azure is the cloud for independent software vendors.privacy-by-design architecture by default....

Azure Innovation Playbook for ISVs

Azure is the cloud for Independent Software Vendors.

Azure Innovation Playbook for ISVsThis playbook includes scenarios across modernization and innovation categories that leaders of software companies like you can consider as you plan to advance your use of the cloud across your existing and new apps. Take a moment to review the table of contents and the overview section to get a better feel for how this playbook and Microsoft Azure can help you differentiate and grow your software business.

07 Modernize existing apps14 Advanced analytics21 Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning31 Internet of Things40 AR, VR, and MR

05 Overview

How to use this playbook

© Microsoft Corporation Azure

We have modernization and innovation ideas across several categories. You can drill into the area that interests you the most… or browse.

1. Determine your interest areas

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Each of the category areas has an overview page that includes growth statistics and details on related scenarios.

2. Absorb category details

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Each scenario has a page that highlights what the scenario is, benefits to your customer, benefits to you, the ISV, relevant use cases, and a case study.

3. Drill into scenario opportunities

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Most scenarios have a second page that provides more technical details about the scenario, including architectural solutions, key products, and reference materials to get started.

4. Learn scenario “building blocks”

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Innovation happening on Azure


“Using Azure frees us to focus on where we add value —developing great software and delivering great customer experiences.” Mike MellorSenior Director, Technical OperationsAdobe

“Azure helped us expand our product portfolio and quickly bring innovations like Max, our virtual assistant, to market. With Microsoft cloud technologies, our customers can achieve outcomes that simply were not possible before.”

Alan ManuelGeneral ManagerApttus

“Our architecture needed a privacy-by-design architecture by default. That's one of the strengths we saw in Azure.”

Ruediger BertschBusiness Developer for TeleradiologySiemens Healthineers

“Our focus is bringing down total cost of ownership for our customers, and Azure helps us do that.… We’re greatly expanding our market while helping thousands more utilities manage their mobile workforces more efficiently.”

James Pierre-NoelSenior Director Product ManagementABB

Why Microsoft and Azure for ISVs


Overview

Innovation drives compelling value and competitive differentiation

Digital transformation is driving significant growth in the software industry. Organizations are moving forward with their transformation efforts and are looking to software providers to deliver solutions that meet their specific needs. This environment is creating a competitive landscape for software developers. ISVWorld estimates that the number of ISVs grew from 92,000 in 2013 to over 175,000 in 20181. It’s never been easier to start a software business: with resources like the cloud, the barrier to entry is lower than ever.

Today the conversation isn’t about whether or not to move to the cloud. The discussion centers on how existing software businesses and startups alike can use the cloud to accelerate innovation. What once took years of development time is now a cloud service that can “just be turned on.” Emerging capabilities like AI, ML, and even mixed reality, are realizing new customer use cases…and for software vendors, opportunities for growth and differentiation.

Software vendors that innovate using advanced cloud capabilities can unlock an estimated $52B US in total addressable market potential by 20232. In fact, ISVs that take advantage of advanced cloud use cases are projected to grow 3x faster than the market rate of public cloud at 51% CAGR2.

Microsoft is the partner for ISVs

Trusted

Robust security and the most comprehensive compliance coverage

Operate hybrid seamlessly

Azure and Azure stack offer ISVs a simpler and faster path to the cloud

Be future-ready

1000+ capabilities build last year

Build on your terms

Flexibility and choice on coding tools and languages

Power of three cloudsNo other cloud provider can bring together the ability for ISVs to enable new and compelling scenarios with the power of Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Enterprise reachMicrosoft is the respected technology provider for the enterprise. Over 95% of Fortune 500 companies are using Azure today. ISV partners benefit with access to the top companies in the world.

Dedicated supportMicrosoft provides programs, partner offers, and sales and marketing resources to accelerate ISV partner revenue and growth, generating 36,000 IP co-sell wins driving over $9.5B in contracted partner revenue.

Sources: 1. ISVWorld reference on INGRAM Micro, “The Meteoric Explosion of Cloud Vendors: How ISVs Can Get Noticed”, March 5, 2019.2. IDC, “ISV Opportunity in a Transforming World”, Infographic, 2019.

https://www.ingrammicrocloud.com/au/en/blogs/meteoric-explosion-cloud-vendors-how-isvs-can-get-noticed/

Innovate with accelerated growth scenarios


Overview

Risk analytics

Real-time decision support

Streaming analytics

Advanced Analytics

Refactor with microservices and containers

Serverless

Multi-tenancy

Modernize IoT AR, VR, and MR

Predictive maintenance

Inventory optimization

Energy management

Remote inspection and maintenance

Immersive gaming

AI and ML

Personalized recommendations

Forecasting

Robotic process automation

Fraud prevention

Diagnosis, treatment, discovery

The public cloud provides ample opportunities to advance your innovation ambitions. Azure has been working hard and making big investments in creating capabilities and solution areas that address the needs of your customers–while helping you accelerate time to market. Here you can click into any of the five categories to learn more, or chose specific solution areas.

Overview


Modernize existing apps

What is it?

For existing applications that are strategic in nature, ISVs will want to consider modernizing those apps for the cloud to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities that improve efficiency and performance while adding value and relevance to customers.

Accelerate the modernization of your existing apps with Azure

Microsoft wants to make it easy for ISVs like you to make the move to the cloud for the ability to quickly modernize your existing apps through its turn-key application delivery platform for cloud-native apps and services. This allows you to take full advantage of the characteristics native to the cloud: scale, agility, and improved workflows focused on continuous delivery and continuous innovation. Azure provides flexible cloud-native technologies including containers, microservices, and serverless–allowing you to select the right app architecture to support your needs and desired customer outcomes.

Refactor with microservices and containersModernizing your existing applications to take advantage of cloud capabilities will drastically improve your deployment agility, so you can ship faster and lower applications’ delivery costs.

Serverless

Serverless computing enables developers to build applications faster by eliminating the need for them to manage infrastructure.

Multi-tenancy

Multi-tenancy is an architecture in which a single instance of a software application serves multiple customers. Each customer is called a tenant.

Your business opportunity

We’re in the midst of a major app modernization effort. Customer digital transformation efforts are driving the propensity to cloud-native capabilities. ISVs must modernize their portfolio architectures to capture this demand, or get left behind. According to IDC, by 2022, the acceleration of legacy app modernization and net-new development will lead to 35% of production apps being cloud native1.

