue Prism Steven Armstrong, Vice President, Global Lead, Microsoft Alliance Tel: +44 779 9535629 steven.armstrong@blueprism.com www.blueprism.com As the pioneer, innovator and market leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Blue Prism delivers the world’s most successful Digital Workforce.

Blue Prism’s digital workers give business leaders new operational capacity and the intelligent skills to automate repetitive administrative tasks, while also meeting the security, compliance and scalability requirements of the most demanding IT environments.

Blue Prism provides a scalable and robust execution platform for best-of-breed artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies and has emerged as the trusted and secure RPA platform of choice for the Fortune 500.

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CDM Kim Erbo Christensen, CEO

Cegid Samir Belkhayat, Director

Collabco Andrew Taylor, Sales and Marketing Director

Tel: +45 513 8161 kec@cdm.dk www.cdm.dk

Tel: +44 1908 272420 cegiduk@cegid.com www.cegid.com

Tel: +44 783 4153840 / +44 151 7056801 andrew.taylor@collabco.co.uk www.collabco.co.uk

CDM is a Danish-owned software company with over 30 years of experience in IT and business development. The company helps customers to identify potential areas for improving their businesses and develop reliable solutions that are customised to their processes. User-friendly solutions are key words within CDM and are embedded within its culture.

The company has a number of standard solutions such as tender management for the healthcare sector and corporations, price management systems for the retail sector.

CDM’s goal is to help customers empower employees with business-critical solutions that optimise daily business.

Cegid provides cloud solutions that help organisations to improve talent and human resources management, as well as finance and business management solutions for the retail industry.

Driven by an ambitious innovation strategy, Cegid’s solutions are at the cutting edge of current technology and user trends. They cover mobility, cloud services and digitisation, big data, artificial intelligence and collaborative platforms.

Serving over 120,000 clients in 75 countries, Cegid employs 2,200 employees globally and the company revenues were €332 million (US$391 million) in 2017.

Collabco is the provider of the myday Digital Campus platform, which is used at over 70 education institutions globally.

The company is passionate about the success of all learners, delighting them on their entire journey through the use of its technology. myday is a Microsoft Azure-based platform that is designed to connect learners and staff by delivering the personalised information they need when they need it. The platform seamlessly guides learners from enquirer to alumnus in a single app.

Collabco is a Microsoft Gold partner.

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CompanyNet Taras Young, Marketing Manager Tel: +44 131 5597500 ContactUs@company-net.com www.company-net.com CompanyNet is an independent software solutions company that creates high-impact systems that drive real business value.

Its team of Microsoft Office 365 experts deliver software to support organisational transformation and improve employee experience, including digital workplaces, business process management solutions and specialist line-of-business applications.

Acknowledging that technology is only one part of the solution, CompanyNet works hard to understand its customers’ businesses. This enables the company to create outcomes that deliver long-term business benefits.

Customers include Scottish Water, Disney, Tesco Bank and the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

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COPA-DATA Johannes Petrowisch, Head of Corporate Partnerships Tel: +43 662 4310020 johannes.petrowisch@copadata.com www.copadata.com COPA-DATA is a three-time global Microsoft Partner Award winner, having won the Internet of Things category in 2017, and the Public Sector/Microsoft CityNext category and Country Partner of the Year in Austria in 2016. COPADATA develops the powerful software zenon that allows for complete end-to-end industrial internet of things solutions – from the field level up to the cloud and to mobile devices.

The company uses the latest Microsoft technologies such as the Azure cloud platform, HoloLens, SQL Server 2016 and Windows 10.

The COPA-DATA distribution network consists of subsidiaries, distributors and partners. Private businesses and the public sector benefit from COPA-DATA’s solutions in terms of operational excellence and savings of valuable resources.

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DXC Technology Shaun Wilde, Strategic Partnerships

Tel: +44 1925 757585 maria@driveworks.co.uk www.driveworks.co.uk

Tel: +1 541 5543781 swilde3@dxc.com www.dxc.technology

DriveWorks configurator software is the ultimate design automation and 3D configure price quote choice for manufacturing.

Successfully developed over more than 15 years in the industry, DriveWorks is the chosen design automation solution for SOLIDWORKS. DriveWorksXpress has been selected by SOLIDWORKS to be included in every licence of its 3D computer-aided design package.

DriveWorksXpress, DriveWorks Solo and DriveWorks Pro are all SOLIDWORKS Gold Partner Products and DriveWorks have built strong links with the SOLIDWORKS community.

