Microsoft pivots to digital selling to reach more customers

This blog post details how Microsoft uses Dynamics 365 to keep up with digital sales. As more customers move to digital buying, the volume of leads generated has grown exponentially. To keep up, Microsoft Digital Sales turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Insights to scale for increased demand, engage customers remotely, and increase seller productivity.

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Not so long ago, the drawbacks of storing databases in the cloud were so great that most businesses gave it little thought. Today, the benefits far outweigh the shortcomings, with an incredible array of additional services and solutions now available that provide organizations with unparalleled efficiency and growth potential. Not only is the price-to-performance ratio of cloud software much better than that of on-site servers, but an array of additional services and solutions can also now be integrated in cloud applications. Subscribe now to learn more about how cloud migration can provide you organization with the scalability and flexibility it needs to support its digital transformation roadmap, as well as how you can reap the benefits of industry-leading capabilities by using Microsoft Azure.

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ComAp: Digital Transformation of Sales

The Czech company ComAp makes control units for diesel, gas, dual fuel, and other kinds of power generators for clients all over the world. Its devices can be found in hospitals, banks, and data centers. Since its foundation in 1991, ComAp has put emphasis on readiness in providing services to its customers. The effort to be always there for its customers has become one of the company's essential values. For ComAp, digitalization of sales with Microsoft has enabled global consolidation and consistency throughout their offices.

ANU: Collaborative research and data sharing

Data-sharing is an immense enabler of scientific advancements. When researchers choose to make their data publicly available, they are allowing their work to contribute far beyond the original findings. Making research data more accessible also fosters transparency and trust in their work, enables other researchers to reproduce and validate their findings, and ultimately, contributes to the pace of scientific discovery by allowing others to reuse and build on top of the data. Fortunately, cloud technology has made it easier than ever to share data across major research institutions. Empowered by tools that include Microsoft Azure, researchers are relying more and more on digital collaboration and open source software to drive scientific breakthroughs. Watch this video to learn how researchers at Australian National University (ANU) are using Azure to build on each other's findings and avoid a siloed approach to data that leads to slower research pipelines.

Microsoft Transforms its Sales Practices

As software customers become better informed through their own online research, sellers must adapt their sales practices to engage with them at the right time and with the right insights to deliver value. By adopting a relationship sales approach that encompasses social listening, customer research, and innovative technology, the Inside Sales team at Microsoft has undergone a digital transformation that drives better interactions and establishes a model from which both partners and customers benefit.

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Increase sales with AI-prioritized activities and cadences

Increase sales and adjust to fluctuations in demand by scaling sales resources and arming digital sellers with training/skilling and next best action enablement tools. Learn how Microsoft makes it possible. Subscribe now.

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How AI is finding patterns and anomalies in your data

From autonomous vehicles, predictive analytics applications, and facial recognition, to chatbots, virtual assistants, cognitive automation, and fraud detection, the use cases for AI span dozens of industries. Regardless of the AI application, though, these use cases all have a common aspect. After implementing thousands of AI projects, experts have come to realize that despite all of the diversity in applications, AI use cases fall into one or more of seven common patterns. One of them—the pattern-matching pattern—has allowed machines to digest large amounts of data to identify patterns, anomalies, and outliers in the data, so organizations can unearth previously undiscovered insights in their datasets. In this article, you'll learn how pattern-matching is being put to use in today's organizations to prevent fraud, find the best job candidates, manage inventories in times of crisis, and empower data scientists with new perspectives on how to improve critical processes.

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Ste. Michelle Wine Estates crafts luxury customer experiences with Dynamics 365 Commerce

Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, one of the largest premium wine companies in the United States, prides itself on superior consumer experiences. To unify its consumer data and provide opportunities for innovation, Ste. Michelle is deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce across all its wine brands. The company is already seeing better mobile experiences, and it expects that by enhancing its omnichannel commerce platform, Ste. Michelle will increase sales and conversion rates, attract new business, and boost loyalty among existing consumers.

Move and modernize your Microsoft workloads with Azure

Hand in hand with digital transformation, cloud technology has seen outstanding growth. Because of the rapid pace of adoption, it has overtaken traditional on-premises hardware. Given the cloud's huge potential across industries, verticals such as manufacturing, railways, banking, retail, education, and healthcare are switching to cloud services to optimize their reach and performance and increase their flexibility. But moving to the cloud is a strategic move, and it requires organizations to make careful internal analysis in choosing the features that will allow them to get the most out of their cloud migration. By reading this infographic, you'll learn more about the most important benefits and features of Microsoft Azure. You'll also discover how the Microsoft cloud is helping businesses enjoy unparalleled cost savings, easily plan migrations, avoid the complexity of multivendor support, and modernize existing cloud applications.

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Themes for sales success

This infographic provides 4 key themes for sales success, including building and strengthening relationships with key prospects and engaging with the whole buying committee. It also notes that success is all about scale and cross-platform is key.