LEARN MORE LEARN MORELEARN MORE

$12.5B total addressable market in 202332% five-year CAGR (2023)

Top Regions (CAGR 2018-23)

Greater China 41%USA 35%Latin America 35%India 34%France 34%Germany 34%United Kingdom 33%

Asia Pacific 32%Western Europe 32%Japan 32%Central Europe 29%Australia 29%Middle East and Africa 29%Canada 28%

Top Industries (CAGR 2018-23)

Insurance 41%Retail 41%Financial Services 41%Healthcare 39%

Source: 1. IDC, “ISV Opportunity in a Transforming World” Infographic, 2019

Refactor with microservices and containers



What is it?

Refactoring your existing applications enables those apps to be optimized for cloud scale and performance. Refactored apps are based on microservices architecture, use managed services, and take advantage of continuous delivery to achieve reliability and faster time to market.

Customer benefits

Greater agility Improved time to market Access to new innovations, faster Greater reliability and performance of apps

Industries

All industries will benefit from cloud-optimized apps

ISV opportunityAs businesses realize the benefits of microservices architecture, ISVs will need to keep in step with modern applications to stay relevant. Customers engaged in digital transformation need modern applications to drive the transformation effort with SaaS-enabled innovation supported by analytics, automation, and an enhanced user experience.

Microservices architecture gains momentum across industries as businesses turn to cloud-native applications for greater reliability, speed, agility, and maintainability. Results from IDC’s Industry CloudPath show that, on average, 52.3% of businesses have currently implemented a microservices architecture, with 43% indicating firm plans to do so.1

An exampleAn online real estate vendor decides to accelerate application updates by breaking down 10M lines of code into microservices that are deployed in containers. Its ability to update the application increases dramatically because development teams can now work in parallel on different parts of the application.

ISV benefits Accelerated development Enhanced development agility Application scalability Resilient and stable architecture

ISV success storySiemens Healthineers helps Biosense Webster unlock insights into cardiac arrhythmia with Azure-based teamplay network

“We needed to embrace different technologies in a flexible way, and a strong microservices-based architecture on Azure gives us the flexibility to realize our ambitions.”

Ruediger BertschBusiness Developer for TeleradiologySiemens Healthineers

FULL STORY

Challenge: Biosense Webster wanted to improve patient outcomes by finding a better way to collect, unify, and analyze patient data from disparate sources.

Solution: Biosense Webster uses the Siemens Healthineers Teamplay network to integrate data streams into a three-dimensional heart mapping system, which leverages Azure AI to drive and share insights across the doctor and clinician network.

Source: 1. IDC Survey Spotlight, Doc #US44929819.

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/740195-biosense-webster-healthcare-azure

Scenario building blocks


Modernize existing apps / Refactor with microservices and containers

What is it?

Refactoring applications refers to the transformation of monolithic applications into microservices-based applications. The modular quality of microservices-based development gives enterprises greater development velocity, operational agility, and the ability to propagate updates and changes to applications quickly.

Products

Azure Kubernetes ServiceAzure Active DirectoryAzure Container Registry

Top resource

Solution architecture

Developer uses IDE such as Visual Studio to commit changes to Github.

Github triggers a new build on VSTS.

VSTS packages microservices as containers and pushes them to the Azure Container Registry.

Containers are deployed to AKS cluster.

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Simplify the deployment and management of microservices-based applications

Users access services via apps and website.

Azure Active Directory is used to secure access to the resources.

Microservices use databases to store and retrieve information.

Administrator accesses via a separate admin portal.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/architecture/microservices-with-aks/

Serverless



What is it?

Serverless computing enables developers to build applications faster by eliminating the need for them to manage infrastructure. With serverless applications, the cloud service provider automatically provisions, scales, and manages the infrastructure required to run the code. This approach allows developers to focus on code without distractions: if they do not have to think about infrastructure, they will be more productive.

Customer benefits

ISV more focused on delivering value than managing infrastructure

Accelerated app innovation

Industries

All industries will benefit from serverless

ISV opportunityServerless provides an opportunity for the ISV to focus on what’s important, and that’s delivering value to customers—versus having internal resources, especially developers, spending too much time tinkering with their app infrastructure. ISVs will experience greater developer productivity, and generally more efficient use of resources when moving forward with a serverless approach. With serverless, you hand the responsibility to the cloud provider to manage the underlying server infrastructure. The serverless infrastructure dynamically scales up and down to match the demands of your apps. Ultimately, you get faster time to market with less infrastructure headaches.

ISV benefits Increase develop velocity Boost team performance Improve organizational impact

Use case detailsIn addition to the growing use of cloud-native app capabilities like microservices and containers, use of serverless computing continues to grow. According to the recent Rightscale 2019 “State of the Cloud Report” from Flexera, serverless is the “top-growing cloud service for the second year in a row, with a 50% growth over 2018 (24% to 36% adoption).

Serverless, for ISVs is yet another underlying infrastructure option designed to accelerate solution development. There are a number of uses for serverless computing, including:

Ecommerce Web applications Machine learning workflows with a serverless architecture Serverless microservices for event-driven scenarios Serverless applications with real-time capabilities

ISV success storyAn e-discovery company uses serverless computing to speed internal development of its SaaS solution

“When we can develop a solution in a week using Azure Functions versus four months using traditional methods, that represents a drastic improvement in our ability to solve business-critical problems.”

Hristo PapazovSenior Software EngineerRelativity

FULL STORY

Challenge: Based in Chicago, Illinois, Relativity wanted to improve the customer experience of its RelativityOne cloud-based e-discovery platform.

Solution: To keep its cloud-based platform running at peak performance with enterprise-class availability, Relativity developed an internal monitoring and reporting solution built on a serverless computing architecture in Azure with the help of Azure Functions for service compute and Azure Cosmos DB as a caching and storage layer.

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/relativity-partner-professional-services-azure



Modernize existing apps / Serverless

What is it?

A serverless approach offers developers, teams, and organizations a level of abstraction that enables them to minimize the time and resources invested in infrastructure management. Every component of an application benefits from this approach, from computing and the database engine to messaging, analytics, and AI. Using an end-to-end serverless platform that provides a comprehensive set of serverless technologies is the best way to ensure that the organization gains the maximum benefit from going serverless.

