azuremarketplace

Acknowledging the pandemic in the UK is presenting some unique challenges. Andrew Busby, the founder of Retail Reflections and co-founder of SafePrem, talks about how is the pandemic is impacting retail in the UK and across the world and the digital technologies and trends retailers are specifically using that are really making a difference right now.

We also discuss how Microsoft is taking part in some of the technologies or trends Andrew describes, and what Microsoft and other retailers are seeing in the retail space in response to COVID challenges.

Episode Links

Episode Transcript

Andrew’s Articles

SafePrem

Behind the Mask Podcast

SafePrem Blog

SafePrem on Twitter

Microsoft in Retail

Retail Trends Playbook for 2021

Azure Machine Learning

Azure Digital Twins

Azure Synapse Analytics

Azure Marketplace

AppSource

Guest

Andrew Busby is the founder of Retail Reflections and co-founder of SafePrem. Andrew is a Top 20 global retail influencer, Forbes contributor, IBM Futurist, keynote speaker, retail writer & analyst.

Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter. 

Host

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. 

Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we talk about making data-driven decisions using DataVisor with Jamshed Patel, Vice President of Solution Engineering. Nick Leimer, Principal Industry Lead in Microsoft Azure for Insurance, explains how seeing more fraud-based solutions in the insurance industry means moving to real-time analysis, alerting, and remediation with DataVisor.

While we’re seeing early adopters embrace technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to help drive their businesses forward with autonomous systems, the uptake is much slower than one might expect. 

The number of companies willing to turn over their operations to a real-time-system vs. a report-analyze-act sort of model is surprisingly small.

Some organizations have taken the approach of capturing all kinds of data in hopes they will glean insights after capturing anything and everything they can get their hands on. 

Jamsheed explains how using this technique has panned out for companies trying to find insights from their data estates or data lakes and shares interesting data sources he looks at to make determinations about threat vectors and real-time remediation.

Episode Links

Episode Transcript

Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

DataVisor.com

DataVisor on LinkedIn and Twitter

Azure Marketplace

AppSource

Guests

Jamshed Patel is Vice President of Solution Engineering at DataVisor. DataVisor is a Microsoft partner and makes powerful and comprehensive fraud and risk solutions for various industries.

Follow him on LinkedIn.

Nick Leimer is Principal Industry Lead in Microsoft Azure for Insurance.

Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter. 

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode, we talked about retail and consumer goods with a focus on eCommerce and the fast-paced change the industry is seeing with our guests, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis Jason Goldberg, and Principal Industry Lead for Retail & CPG at Microsoft Sahir Anand. 

We talk about Microsoft’s retail and consumer goods strategies, interesting technologies or trends in retail right now, the urgency for businesses to change investment priorities considering the pandemic and the strain it has put on them, and new delivery models such as last-mile home delivery and the implications for retailers.

Episode Links

Retail and Consumer Good Home

Retail Trends Playbook e-book

Guests

Jason Goldberg is Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis. He was voted one of retail’s top global influencers by Vend four years in a row, and in 2017 he was inducted into the National Retail Federation’s “The List” of people shaping the future of retail.

Jason has a podcast of his own, the retail-focused Jason and Scot show. The home for the podcast is jasonandscot.com and it’s the top-rated iTunes podcast for eCommerce.

Follow Jason on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out his blog at retailgeek.com.

Sahir Anand is the Principal Industry Lead for Retail & CPG at Microsoft.

In his 20-year career, Sahir has focused on building experience and expertise within retail and consumer goods industries and now works with the Cloud & AI Industry Experiences team at Microsoft.

Follow Sahir on LinkedIn.

Hosts

Paul Maher is General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Retail has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Shelley Bransten, Karen Garrette, and Sahir Anand join David and Paul to discuss how retailers are responding to the current crisis along with what to expect during and after recovery.

We introduce the Microsoft for Retail team and how it works with partners and customers to solve the biggest retail problems and move the state of the industry forward with digital technologies. In addition we hear how Microsoft is helping the largest employment segment in the world navigate the COVID-19 crisis.

Finally, we hear where Microsoft is investing in the technologies serving the future of the industry.

Show Links

[Transcript]

• Microsoft for Retail
• Project Zap, Retail Matchmaking Tool
• McKinsey Covid Resource Center
• The Kroger Blueprint
• Walgreens’s Boot Alliance

Guests

Shelley Bransten
Corporate Vice President, WW Retail & Consumer Goods Industries, Microsoft

Shelley grew up in retail. She is a passionate advocate for customers and works tirelessly to ensure retailers are set up for success across their digital transformation efforts. At Microsoft, Shelley leads the thought leadership, go-to-market and solution approach to address retailers’ most important growth opportunities.