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One of the main challenges that modern researchers encounter centers on the size of their datasets. As research projects become increasingly more digital, the vast volumes of data that research generates demands enormous raw computing power, for both storage and computational capacity, which most organizations simply didn't have access to. Cloud technology and artificial intelligence (AI) address this need, allowing researchers to free themselves from the constraints of their physical hardware. Cloud-based approaches can also boost the speed and efficiency of publishing, increasing the impact of research publications. Subscribe now to learn more about the data management and automation capabilities of the Microsoft cloud and how they're enabling breakthrough research projects around the world.

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Work remotely, stay secure

As businesses have had to quickly pivot to new working environments, cyberattacks become an urgent concern. In this thought leadership article, you can learn some of best practices using Microsoft security that help ensure the best protection. Examples include secure access to cloud applications that protect sign-ins with security defaults, methods to manage and secure corporate data in approved apps on personal devices, and providing clear and basic information, including how to protect their devices, will help you and employees stay ahead of threats so they can remain productive.

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Customer centricity: A key priority across all lines of business

Customer experience is expected to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020. Get ahead of the competition now by personalizing your organization's customer experience strategy. Read the Customer Centricity e-book to learn how to unify your siloed marketing, sales, and service data into a single, intelligent 360-degree customer view by adopting a customer data platform.

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ANU: Storing the human genome

Thanks to cloud technology, researchers can take advantage of faster, more advanced and more scalable resources that enable them to perform tasks that they can't manage using in-house resources. The cloud also enables scientists to quickly run tests across a variety of platforms and virtual machines with different specifications, which can aid rapid prototyping, interoperability testing, and performance testing. A cloud solution can also provide researchers with ways to augment their existing resources by handling peaks in demand and reducing competition for local resources, when multiple teams are working toward an upcoming deadline. By reducing dependence on on-site computing, research projects can increase efficiency and scalability, and deliver greater results faster. Watch this video to learn how Australian National University (ANU) is using Microsoft Azure to help decode more than 7 billion base pairs of DNA in the human genome and take its research further than ever before.

Curate an end-to-end digital buying experience with AI-generated customer insights

Learn how to curate an end-to-end digital buying experience with AI insights. Subscribe now!

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Shipping company navigates to the cloud, boosts security, cuts operating costs by 50%

Qatari shipping and maritime company Nakilat has one of the world's largest fleets of liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers, transporting LNG from Qatar to global markets. To increase its competitive advantage, Nakilat wanted to improve employee productivity and mobility, without compromising on data security. It uses Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Cloud App Security to deliver highly secure cloud-first workplaces—shipboard and in the office. Nakilat also adopted the Microsoft Azure platform to optimize its operations and improve business continuity, reducing operating costs by 50 percent. See more in this video.

How AI will change the way we work in 2020

Thanks to AI, business applications will soon be able to answer complex questions, help users navigate interfaces, and enable cloud vendors to reduce support from personnel to manage their loads. AI is also being used in various software applications to help decision-makers identify and automate repetitive tasks, improving employee productivity. Increased understanding of how to better implement AI in business applications likely will lead to the emergence of new features, such as natural-language processing (NLP), that can help managers interact in more-intuitive ways with AI-powered apps. In this article, you'll learn about the innovative features powered by AI and machine learning (ML) that you can expect to see in business applications in the next five years.

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Microsoft Threat Protection stops attack sprawl and auto-heals enterprise assets with built-in intelligence and automation

Attackers will cross multiple domains like email, identity, endpoints, and applications to find the point of least resistance. Today's defense solutions have been designed to protect, detect, and block threats for each domain separately, allowing attackers to exploit the seams and threshold differences between solutions—leaving the business vulnerable to attack. Microsoft Threat Protection stops attack sprawl and auto-heals enterprise assets with built in intelligence and automation. Read on to learn more.

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Cloud migration essentials

In recent years, the global business landscape has witnessed a significant increase in cloud adoption. This has created significant value over traditional datacenters via greater scalability, cost-efficiency, and other performance improvements. Yet cloud migration requires careful planning. For a migration to be successful, it's important for the business to come up with a strategy that also covers the end cloud environment, training, and—most importantly—the readiness of workloads and applications. In this eBook, you'll discover the key preliminary steps to consider in evaluating a cloud migration, as well as the various approaches for rehosting, refactoring, rearchitecting, and rebuilding your workloads for the cloud. You'll also learn about some useful tools that you can use to accelerate your migration project and get tips to help you ensure post-migration success by using Microsoft Azure.

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Grant Thornton closes new opportunities faster with Dynamics 365 Sales Insights and AI

To best serve its clients, Grant Thornton must tie its extensive knowledge of macro-level economic and industry trends to the micro-level business needs, motivations, and challenges faced by individual executives within its client base. The global accounting and consulting firm does this by using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Azure, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to "connect the macro with the micro" and deliver that information quickly and accurately to geographically distributed team members. They also use Dynamics 365 Sales Insights to understand the health of client relationships and where new opportunities may lie, take actions based on those insights, close new opportunities faster, and win more deals.