Developers build serverless applications using a variety of application patterns—many of which align with approaches that are already familiar—to meet specific requirements and business needs. Popular patterns include:

Serverless functions Serverless Kubernetes Serverless workflows Serverless app environments Serverless API gateway

Products

Azure Web AppsAzure SQL DatabaseAzure FunctionsAzure Application Insights

Top resources

Solution architectureAzure Serverless overview

User accesses the web app in browser and signs in.

Browser pulls static resources such as images from Azure Content Delivery Network.

User searches for products and queries SQL database.

Website pulls product catalog from database.

Web app pulls product images from Blob Storage.

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Page output is cached in Azure Cache for Redis for better performance.

User submits order and order is placed in the queue.

Azure Functions processes order payment.

Azure Functions makes payment to third party and records payment in SQL database.

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Sample serverless architecture: e-commerce application

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/architecture/scalable-ecommerce-web-app/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/serverless/

Multi-tenancy



What is it?

Multi-tenancy is an architecture in which a single instance of a software application serves multiple customers. Each customer is called a tenant. Each tenant’s data is isolated and remains invisible to other tenants. Multi-tenancy is a key element of Software as a Service (SaaS). An example of a large multi-tenant application is Office 365.

The opposite of multi-tenancy is taking a single tenant approach where the software and supporting infrastructure serve a single customer. In that case, each customer has his or her own independent database and instance of the software.

Customer benefits

Economies of scale Lower operating and adoption costs

Industries

All industries will benefit from multi-tenancy

ISV opportunityWhen you think of multi-tenancy, you often think of SaaS. SaaS represents an opportunity for ISVs to fundamentally transform your business to deliver greater value and sell software to a broader range of customers and streamline internal operations.

Whether you are a cloud-native start-up or an existing ISV with legacy on-premises software solutions, SaaS represents an opportunity to deliver more value to your customers, while simultaneously increasing profitability and improving internal operations through reduced cost and complexity.

This appeals to customers because SaaS solutions are engineered to be more purpose-built and are delivering better business outcomes than traditional software.1According to the “Cisco Global Cloud Index,” SaaS applications will make up 74% of all cloud workloads by 2020, up from 41% in 2013.2

ISV benefits

Optimize cost savings due to shared infrastructure Enable scalability and elasticity of resources and usage Enable data privacy by implementing robust processes

to ensure data segmentation from other customers

ISV success storyBreaking down barriers to cloud adoption for small and midsize businesses with SAP on Azure

“Honestly, I think Azure is the best platform on the market. It is very easy to build a solution on Azure, and it is extremely flexible.”

Tomé CordeiroSAP Consultant and Technical Managernewoxygen

FULL STORY

Challenge: Portuguese IT service provider newoxygen needed a flexible platform to build, manage, and deploy its solution quickly and easily.

Solution: With Microsoft Azure, the company implemented a user-friendly Software as a Service (SaaS) solution and infrastructure, making it available to clients in just over two hours after the initial investment.

Source: 1. Gartner, “Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2016-2020, 2Q17 Update”, September 28, 2017.2. Global Cisco Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology,” editions 2013-2018 & 2015-2020.

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/735531-newoxygen-professional-services-azure-portugal



Modernize existing apps / Multi-tenancy

What is it?

A multi-tenant application is a shared resource that allows separate users, or "tenants," to view the application as though it was their own. A typical scenario that lends itself to a multi-tenant application is one in which all users of the application may wish to customize the user experience but otherwise have the same basic business requirements. Examples of large multi-tenant applications are Office 365, Outlook.com, and visualstudio.com.

Products

Azure SQL DatabaseAzure Active Directory

Top resources

Multi-tenant SaaS database patterns

Multitenant app with database-per-tenant

This approach provides a multi-tenant application with many databases, all being single-tenant databases. A new database is provisioned for each new tenant. The application tier is scaled up vertically by adding more resources per node. Or the app is scaled out horizontally by adding more nodes. The scaling is based on workload and is independent of the number or scale of the individual databases.

Elastic pools enabled

When databases are deployed in the same resource group, they can be grouped into elastic pools. The pools provide a cost-effective way of sharing resources across many databases. This pool option is cheaper than requiring each database to be large enough to accommodate the usage peaks that it experiences.

Multitenant app with shardedmulti-tenant databases

Most SaaS applications access the data of only one tenant at a time. This access pattern allows tenant data to be distributed across multiple databases or shards, where all the data for any one tenant is contained in one shard. Combined with a multi-tenant database pattern, a sharded model allows almost limitless scale.

Common multi-tenant patterns

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-database/saas-tenancy-app-design-patterns

Overview


Advanced analytics

What is it?

Advanced analytics goes beyond the historical reporting and data aggregation of traditional business intelligence (BI), and uses sophisticated modeling techniques and tools to support predictive processing and automated decision-making.

Providing advanced analytics allows software vendors to help their customers deliver better experiences and make better decisions by analyzing massive amounts of data in real time. It allows customers to get the insights they need to deliver intelligent actions that improve customer engagement, increase revenue, and lower costs. Here are some common uses:

Personalized experiences Optimized supply chains Drive organization-wide efficiencies

Differentiate your analytical capabilities with Azure

Azure enables ISVs to transform customer data into actionable insights using best-in-class machine learning tools, advanced data systems, and decision support applications. Your customers can combine any data at any scale and deploy custom machine learning models. Below are three advanced analytics scenarios that you can explore to add to your existing apps or when thinking about building new cloud native apps.

$6.8B total addressable market in 202350% five-year CAGR (2023)



Greater China 65%India 52%USA 46%Asia Pacific 44%Latin America 43%Germany 43%Canada 43%

Japan 43%Middle East and Africa 42%United Kingdom 41%France 41%Central Europe 41%Australia 41%Western Europe 40%

Risk analyticsRisk analytics make it possible to measure, quantify, and predict risk.

Real-time decision supportReal-time decision support helps you create intelligent systems that provide contextual decision-making that sharpens with experience.

Streaming analyticsStreaming analytics provides complex event-processing designed to analyze and process high volumes of fast streaming data.

LEARN MORE LEARN MORELEARN MORE

Insurance 53%Retail 55%Financial Services Industry 55%Healthcare 53%

Risk analytics


Advanced analytics

What is it?

Risk analytics makes it possible to measure, quantify, and predict risk. By taking advantage of advanced machine learning tools and cloud-based, on-demand compute and on-demand scale, a multitude of companies across industries improve analysis, reporting, and risk decision-making.