Shelley on LinkedIn

Karen Garrette
World Wide Retail Strategy Lead at Microsoft

Having worked in a variety of roles from presales to consultancy, Karen has the depth and breadth of experience and deep technical understanding that allows her to translate the feature and function set into customer solutions to win against the competition.

Karen on LinkedIn

Sahir Anand
Principal, Industry Lead – Microsoft Azure Cloud+AI for Retail & CPG at Microsoft

Over the years, Sahir has published several industry reports, blogs, whitepapers, and videos focused on retail and CPG industry business and technology areas. He is an avid speaker at industry events.

Sahir on LinkedIn

Our Microsoft for Health panel looks forward to the future of healthcare. As healthcare responds to the current COVID-19 crisis, it is accelerating its adoption of technologies that would have taken years to implement before the current need for change.

The panel discusses how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is impacting healthcare today and in the future. Hear how Microsoft's AI/ML technologies and the Azure cloud are being brought to bear to empower people to work differently.

Not only are these technologies helping the current situation, but partners are providing the next generation of medicine today. Learn how Healthcare will be forever changed by the technology solutions currently being introduced today.

Transcript

Show Notes

• Microsoft for Healthcare
• Microsoft Industry Health Blog
• Microsoft 365 and healthcare
• Microsoft for Healthcare on LinkedIn

Microsoft’s Covid-19 Response

• Patient outreach & triage (Healthcare bot, PlasmaBot)
• Track allocation of resources & supplies - Protecting People Everywhere
• Communication for crisis management
• Deliver & manage continuous care (Virtual Visits)
• Dissemination of accurate information (COVID Open Research Dataset (CORD19), Contact Tracing)

Supporting your healthcare organization and community during crises

• Complimentary 6-month Office 365 E1 to help connect employees during COVID-19 response
• Enabling the NHS to continue delivering frontline healthcare
• GE Healthcare is extending its longtime collaboration with Microsoft to launch a cloud-based COVID-19 patient monitoring software for health systems
• Learn about Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot service that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help respond to patient inquiries
• Build a crisis management site to connect people and information
• Use this preconfigured template to rapidly share information across facilities and collect employee updates with Power Apps Crisis Management template
• Quickly optimize Office 365 traffic for remote staff and reduce the load on your infrastructure 
• Balancing cloud services continuity for crucial health and safety organizations
• Work remotely, stay secure—tips for CISOs

Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
Uses of AI for health include the work to fight COVID-19 is already underway. A handful of key partnerships include the following.

The  COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, a private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, for which Microsoft is providing researchers access to the world’s most powerful computing resources, which can significantly speed the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus. Around the world, Microsoft’s research scientists, spanning computer science, biology, medicine and public health, are collaborating on projects in the consortium

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a global health research organization at the University of Washington School of Medicine, is releasing a set of COVID-19 data visualizations and forecasts that the White House, FEMA, governors and hospital administrators have started using to mobilize resources

The Washington State Department of Health is working on a new dashboard that aims to increase timeliness, accuracy and speed of data reporting to the public. The dashboard relies on data reported by local health jurisdictions, healthcare facilities and labs

Folding@home, a global organization that uses distributed computing is researching COVID-19 proteins that could help with designing therapeutics

The Sepsis Center of Research Excellence (SCORE-UW), part of the University of Washington’s Department of Medicine, is a global collaboration between a network of hospitals, industry, blood banks, universities and funding partners. Using clinical data, radiologic imaging and other patient biomarker responses, SCORE-UW is developing novel algorithms to predict, and improve, healthcare and socioeconomic outcomes of COVID-19 positive patients

Take, the Brazilian leader in chatbots and the smart contacts market, developed a bot to bring official and credible information to the public and connect potential patients to medical teams to avoid overloading Brazilian hospitals

Guests

Gareth Hall

Senior Director - Microsoft WorldWide Health Solutions

Gareth leads the team driving the worldwide solutions strategy for the Microsoft Health business, focused on working with Microsoft product teams and partners to build solutions on the Microsoft cloud platforms (Azure, Dynamics 365 and Office 365).

LinkedIn

John Doyle

Director, Cloud & AI, Microsoft Healthcare

As a Director within the worldwide commercial business industry team at Microsoft, John Doyle is responsible for the development of business strategy and partnerships across the healthcare industry, globally. John, engages with industry customers and partners, developing strategies and repeatable technology solutions that harness the power of cloud and AI to drive innovation and industry transformation.

LinkedIn

David Houlding

David is the Director of Healthcare experiences on Microsoft Industry Experiences team. He has extensive experience in working with partners for healthcare in applicable technologies, most lately the cloud, blockchain, and AI.

LinkedIn
Twitter

Microsoft for Healthcare is working hard to help healthcare throughout the COVID-19 crisis and to plan for what comes after the pandemic. Our guests discuss how Microsoft is responding to the current COVID-19 crisis as well as their mission in healthcare and the future of the industry.