DriveWorks has been recognised as a Microsoft Gold Partner for application development and its products are Windows 10 compatible.

DXC Technology is an independent end-to-end IT services company helping clients harness the power of innovation. Created by the merger of CSC and the Enterprise Services business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, DXC Technology serves nearly 6,000 private and public sector clients across 70 countries. The company’s technology independence, global talent and extensive partner network combine to deliver next-generation IT services and solutions.

DXC and Microsoft have been strategic partners for over 30 years, with joint offerings that unleash the power of Microsoft products – including Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Azure and more – to deliver secure new ways of connecting people.

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Tel: +30 210 6890400 info@diastasys.gr www.diastasys.com Diastasys was founded in 2007 with the vision of enabling insurance organisations to succeed by providing premier enterprise software solutions for core insurance applications, customer relationship management and analytics.

The company’s key focus is to build insurance solutions that encompass its deep industry knowledge and are based on key Microsoft technologies.

Diastasys’ insurance solutions provide added value to its customers and return on investment because they combine continuous innovation on best practices and technology with user-friendly capabilities that boost organisations’ productivity.

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DriveWorks Maria Sarkar, Vice President and Co-Founder

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EIS Group Tel: +1 415 4022622 info@eisgroup.com www.eisgroup.com EIS Group moves insurance carriers closer to their customers. Leading insurers use the EIS digital insurance platform to build and deliver fast, simple, engaging experiences across the entire insurance lifecycle – quoting, policy administration, billing, claims and service. The cloud-enabled platform of core, experience and insight solutions empowers insurers to innovate faster, reduce costs, and create competitive advantages. Headquartered in San Francisco, US, EIS powers digital insurance for property and casualty, and benefits insurers of all sizes, worldwide.

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Finastra Nathalie Aspinall, Global Partner Marketing Lead – Strategic Alliances

Episerver info@episerver.com Tel: +1 603 5940249 www.episerver.com Episerver connects digital commerce and marketing to help organisations create unique digital experiences for their customers, with measurable business results.

The Episerver Digital Experience Cloud combines content, commerce, multichannel marketing and predictive analytics in a single, easy-to-use platform for businesses online.

Episerver attracts innovative customers like American Express, Buffalo Wild Wings, Mazda, Yamaha and Walmart. It also has a partner network of more than 880 creative agencies and system integrators.

Episerver’s mission to make it easy for customers to create effective digital experiences for their customers – via any channel on any device – is being realised worldwide every day.

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Finastra unlocks the potential of businesses in finance, creating a platform for open innovation. Formed in 2017 by the combination of Misys and D+H, the company provides the broadest portfolio of financial services software – spanning retail banking, transaction banking, lending, and treasury.

Finastra’s solutions enable customers to deploy mission critical technology on premises or in the cloud and the geographical reach of the company means that it can serve its customers effectively.

Through Finastra’s open and reliable solutions, customers are empowered to accelerate growth, optimise cost, mitigate risk and evolve to meet the changing needs of their customers.

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ICONICS Melissa Topp, Director of Global Marketing Tel: +1 508 2161215 melissa@iconics.com www.iconics.com

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interworks.cloud Pelagia Papoulidou, Vice President, Customer Engagement

The interworks.cloud platform enables Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers (CSP), distributors and independent software vendors to grow their cloud business by publishing custom-branded marketplaces for their customers or resellers, boost sales and automate billing, ordering, payment and support processes. interworks.cloud offers a Microsoft online service automation and robust billing engine, addressing the main pains of the CSP market. interworks. cloud is represented in Greece, UK, US and Germany with over 50 clients including Microsoft CSPs, distributors, telcos and managed service providers. The company reaches more than 6,500 resellers in 21 different countries and is Microsoft Gold Partner Certified.

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Tel: +1 519 5893436 angelique@gainx.com www.gainx.com GainX exists to help the global enterprise predict and better manage their transformation spend to compete in the next economy.

The GainX artificial intelligence platform manages the complexity of transformation and provides executives with unprecedented visibility across their organisation’s people, projects, and processes.

This single source of truth enables executives to make data-driven transformation decisions on complex resource restructuring and digital transformation initiatives at the pace demanded by the market.

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Tel: +30 231 0688186 p.papoulidou@interworks.cloud interworks.cloud

ICONICS is a six-time Microsoft Partner of the Year award winner and a software provider offering real-time visualisation, HMI/ SCADA, energy management, fault detection, manufacturing intelligence, internet of things and a suite of analytics solutions for building automation and operational excellence.