Customer benefits

Automated fraud and threat detection Lowered exposure to risk Improved decision making

Industries

Financial Services Healthcare Retail Technology: Security

ISV opportunityRisk analytics is a growing opportunity as risk management is a top concern for most, if not all organizations. Where risk management once was an activity or skillset based upon experience and intuition, advancements in new analytical capabilities and cloud computing power is allowing leadership to combine their intuition with these new capabilities to dramatically improve risk management practices.

ISV benefits Expand analytics offerings to cover growing risk

management opportunity Enter new high-growth markets with risk analytics

capabilities, such as India or Latin America

Use case detailsRisk analytics applies to many industries. The featured industries are Banking and Insurance as they have the most to gain from improved risk management. Another vertical opportunity for the technology sector includes using risk analytics capabilities to automatically detect and prevent threats.

Leverage analytics to analyze riskRisk management is a top concern for the Financial Services industry. The ability to further analyze potential risks will deliver tremendous value for this industry.

Use analytics to detect and prevent threatsAs the business world continues to digitally transform, so does the risks associated with cyberthreats. The ability for organizations to automatically detect and prevent threats using advanced AI capabilities will continue to create substantial opportunity for ISVs, especially in the security sector, but also in other industry applications.

ISV success storyEthics and compliance experts use Microsoft cloud technologies to drive global success

“We rely on the scalability, reliability, privacy, and security of Microsoft solutions to make our products available to large, multinational customers in a way we couldn’t do if we were buying and managing our own servers.”

Thomas SpenglerVP of Business Development Convercent

FULL STORY

Challenge: Buyers increasingly focus on purchasing from brands that act ethically. It’s vital that companies take a holistic approach to ethics/compliance, which is difficult when relevant data is confined to spreadsheets and other ad hoc mechanisms.

Solution: Running on Azure, Convercent Ethics Cloud Platform is an integrated, end-to-end solution that makes it easy for companies to manage all aspects of ethics and compliance through a single interface. Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and Power BI Embedded help manage, store, and analyze the data.

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/convercent-partner-professional-services-azure

Scenario building blocksAdvanced analytics / Risk analytics


Products

Azure SQL Data WarehouseAzure Data FactoryAzure Blob storageAzure DatabricksAzure Cosmos DBAzure Analysis ServicesMicrosoft Power BIAzure DatabricksAzure HDInsight

Top resources


Scoring credit risk is a complex process. Lenders carefully weigh a variety of quantitative indicators to determine the probability of default and approve the best candidates based on the information available to them.

This solution acts as a credit-risk analyzer, helping you score credit risk and manage exposure using advanced analytics models. SQL Server 2016 with R Services equips you with predictive analytics that help assess credit or loan applications and accept only those that fall above certain criteria. For example, you might use the predicted scores to help determine whether to grant a loan, then easily visualize the guidance in a Power BI dashboard.

Data-driven credit risk modeling reduces the number of loans offered to borrowers who are likely to default, increasing the profitability of your loan portfolio.

Loan credit risk analyzer and default modeling solution architectureWhat is it?

Risk analytics combines machine learning, advanced cloud-based data systems, and end-user decision support tools to answer critical risk-based questions, such as, are our risk models valid?

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/architecture/loan-credit-risk-analyzer-and-default-modeling/

Real-time decision support


Advanced analytics

What is it?

Organizations are awash with data. You’ve seen the stats for the exponential growth of data over the past years. We have touted the ability to make real-time decisions to our customers’ decision makers; however, making decisions using real-time information is easier said than done. Real-time decision-making support provides advanced analytics with automation capabilities to provide organizations and their decision makers the tools necessary to make sense of the various data streams running through the business and to rise above the noise to make better decisions.

Customer benefits

Enhance decision-making via timely, accurate data Improve uptime/performance of operational systems Reduce inefficiencies

Industries

Financial Services Healthcare Retail

ISV opportunityFor ISVs like you, advancements in cloud-based large-scale analytics systems, combined with machine learning capabilities make real-time decision support a reality. It’s a natural compliment to any existing or new customer scenario that involves decision-making on high-velocity data streams, or combinations of very large data sets. Real-time decision support becomes an additional value add that you can bundle with existing or new solutions.

ISV benefits

Expand analytics offerings to include premium real-time decision support

Enter adjacent markets that have similar real-time decision-making needs, such as retail operations of Financial Services, if you focus on retail

Use case detailsReal-time decision support can be applied to a variety of industries supporting a number of use cases and horizontal functions. Industries that have high-velocity data streams, like manufacturing, retail/e-commerce, and healthcare will dramatically benefit from improved real-time decision-making support.

On a horizontal perspective, groups like marketing or sales that manage customer experience and transactions will also benefit from better tools to make sense of high-volume, high-speed data across different channels, whether that be internal or external data sources like social.

Enable real-time decision supportThe first step is to assess where real-time decision-making addresses a real customer challenge. Look vertically and horizontally to determine where might be the best place to make the investment in building advanced analytical capabilities that improves decision making on high-velocity/volume data sets.

ISV success storyParse business-critical data and act upon it in real time

“Avoiding and mitigating unplanned issues in the first place is a huge area for savings in time and money. This means less down time, more minor repairs, and an enormous amount of peace of mind for our customers.”

Mike BoudreauxDirector of Connected ServicesEmerson

FULL STORY

Challenge: Some of the largest manufacturing companies still rely on manual inspections to ensure the smooth operation of their machinery, instrumentation, and systems. These periodic checks by busy plant personnel can be inefficient and unreliable.

Solution: The Azure-based IoT solution, Plantweb, helps its manufacturing customers continue to grow and transform their businesses, empowering them to parse business-critical data and act upon it in near real time.

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/emerson-power-utility-azure-iot-machine-learning-powerbi-us

Solution building blocksAdvanced analytics / Real-time decision support


Top resource


Products

Azure SQL Data WarehouseAzure Data FactoryAzure Blob StorageAzure DatabricksAzure Cosmos DBAzure Analysis ServicesMicrosoft Power BI

What is it?

Get insights from live streaming data with ease. Capture data continuously from any IoT device, or logs from website clickstreams, and process it in near-real time.

Easily ingest live-streaming data for an application using Apache Kafka cluster in Azure HDInsight.

Bring together all your structured data using Azure Data Factory to Azure Blob Storage.

Take advantage of Azure Databricks to clean, transform, and analyze the streaming data, and combine it with structured data from operational databases or data warehouses.