Our guests describe how they work with partners to find the right capabilities enabled by Microsoft solutions. Additionally, we discuss several Microsoft healthcare-focused products in use today. Learn how Microsoft technologies are being used to solve real world problems related not only to the current pandemic, but other important healthcare problems.

The panel discusses the partnerships occurring between competitors to combat COVID-19. Learn about Microsoft partner solutions available to help "flatten the curve" during this crisis.

Transcript

Show Notes

• Microsoft for Healthcare
• Microsoft Industry Health Blog
• Microsoft 365 and healthcare
• Microsoft for Healthcare on LinkedIn
   

Microsoft’s Covid-19 Response

• Patient outreach & triage (Healthcare bot, PlasmaBot)
• Track allocation of resources & supplies - Protecting People Everywhere
• Communication for crisis management
• Deliver & manage continuous care (Virtual Visits)
• Dissemination of accurate information (COVID Open Research Dataset (CORD19), Contact Tracing)

Supporting your healthcare organization and community during crises

• Complimentary 6-month Office 365 E1 to help connect employees during COVID-19 response
• Enabling the NHS to continue delivering frontline healthcare
• GE Healthcare is extending its longtime collaboration with Microsoft to launch a cloud-based COVID-19 patient monitoring software for health systems
• Learn about Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot service that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help respond to patient inquiries
• Build a crisis management site to connect people and information
• Use this preconfigured template to rapidly share information across facilities and collect employee updates with Power Apps Crisis Management template
• Quickly optimize Office 365 traffic for remote staff and reduce the load on your infrastructure 
• Balancing cloud services continuity for crucial health and safety organizations
• Work remotely, stay secure—tips for CISOs

Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
Uses of AI for health include the work to fight COVID-19 is already underway. A handful of key partnerships include the following.

The  COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, a private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, for which Microsoft is providing researchers access to the world’s most powerful computing resources, which can significantly speed the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus. Around the world, Microsoft’s research scientists, spanning computer science, biology, medicine and public health, are collaborating on projects in the consortium

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a global health research organization at the University of Washington School of Medicine, is releasing a set of COVID-19 data visualizations and forecasts that the White House, FEMA, governors and hospital administrators have started using to mobilize resources

The Washington State Department of Health is working on a new dashboard that aims to increase timeliness, accuracy and speed of data reporting to the public. The dashboard relies on data reported by local health jurisdictions, healthcare facilities and labs

Folding@home, a global organization that uses distributed computing is researching COVID-19 proteins that could help with designing therapeutics

The Sepsis Center of Research Excellence (SCORE-UW), part of the University of Washington’s Department of Medicine, is a global collaboration between a network of hospitals, industry, blood banks, universities and funding partners. Using clinical data, radiologic imaging and other patient biomarker responses, SCORE-UW is developing novel algorithms to predict, and improve, healthcare and socioeconomic outcomes of COVID-19 positive patients

Take, the Brazilian leader in chatbots and the smart contacts market, developed a bot to bring official and credible information to the public and connect potential patients to medical teams to avoid overloading Brazilian hospitals

Guests

Gareth Hall

Senior Director - Microsoft WorldWide Health Solutions

Gareth leads the team driving the worldwide solutions strategy for the Microsoft Health business, focused on working with Microsoft product teams and partners to build solutions on the Microsoft cloud platforms (Azure, Dynamics 365 and Office 365).

LinkedIn

John Doyle

Director, Cloud & AI, Microsoft Healthcare

As a Director within the worldwide commercial business industry team at Microsoft, John Doyle is responsible for the development of business strategy and partnerships across the healthcare industry, globally. John, engages with industry customers and partners, developing strategies and repeatable technology solutions that harness the power of cloud and AI to drive innovation and industry transformation.

LinkedIn

David Houlding

David is the Director of Healthcare experiences on Microsoft Industry Experiences team. He has extensive experience in working with partners for healthcare in applicable technologies, most lately the cloud, blockchain, and AI.

LinkedIn
Twitter

Transcript

Insurance is changing quickly these days and undergoing a digital transformation is not easy. Adding blockchain to the mix can change an entire architecture. When used appropriately, however, blockchain can become an indispensable tool for your ledger technology.

In this episode, we discuss the use of blockchain in insurance as well as how it applies to other industries such as banking and capital markets, healthcare and manufacturing.

Specifically, you will learn how companies are using Corda's smart contracts feature to create complex, logic-based, on-block content and events. Listen to how R3, with the open source Corda blockchain, is helping companies get started with blockchain today.