ICONICS’ solutions help customers to be more profitable, agile, efficient and sustainable.

ICONICS promotes an international culture of innovation, creativity and excellence in product design, development, technical support, training, sales and consulting services for end users, system integrators, original equipment manufacturers and channel partners. ICONICS has more than 350,000 applications installed across multiple industries.

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Tel: +44 203 3205000 nathalie.aspinall@finastra.com www.finastra.com

GainX Angelique Mohring, Founder and CEO

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ITWORX Education Essam Makhlouf, Marketing Director Tel: +1 860 6566336 edurequest@itworx.com www.itworx.education ITWORX Education is an education services provider on a journey to disrupt traditional education around the world. Its role is to lead and facilitate transformation through the power of technological innovation.

The company provides end-to-end solutions for learning, teaching, and management, as well as adoption and change consultancy that is designed to raise student outcomes, teacher effectiveness and institutional development.

ITWORX Education is a Microsoft worldwide partner and was selected as Microsoft CityNext Partner of the Year Finalist in 2016. The company also won the BETT MEA Game Changer Award in 2017.

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Malong Technologies Matt Scott, Co-founder and CTO

Meshcrafts Paal Christian Myhre, COO

PayiQ Tuomo Parjanen, CEO, Senior Partner

mscott@malong.com www.malong.com/en/home

Tel: +47 928 84588 paal@meshcrafts.com www.meshcrafts.com

Tel: +358 500 528295 tuomo.parjanen@payiq.net www.payiq.net

Meshcrafts delivers an open market platform for electrical vehicle charging. The SmartCharge platform is a turnkey solution for charging infrastructure. SmartCharge connects all stakeholders in the electric vehicle market and enables anyone to operate and control a charging infrastructure. The interface enables the easy management of infrastructure, including price management, load balancing and remote upgrades. Real-time communications between the electric vehicle, the charger station and the grid operator open new business opportunities such as virtual power plants, using the vehicle battery for energy storage. Meshcrafts’ SmartCharge app guides drivers to available chargers and is available on all platforms.

PayiQ develops cloud-based intelligent mobile ticketing, payment and validation solutions for smart cities, transport operators and event organisers around the globe utilising Microsoft Azure technology. The company’s solutions provide end users with a way to travel door-to-door by giving them the freedom to combine various means of transport and services as one transaction using their mobile phones. The open ecosystem enables end users to freely choose from a wide range of payment methods. They can combine different services, such as those provided by route planning services, shared car and bike operators or event organisers.

Malong Technologies is an artificial intelligence start-up from China that provides computer vision technology and solutions for enterprises.

Founded in 2014, Malong Technologies is backed by Softbank in China and performs award-winning scientific research in deep learning and computer vision. Its technology is available to any business via ProductAI – affordable, accurate and secure cloud-based cognitive services and embedded systems.

The company’s headquarters are in Shenzhen, China and it has teams in Beijing and Shanghai, China; Tokyo, Japan; and Bentonville Arkansas, US.

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PowerON Kathryn Reeves, Head of Marketing and Alliances Tel: +44 800 3029280 info@poweronplatforms.com www.poweronplatforms.com UK-based IT automation specialist PowerON provides powerful IT management and cloud automation solutions to private and public sector organisations.

PowerON removes the complexity and costs associated with implementing and monitoring IT management solutions by leveraging automated delivery approaches, deploying most solutions in half the average time.

Microsoft has chosen PowerON to join its Enterprise Mobility & Security Elite Partner Team – a group of 70 partners that can access early product releases and technical content. PowerON will help Microsoft to develop products. The company has achieved £2 million (US$2.6 million) turnover since opening in 2015.

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Redgate Mary Robbins, Product Marketing Manager Tel: +44 1223 437922 devops@red-gate.com www.red-gate.com/devops Redgate is a Microsoft SQL Server tools vendor that makes simple software used by over 800,000 IT professionals. Redgate’s philosophy is to design highly usable, reliable tools that elegantly solve the problems businesses face every day in managing and developing their databases. The tools integrate with, and plug into, a company’s existing infrastructure and enable them to introduce DevOps to their databases and, at the same, meet increasingly strict regulatory pressures surrounding data privacy. As a result, more than 100,000 companies use products in the Redgate SQL Toolbelt, including 91% of those in the Fortune 100 group.