Use scalable machine learning/deep learning techniques, to derive deeper insights from this data using Python, R or Scala, with inbuilt notebook experiences in Azure Databricks.

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Real-time analytics

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Leverage native connectors between Azure Databricks and Azure SQL Data Warehouse to access and move data at scale.

Build analytical dashboards and embedded reports on top of Azure Data Warehouse to share insights within your organization and use Azure Analysis Services to serve this data to thousands of users.

Power users take advantage of the inbuilt capabilities of Azure Databricks and Azure HDInsight to perform root cause determination and raw data analysis.

Take the insights from Azure Databricks to Cosmos DB to make them accessible through real-time apps.

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https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/architecture/real-time-analytics/

Streaming analytics


Advanced analytics

What is it?

Streaming analytics allows customers to gain powerful insights from streaming data in real time. It can analyze and process high volumes of fast-streaming data from multiple sources simultaneously. From this, patterns and relationships can be identified from many sources, including devices, sensors, clickstreams, social media feeds, and applications.

Customer benefits

Obtain real-time analytics and insights from streaming data

Enhance decision-making via timely, accurate data Improve operational efficiencies and performance

Industries

Retail Healthcare Financial Services

ISV opportunityFor ISVs, streaming analytics represents a powerful add-on decision support business opportunity between now and 2023. As the business world becomes more instrumented (e.g., IoT), providing streaming analytics to compliment IoT or other event or time-series intensive scenarios will benefit ISVs.

ISV benefits Expand analytics offerings to include premium streaming

capabilities Enter adjacent markets that have similar time-series or

event-based decision-making needs; for example, delivering a retail supply chain solution in addition to your existing retail capabilities

Use case detailsEnable real-time streaming analyticsStreaming analytics applies to many industries and enables or enhances many interesting use cases. Here we focus and recommend that ISVs first enable real-time streaming analytics for relevant applications that can take advantage of its powerful processing and analysis capabilities.

From an industry perspective, streaming analytics has wide benefits. Obvious examples include industrial applications, where time-series systems are common, such as instrumented equipment in a manufacturing plant, or refinery. Now imagine the possibilities in other industries that might not be as obvious. Retailers can use streaming analytics to track customer sentiment in real time. Now imagine tracking movement of customer flow in brick-and-mortar locations and combining that data with social media customer sentiment. Or, use streaming analytics in the retail supply chain–monitoring flow of inventory and deliveries in real time.

Think about the potential in Healthcare and even Insurance. With sensors and devices being integrated into those industries, the ability to collect, combine, and analyze those streaming data sources becomes invaluable to improving patient care, or to reward safe auto insurance customers.

ISV success storyBuilding a holistic analytics solution in the cloud

“We don’t want to have rooms full of business analysts processing and reviewing the data, so we use Microsoft and TimeXtender solutions to provide our employees and customers with the right data at the right time and in the right place.”

Todd ConnollyGeneral Manager, Construction SolutionsKomatsu Australia

FULL STORY

Challenge: Komatsu has 30K+ machines in daily operation that stream data on productivity, machine condition, and other factors. With so much data in play, the company needs highly efficient tools to aggregate it, make sense of it, and deal with any exceptions.

Solution: Komatsu built a holistic data management and analytics solution with TimeXtender Discovery Hub underpinned by Azure SQL Database Managed Instance. The system transforms data, aggregating it into tabular models aligned to business use cases with Azure Analysis Services. The data is then served to business users.

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/komatsu-australia-manufacturing-azure

Solution building blocksAdvanced analytics / Streaming analytics


Products

Azure Stream AnalyticsAzure Event HubsAzure IoT HubAzure Machine LearningMicrosoft Power BI

Top resource

Azure Stream Analytics overview

What is it?

Azure Stream Analytics is a real-time analytics and complex event processing engine that is designed to analyze and process high volumes of fast-streaming data from multiple sources simultaneously. Patterns and relationships can be identified in information extracted from multiple input sources including devices, sensors, clickstreams, social media feeds, and applications. These patterns can be used to trigger actions and initiate workflows such creating alerts, feeding information to a reporting tool, or storing transformed data for later use. Also, Stream Analytics is available on Azure IoT Edge runtime, and supports the same exact language or syntax as cloud.

The following scenarios are examples of when you can use Azure Stream Analytics:

Analyze real-time telemetry streams from IoT devices Web logs/clickstream analytics Geospatial analytics for fleet management and driverless

vehicles Remote monitoring and predictive maintenance of high

value assets Real-time analytics on Point of Sale data for inventory

control and anomaly detection

Stream analytics

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/stream-analytics/stream-analytics-introduction

Overview


Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

What is it?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems aim to enable intelligent machines to perform tasks with human competency. Machine Learning (ML) is a branch of AI that automates the development of analytical models.

How can Azure make Artificial Intelligence (AI) real for your business?

Azure AI provides a robust framework and tools for developing AI solutions in conversational AI, Machine Learning, data sciences, robotics, IoT, and more. Azure helps ISVs unlock the value of their data to deliver richer, more relevant experiences to customers, accelerate sales, and streamline operations. IDC estimates that by 2022, 60% of G2000 enterprises will be AI-enabled, with over 50% of enterprise application workflows aided by AI to better utilize legacy data, real-time operational data, and third-party feeds.

Personalized recommendationsData-driven personalization allows you to target customers with more relevant products or services specific to their needs in real time.

Forecasting

AI-driven forecasting allows leaders to plan more effectively with insights from data-driven predictions on customer demand, performance, and more.

Robotic process automationRobotic process automation (RPA) enables the automation of rules-based processes and tasks, freeing workers to focus on higher-value activities.

Fraud preventionUsing a combination of advanced analytics and deep learning, fraud detection models can learn to recognize fraud schemes, even in a continuously evolving landscape.

Diagnosis, treatment, and discoveryExtract deeper insights from health data, enabling providers to make more informed decisions about treatments, and deliver better care for their patients.

$8.3 billion total addressable market in 202392% five-year CAGR (2018-23)



Greater China 85%India 73%Asia Pacific 71%Central Europe 71%Middle East and Africa 71%Australia 70%Latin America 69%

Western Europe 68%United Kingdom 67%Germany 67%France 66%Japan 65%USA 63%Canada 58%

Retail 77%Insurance 76%Financial Services Industry 76%Healthcare 76%

LEARN MORE LEARN MORE LEARN MORE LEARN MORE LEARN MORE

Personalized recommendations



What is it?