Show Links

• R3 on Azure: Launch of Corda Enterprise v3.1
• R3 website
• R3 on Azure: Strengthening our partnership
• Corda Enterprise Scale Deployment on Microsoft Azure

Ryan Rugg

Ryan is the Global Head of Insurance for R3 and leads the company's Insurance strategy to drive business growth. She is responsible for the strategic design, development, and commercialization across the ecosystem of blockchain innovation within the Insurance Industry.

In 2017, she launched the Center of Excellence for Insurers and Reinsurers in partnership with ACORD which is redefining the foundations of insurance by harnessing the power of collaborative networks, through the deployment of DLT within the financial services industry. 

Since then Corda, R3's blockchain platform has been the platform of choice for the insurance industry. Corda integrates and secures the entire stream of disparate data sources, while simultaneously ensuring transparency across an interconnected network of clients, brokers, insurers and other third parties.

Prior to R3 Ryan worked for Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan where she gained extensive experience in financial services covering a broad range of institutions including; insurance, hedge funds, banks and asset managers. Ryan started her career in Technology at Lehman Brothers, experiencing first-hand the inefficiencies in the legacy infrastructure which she is now working to solve. She has a double major in Computer Science and Finance.

Nick Leimer

Nick Leimer is the Principal Insurance Industry Lead for Azure. Nick brings 20+ years of experience bridging the business and IT gap in application development, operations, and infrastructure.

Before joining Microsoft, Nick was the Senior Director for Actuarial Compute at Manulife leading the migration of LAN based HPC Farms to the Azure environment for all of Asia; including all desktop Moody’s / GGY Axis users and data feeds.

Prior to Manulife, his career progressed through developing applications for Actuarial Valuation and Projection including components of ArcVal and Prophet, the Defined Benefit area with the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (BPGC), and leading life insurers, AIG and Manulife. 

Follow Nick on LinkedIn  and Twitter.

Transcript

In this episode, we speak with Marcy Larsen, Microsoft Industry Solutions Executive focused for Retail in Australia. She helps us understand how hyper-personalization is the future for successful retailers.

She shares how retailers balance the line of how personal can offers really be, without being off-putting to the customer. Marcy tells us about working with Microsoft to garner feedback and build services retailers want.

Also, Marcy offers insights into how retailers can take advantage of the data they already have.

Show Links

Read the use case that underlies this podcast episode and learn more from these other resources.

• See how Microsoft is helping grow intelligent retail
• Microsoft retail and consumer goods
• Power BI
• Azure Data Factory
• Azure HDInsight
• Azure Machine Learning Service
• Azure Machine Learning Studio

Marcy Larsen

Marcella Larsen leads Microsoft's Retail Industry focus to inspire digital transformation in consumer-facing industries for Australia. Marcella is responsible for managing platform agnostic cloud and cross channel focused growth strategies in the industries of Retail, Travel, Hospitality, and Consumer Goods. She oversees retail, travel, transport and consumer goods industry solutions, go to market strategies, partnerships, marketing, solution development, thought leadership and customer relations to ensure the full extent of Microsoft’s industry visions and value propositions are realized locally. Marcella brings almost 22 years of deep customer, vertical technology, sales and marketing experience to this role.

Marcella has a strong track record in developing and growing business, is results oriented, with a multidisciplinary approach for business planning. She is experienced in marketing, business development, supply chain operations, international trade, finance, and product management.

Transcript

In this episode, we speak with Kelly Goetsch, who is Chief Product Officer at commercetools. We touch on current and emerging trends in retail and hear how data-informed decisions can change a company culture. Further, discuss commercetools and their offering of APIs to retailers who are building their own eCommerce sites that live on commercetool's platform.

Our discussion covers how Azure allowed them to spool up their multi-tenant app quickly in containers using Azure Kubernetes Service. Looking forward into the future of retail, we hear about uses for AI and even augmented reality.

Show Links

• Commercetools website
• Azure Kubernetes Service

Kelly Goetsch

Kelly Goetsch is Chief Product Officer at commercetools. He came to commercetools from Oracle, where he led product management for their microservices initiatives.

Kelly is the author of 3 books about commerce.

He previously held senior-level product development and go-to-market responsibilities for key Oracle cloud products representing nine+ figures of revenue for Oracle. Prior to Oracle, he was a senior architect at ATG (acquired by Oracle), where he was instrumental to 31 large-scale ATG implementations. In his last years at ATG, he oversaw all of Walmart's implementations of ATG around the world.

Follow Kelly on LinkedIn.

David Starr

In addition to being the host of this podcast, David is a Principal Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft, focusing on healthcare. He loves creating with code and with large systems supporting scale.

He enjoys all aspects of developing, delivering and operating software systems. He is also passionate about the end-to-end process, methods and techniques, and the patterns and practices of high performing software development teams, using skills that transcend specific technology stacks.

Follow David on LinkedIn or Twitter