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Segment of One Stephan Visarius, Director Customer Acquisition and Success Tel: +49 30 20898730 visarius@so1.net www.so1.net Segment of One’s powerful artificial intelligence for retail solution is capable of personalising promotions in real time, providing relevant offers, avoiding substitution of planned purchases and following retailers’ financial goals. Machine learning algorithms understand latent product properties and consumer preferences to significantly impact retailer’s revenues (10-25% increase in targeted baskets), promotional budgets (40-60% savings), and customer satisfaction.

The company has offices in Berlin, Germany; Boston, US; and Warsaw, Poland and employs 40 international talents. It also has strong academic ties with MIT, ETH, Humboldt University with full access to GfK and Nielsen household panel data.

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The ID Co. Milko Radotic, Chief Commercial Officer

VeriPark Ceyhun Dograyan, Marketing Executive

Willis Towers Watson Hagen Selinger

Tel: +44 734 2888965 milko.radotic@theidco.com www.theidco.com

Tel: +90 538 2328057 ceyhun.dograyan@veripark.com www.veripark.com

Tel: +44 20 71703568 hagen.selinger@willistowerswatson.com www.willistowerswatson.com/ICT

The ID Co. has a simple mission: allow users to sign up for products and services in seconds.

Founded in 2011, The ID Co. has been building products based on open banking data, creating convenience for consumers and helping businesses by solving issues such as affordability and credit risk.

The DirectID business products help achieve this by removing friction caused in the application process by current challenges of risk, compliance, fraud and regulation.

The products it provides solve business obstructions, such as assessing a customer’s affordability and verifying their account information to offset credit risk.

Since it was founded in 1998, VeriPark has gone on to become a leading global software company enabling financial institutions to deliver world-class customer journeys in digital and assisted channels. VeriPark’s digital innovations and consultancy services are transforming business worldwide for banks, credit unions, insurance companies, pension funds, brokerage and wealth and investment firms. Operating in many countries worldwide, VeriPark has its main offices in the UK, Europe, Asia, Africa and Middle East.

Willis Towers Watson is the world’s largest provider of actuarial software and has been developing technology solutions for more than 40 years. The company’s products are created by drawing upon the combined insights and expertise of more chartered actuaries and risk analysts than any other professional services company. Willis Towers Watson helps more than 950 clients in over 60 countries by combining innovative actuarial thinking with technology expertise to help them measure value, manage risk and safeguard solvency.

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ISSUE 8: SPRING 2018

ISSUE 9: SUMMER 2018

£9.00

£9.00

The best of enterprise technology on the Microsoft platform INTERVIEW

Partnering for success

Empowering employees

At last year’s Inspire event, Microsoft announced major changes to the way it is working with partners. In an exclusive interview with The Record, Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner organisation, tells us more about these changes and explains the opportunities that will be presented in the coming financial year B Y A N D Y C L AY T O N - S M I T H

How to foster worker productivity in a new operating environment

Cultivating tomorrow’s enterprise

Last July, Microsoft made some big, bold changes to how it works with partners. Tell us about those changes and why they were made.

Last year, we set out to make dramatic changes.

At Inspire, we introduced the One Commercial Partner organisation, and transformed how we engage with our partner community by bringing all of our partner facing roles into one organisation. We aligned all of those partner facing roles to three motions: build-with; go-to-market; and sell-with. This has simplified our partner engagement, driven increased collaboration and fostered a culture of work that puts our partners first.

As part of the sell-with motion, we introduced a new role called the channel manager. This role has strengthened the relationship between Microsoft field sellers and the selling teams of our partners. The channel manager role has proven to be invaluable. We have seen some remarkable success this year generating more than 240,000 leads and opportunities for partners.

We also introduced rewards for co-selling third-party solutions from our partners. From that we have closed nearly US$2 billion in revenue for our partners in more than 8,000 customer wins. We intend to continue this programme and expand our co-sell motion even further next year with enhancements to our marketplaces – AppSource and Azure Marketplace. We will also start facilitating opportunities for partners to co-sell with each other.

one way we’re doing that, and both AppSource and Azure Marketplace now allow partners to publish both apps and services as offerings. In addition, we have a referrals engine in place that makes it easier for customers to find a Microsoft partner with a solution that meets their needs.

Over the past few years, we’ve made available marketing and sales content and customisable assets that a lot of partners have found valuable, and now we’re making go-to-market services available to partners to better enable demand generation, channel development and more.