Personalization allows you to understand where your customers are on their journey, and how they wish to engage with you. It allows you to offer the most relevant and timely information, whether to drive sales, further loyalty and preference, or create market differentiation. Azure AI provides ISVs with real-time, data-driven personalization capabilities to enable you to bring the most relevant information to the right customers, at the right time.

Customer benefits

Improve customer experience by providing more personalized recommendations to customers

Deliver intelligent, interactive engagement via chatbots that accelerate time to resolution of customer questions

Deepen customer engagement, loyalty, and reduce attrition by means of analytics about customer experience and customer journey

Identify customer segments that maximize revenue

Industries

Retail Financial Services Healthcare

ISV opportunityThe Azure AI platform makes personalization possible at a scale not easily achievable with traditional solutions. Customers today expect their vendors to serve relevant content that is actionable and targeted. Companies that are able to meet that need effectively differentiate their customer experience, driving better engagement and loyalty.

ISV benefits Personalized recommendations is an additional service

that ISVs can offer their customers so they can build higher engagement and loyalty.

Use case detailsAI excels at extracting more value from data at scale, and can do so in real time. Automated tools are used to learn about prospective customers and make shopping recommendations based on knowledge about those individuals. AI natural language tools search through millions of social media conversations, blogs, forums, ratings, reviews, and reasons to identify, measure, and recommend products.

For ISVs, that can make a difference by accelerating response times, enabling teams to adjust services, promotions, or other content based on real-time analysis of customer behaviors, sentiments, and patterns. In the Healthcare industry, for example, that may allow a health provider to better understand admissions patters and coordinate specific patient response mechanisms.

ISV success storyPersonalized, mobile-first experiences for 15.4 million customers worldwide

“In a world where we have 85,000 products on the site and 5,000 products going live each week, we need to make sure that the right subset of those products is in front of our consumers. Now, the products and content will be more relevant to you as a shopper.”

Bob StrudwickChief Technology OfficerASOS

FULL STORY

Challenge: In December 2016, ASOS announced plans to hire 1,500 new employees in its London headquarters, and to double sales over the next five years. To support that growth, it needed a more flexible e-commerce platform.

Solution: ASOS transformed its platform from a monolithic, on-premises e-commerce system to a microservices platform running on Microsoft Azure. The new architecture allows ASOS to tailor its front-end services to offer personalization to customers.

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/asos

Scenario building blocksArtificial Intelligence and Machine Learning / Personalized recommendations


Products

Event HubsAzure Stream AnalyticsAzure Cosmos DBStorage AccountsAzure FunctionsMachine Learning StudioAzure Cache for RedisPower BI

Top resources


What is it?

Personalized recommendations help you deliver an individualized experience for every current or prospective customer, boosting engagement and improving customer conversation, lifetime value, and retention.

Personalized marketing

The Azure Event Hub ingests and distributes user action data.

Azure Stream Analytics aggregates user data into time intervals and sends it to the Table Store. Raw data is sent to storage.

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Power BI creates reports and visualizations based on the real-time and historical data.

Azure Machine Learning creates and regularly retrains a model of the user based on real-time and historical data to make personalized offers in real time.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/architecture/personalized-marketing/

Forecasting



What is it?

Building forecasts is an integral part of any business, whether it’s revenue, inventory, sales, or customer demand. Building Machine Learning models is time consuming and complex with many factors to consider. ML simplifies that process, while improving the accuracy and performance of forecast models.

Customer benefits

Automated data analysis Shorter forecasting cycles Improved forecasting accuracy

Industries

All industries

ISV opportunityForecasts are often built with past data and as result, quickly get outdated. Azure AI enables ISVs to create forecast models using real-time data, driving more accurate predictions.

Forecasting is a widely applicable service, relevant across all industries and most business functions. ISVs can help their customers to get started, and also provide an easy path to adopt a forecast solution in a ready-to-use package.

ISV benefits ISVs can provide a value-added service to gain

additional revenue streams

Relevant use casesReal-time insights on trends can help organizations be more targeted and efficient. For example, sales forecasts can help sellers shorten the sales cycle or adjust strategies to better meet market demands. Insights can also aid sellers in extending existing relationships, and in driving increased retention by better anticipating customer needs and more effectively cross-selling products and/or services.

ISV success storyRetail jewelry chain automates demand forecasting with Microsoft Azure Data Services and Power BI

Like the vast majority of businesses in the retail sector, Ukrainian jewelry chain Pandora is subject to wide fluctuations in seasonal demand, shifting customer tastes, ever-changing fads and trends, and the ability of factories and suppliers to produce and deliver goods in a timely manner. The ability to forecast and plan for such volatility is vital to the profitability and ongoing viability of the business.

Challenge: The volatile and cyclical nature of its business was frequently resulting in overstock during slow periods, shortages during high-demand times, and stock replenishment cycles that were out of sync with the individual needs of its retail stores. Forecasts took days to accomplish and were challenging to execute.

Solution: Pandora engaged Syntegra to build a solution based on Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio, Microsoft Azure Data Services, and Microsoft Power BI that automates demand forecasting on short-, mid-, and long-term horizons in just one hour.

FULL STORY

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/757584-pandoraukraine_syntegra_azure

Scenario building blocksArtificial Intelligence and Machine Learning / Forecasting


Products

Event HubMachine LearningAzure SQLData FactoryStream analyticsAzure Blob StorageVisualize Power BI

Top resources


What is it?

Forecasting demand can lend an important competitive advantage for ISVs. From a sales perspective, it can help sellers identify hot or cold markets, and enable adjustments to sales and territory targets.

Demand forecasting

The sample data is streamed by newly-deployed Azure Web Jobs.

This synthetic data feeds into the Azure Event Hubs and Azure SQL service as data points or events that will be used in the rest of the solution flow.

Azure Stream Analytics analyzes the data to provide near real-time analytics on the input stream from the event hub and directly publish to Power BI for visualization.

The Azure Machine Learning service is used to make forecasts on the energy demand of a particular region given the inputs received.

Azure SQL Database is used to store the prediction results received from the Azure Machine Learning service. These results are then consumed in the Power BI dashboard.

Azure Data Factory handles orchestration and scheduling of the hourly model retraining.

Finally, Power BI is used for results visualization, so that users can monitor the energy consumption from a region in real time and use the forecast demand to optimize the power generation or distribution process.

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https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/architecture/demand-forecasting/

Robotic process automation



What is it?

Robotic process automation (RPA) involves the automation of repetitive tasks, particularly rules-based processes, to free employees to focus on more strategic activities. The Azure AI platform opens RPA to use not just structured, but also unstructured data, and to go beyond repetitive tasks to provide recommendations and analysis of data.

Customer benefits

Reduce manual processes by robotic process automation that can intelligently perform repetitive tasks

Improve accuracy by delegating manual tasks to robots Standardize repetitive tasks

Industries

All industries

ISV opportunityFor ISVs, RPA can open doors to enriched or entirely new services for customers as well as improved operational, security, and compliance internally.



Use case detailsRPA has a nearly limitless amount of applications, across all industries. A recent Deloitte survey notes that some of the most frequent executive priorities for RPA implementations include:

• Focusing on continuous improvement• Increase level of automation• Develop analytics capabilities1

Adding AI and ML to RPA can enhance robots to take smarter actions with data, expanding their reach and value. For example, to process unstructured data and extract relevant text using natural language processing. Or to look for a piece of data in different places and in different formats.

ISV success storyUiPath helped Chevron drill into their data with RPA powered by Azure AI

“We only have a finite amount of time to extract data, and oftentimes the data that’s left behind is valuable. With this new technology, we’re able to extract everything and then decide what we can use to improve our performance.”

Diane CillisEngineering TechnologistChevron Canada

FULL STORY

Challenge: For years, Chevron’s Canada Business Unit manually mined critical data from drilling and completion reports—a laborious, time-consuming, and error-prone process.

Solution: Chevron now uses Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer together with UiPath’s robotic process automation platform to automate the extraction of data and move it into back-end systems for analysis. Subject matter experts have more time to focus on higher-value activities and information flows more rapidly.

Source: 1. “Robotic process automation (RPA) trends and to-do list for scaling across the enterprise”, Deloitte, 2018.

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/chevron-mining-oil-gas-azure-cognitive-services

Fraud prevention



What is it?

As people and businesses digitize their interactions, so do fraudsters and criminals. Much of fraud prevention today is reactive and slow. But AI changes that dynamic and enables real-time fraud analysis to prevent and halt criminal acts.

Customer benefits

Proactively identify fraud using data-driven analytics to prevent or minimize impact of fraudulent activity

Automate remediation of fraudulent activity to minimize impact and escalation

Industries

Financial Services Healthcare Government

ISV opportunityFor ISVs, AI-powered fraud prevention can help protect valuable and sensitive customer data, while also instilling confidence in customers about the safety and security of their digital assets.


additional revenue streams ISVs can tweak fraud-identification algorithms to

suit their own customer base

Relevant use casesAI helps you move from detecting fraud to actually preventing it from happening in the first place. Using a combination of advanced analytics and deep learning, fraud detection models can learn to recognize fraud schemes, even in a continuously evolving landscape. AI allows ISVs to take a more proactive stance to fraud, so you can identify, predict, counteract, and recover at a much faster pace.

Leverage AI to perform risk analytics and prevent fraudHelps banks detect illegal/illicit financial acts involving intentional deception and/or misrepresentation across different areas (i.e., operational and financial) of an organization. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems utilize rule-based learning to identify transactions that indicate fraudulent activity or the heightened risk of fraud. Systems automatically learn the rules to identify numerous banking-related fraud schemes from bank employees and customers alike. These fraud schemes include, but are not limited to, corruption (i.e., money laundering), cash thresholds, billing fee waivers, check tampering, larceny, and financial statement fraud.

Related scenarioFraud prevention can be supplemented with Risk Analytics solutions. See more on this scenario.

ISV success storyIncreasing security and compliance through Azure and a cloud Center of Excellence

“In financial institutions, security and compliance in the public cloud environment are crucial and require high skills and knowledge. The access we had to Microsoft specialists gave us the confidence to move forward and reduced the time to get regulatory approval to use confidential data in the public cloud.”

Jaap CrumHead of IT Technology Development and Cloud PlatformsABN AMRO Bank

Challenge: ABN AMRO Bank was adopting public cloud to boost its security and capacity to innovate quickly, and needed to build up in-house expertise, especially since it had previously outsourced its technology management. This was particularly important for ensuring security and compliance.

Solution: The bank tapped Microsoft for help in building a cloud Center of Excellence. As part of that effort, they integrated secure-by-design principles into the development process, making products more secure. In addition, Azure was used to reduce costly false positives from fraud detection.

FULL STORY

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/721569-abn-amro-bank-digital-transformation

Scenario building blocksArtificial Intelligence and Machine Learning / Fraud prevention


Products

Event HubStream AnalyticsAzure Blob Storage

Top resources

Real-time fraud detection on Azure

What is it?

This example scenario is relevant to organizations that need to analyze data in real time to detect fraudulent transactions or other anomalous activity (for example, identifying fraudulent credit card activity or mobile phone calls).

Real-time fraud detection

Mobile phone call metadata is sent from the source system to an Azure Event Hubs instance.

A Stream Analytics job is started, which receives data via the event hub source.

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The Stream Analytics job runs a predefined query to transform the input stream and analyze it based on a fraudulent transaction algorithm. This query uses a tumbling window to segment the stream into distinct temporal units.

The Stream Analytics job writes the transformed stream representing detected fraudulent calls to an output sink in Azure Blob Storage.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/data/fraud-detection

Diagnosis, treatment, and discovery



What is it?

The Healthcare sector is a hotbed of transformation. With the rise of digital systems and electronic health records, the patient/caregiver relationship has evolved significantly. AI is opening doors for ISVs to extract deeper insights from health data, enabling providers to make more informed decisions about treatments, and deliver better care to their patients. Azure AI allows ISVs to provide richer insights from data, including advanced predictive analysis.

Customer benefits

Proactively identify illness using AI/ML's pattern recognition ability

Understand disease progression given a multitude of variables and scenarios

Modify treatment plans in real time based on current data sets and outcomes-related data

Industries

Healthcare

ISV opportunityFor ISVs, Azure-based AI models to diagnose, treat, and discover medical conditions or patient behaviors can help supplement medical analyses by trained medical staff, or discover new, more effective treatment options. In addition, these AI-powered models can help decrease the cost and time to assess patient data, freeing staff to spend more of their valuable time with patients.