We’ve made these moves because we cannot serve our customers without partners. Our partners continue to be a critical ingredient in our business model. Microsoft is squarely focused on enabling partners of all types to deliver services around the world on any platform. This open and cloud-focused approach allows us to provide more value and more choice to customers in four solution areas: Modern Workplace; Business Applications; Apps & Infrastructure; and Data & Artificial Intelligence. Through these changes, we want to help partners innovate more, go to market faster and connect with the right customers at the right time.

FREAEL How are you helping partners to reach more customers?

The top request that partners have made of us is to better connect them to customers. Helping partners take the solutions they’ve built to market and reach more customers will be a significant focus for us going forward. The marketplaces are

Five years ago at the LeWeb Conference in Paris, Satya Nadella said: “Over the next ten years, we’ll reach a point where nearly everything has become digitised.” At the halfway point between prediction and outcome, how do you think Nadella’s quote holds up to scrutiny? Where do you think that Microsoft is leading the way with this digital transformation agenda?

For Microsoft and our partners, digital transformation is more than a trend; it’s a new way of life. The opportunity around

“Helping partners take the solutions they’ve built to market and reach more customers will be a significant focus for us going forward”

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EDITION

Making the shift from ‘process first’ to ‘culture first’

Microsoft’s Richard Peers explains the opportunities presented by open banking

PLUS:

PLUS:

Why modern productivity tools can transform manufacturing

Why microservices enable a seamless omnichannel retail experience

How Microsoft is helping many of the biggest telcos win the race to 5G

How artificial intelligence is transforming the media industry

We take an in-depthGavriella look at how Schuster AI is explains how Janet outlines Microsoft’s vision to TheMicrosoft tech that’s shaping theLewis connected changing the face ofisthe renewing retail industry its commitment togovernments partners empower financial firms to transform of the future

technologyrecord.com/subscribe

The technology that is helping to create a new manufacturing landscape

Sign up to receive a FREE digital subscription to The Record Or purchase a subscription to the printed edition

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THE LAST WORD

A productive workplace Anthony Bruce, a partner in PwC’s human resources consulting practice, outlines what technologies and best practices organisations can use to empower employees to work from anywhere

BY REBECCA GIBSON

What challenges do companies face when creating flexible, digital-first workplaces?

People working remotely need the same tools they’d have in a traditional office environment, so implementing the right technology is important.

However, the biggest challenge is to create the right culture. Employees want the freedom to work wherever and whenever they want, but they still desire the ‘water-cooler chat’ experience. Companies must create a culture where employees feel like they’re working alongside their workmates, despite being in different physical locations. Working from home can sometimes be counterintuitive to a healthy work-life balance because employees feel obliged to answer phone calls or e-mails outside of traditional working hours. Hence, it’s crucial for organisations to review their flexible working arrangements and set clear policies.

What technologies are organisations using to actively improve worker productivity?

Mobile technology has transformed the workplace, while communication tools, such as Yammer, are helping companies to share knowledge and information in new ways. Wearable technology is also being used to monitor employees’ health and stress levels to improve their well-being and reduce absences. There’s been an increase in wearables that track and assess employee efficiency, particularly at supermarkets and delivery companies.

Some organisations are using workforce allocation technology to identify the most cost-effective and productive combination of full-time, part-time and gig economy workers.

Are there any best practices companies can implement to better support employees to work flexibly?

Employers must identify the business problem that they’re trying to solve. Do they want to create

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a more productive and agile workforce? Are they trying to reduce costs? Do they want to encourage the use of new technology? Is it a combination of all these factors? Executives must also lead the cultural transformation. There’s no point in encouraging employees to work remotely if senior management sit at their office desk all week.

How will the future workplace evolve?

Although there’s not been a reduction in large companies taking up office space in big cities, there’s been an increase in pop-up offices and collaborative workspaces. Anywhere with internet connectivity can now become a workplace, whether it’s a coffee shop or an airport departure lounge. Meanwhile, the gig economy will continue to grow. PwC’s Workforce of the Future research found that being able to control how and when they work is a top factor for people when it comes to their future career. Only 23% of UK employees said they wanted to work in a traditional office.

“Anywhere with internet connectivity can now become a workplace”

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It lets you integrate new technology seamlessly – bringing new products to market more quickly and with a better customer experience.

As we say, it’s innovation with unlimited potential.

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MAKE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION A REALITY. DXC CAN HELP YOU MIGRATE THE RIGHT WORKLOADS TO THE CLOUD, MODERNIZE APPLICATIONS AND SIMPLIFY TRADITIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE, SECURELY AND EFFICIENTLY. www.dxc.technology/KickApps

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