Use case detailsLeverage AI and ML for diagnosis, discovery, and treatmentAI solutions extract insights from the intersection of diverse data sets, including medical records, lab tests, clinical studies, medical images, and other sources, to assist in diagnosis and provide personalized treatment at the individual patient level.

For example, patient scans and images typically need to be interpreted by educated staff, such as radiologists, which can be a lengthy process given the volumes of patient exams that must be routinely handled. Azure AI data analysis and predictive insights provide a way for ISVs to automate the analysis, providing a rich complement to aid and speed expert reviews, while providing better care to the individual patient. As well, ML models can be trained to provide relevant recommendations for treatment following the initial diagnosis.

Leverage AI to provide real-time customer insights/careReal-time customer insights can aid healthcare providers in their readiness to combat disease, provide treatment, and encourage healthy patient habits. For example, it can help hospitals prepare for seasonal waves of illness, or provide more effective discharge instructions and care regimens to patients to prevent readmissions.

ISV success storyRevolutionizing mammography, reducing errors with computer vision models

“One of the big wins for us is the ability to give our clinical staff access to Custom Vision so they can reclassify images and retrain the model with an easy-to-use interface.”

David Murray, PhD

Chief Technology EvangelistVolpara Solutions

FULL STORY

Challenge: Breast screening is one of the key public health success stories of the past century, but 1-2% of images are rejected on analysis due to poor image quality. Hundreds of thousands of women need to be recalled for additional imaging, causing inconvenience and delaying treatment.

Solution: Volpara chose Microsoft Azure and Power BI as the platform services to deliver its metrics and analytics to customers through dynamic, interactive dashboards. Technicians get information and business intelligence through the Volpara Enterprise product on the dashboards in real time.

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-US/story/volpara-health-azure-cloud-service-powerbi-en

Scenario building blocksArtificial Intelligence and Machine Learning / Diagnosis, treatment, and discovery


Products

IoT Hub Cognitive ServicesAzure Active Directory (AD)Logic AppsAzure Cosmos DBMachine LearningAlertsSecurity CenterRBAC and build-in rolesKey VaultPower BI EmbeddedApp InsightsOperations Management Suite

Top resources


What is it?

Predict and prevent future incidents by combining IoT and intelligence to optimize treatments using Azure to remotely monitor patients and analyze the massive amounts of data generated by medical devices.

Remote patient monitoring

Securely ingest medical sensor and device data using Azure IoT Hub.

Securely store sensor and device data in Cosmos DB.

Analyze sensor and device data using a pre-trained Cognitive Services API or a custom-developed Machine Learning model.

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Store Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning results in Cosmos DB.

Interact AI and Machine Learning results using Power BI, while preserving Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).

Integrate data insights with backend systems and processes using Logic Apps.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/architecture/remote-patient-monitoring/

Overview


Internet of Things

What is it?

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the billions of sensors embedded in devices that are connected to the internet, enabling them to send and receive data.

How can ISVs do more with data by adopting IoT?

Across all industries, IoT adoption is growing. Microsoft’s 2019 IoT Signals study found that 85% of enterprise decision makers worldwide have at least one IoT project in either learning, proof-of-concept, or currently in use. With interest in IoT expected to continue to grow, it’s a space that represents a tremendous opportunity for ISVs to offer new models of engagement and value for their customers. Microsoft Azure IoT offers ISVs a way to get started quickly with IoT with a fully-managed SaaS solution for IoT and ready-to-use IoT solution accelerators.

Predictive maintenanceExtend the useful service life of equipment and prevent failures.

LEARN MORE

Inventory optimizationReal-time inventory access, monitoring, and management across multiple locations.

LEARN MORE

Energy managementReduce energy costs and improve efficiency by using IoT and smart building systems.

LEARN MORE

Remote inspection and maintenanceManage routine inspections and maintenance of assets remotely.

LEARN MORE

$5.4 billion total addressable market in 202327% five-year CAGR (2018-23)



India 35%Latin America 32%Greater China 32%Asia Pacific 28%Middle East and Africa 27%USA 26%Australia 26%

Germany 26%United Kingdom 26%WE 26%Canada 26%CEE 25%Japan 25%France 24%

Retail 27%Financial Services Industry 27%Insurance 27%Healthcare 76%



Internet of Things

What is it?

Unscheduled equipment downtime is a challenge for many businesses. Predictive maintenance allows organizations to extend the useful service life of equipment and prevent failures. Solutions incorporate capabilities such as anomaly detection, which identifies when equipment is behaving outside of the norm.

Customer benefits

Minimize costs associated with unexpected machine-related failures by identifying machines or component parts that are at high risk of failure

Increase safety of resources who may be affected by equipment failure

Reduce repair time to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction

Industries

Manufacturing Transportation and Logistics Energy Healthcare

ISV opportunityPredictive maintenance represents a new service area for ISVs to provide value to their customers. For example, an ISV can provide this software solution to an airplane manufacturer so they can monitor specific parts (i.e., turbines). The manufacturer’s own customers (airlines) can benefit by preventing equipment failures before they happen through the use of sensors and predictive analytics.

ISV benefits Predictive maintenance is an additional service that

ISVs can offer their customers to help monitor equipment, and encourage their own customers to regularly service parts and equipment.

ISV success storyKeeping flights safe in the air with predictive maintenance

“Our digital solutions focus on the entire value chain, from predictive maintenance to automated fulfillment. We don’t just raise an alert when there’s a problem, we help airlines quickly and efficiently find the right solution.”

Tobias MohrHead of Technology & InfrastructureLufthansa Technik

FULL STORY

Challenge: Airplanes now generate more real-time and near-real-time data than ever before, causing many airlines to wrestle with how to use this huge amount of information to drive operational improvements.

Solution: AVIATAR combines data from airlines’ operations systems, aircraft, maintenance systems, and other external sources to turn data into actionable insights that empower airline teams to achieve tangible results by relying on the capabilities of Red Hat on Azure and Cloudera open-source software.

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/lufthansa-technik-partner-professional-services-azure

Scenario building blocksInternet of Things / Predictive maintenance


Products

Event HubStream AnalyticsPower BIAzure Blob StorageAzure SQLSpark on HDInsightMachine LearningData Factory

Top resources


What is it?

Predictive maintenance solutions monitor equipment and parts and predict their remaining useful life. This particular architecture example is specific to the aircraft industry. It demonstrates how to combine real-time data from sensors with advanced analytics to monitor aircraft parts in real time and also predict the parts’ remaining useful life.


The simulation data is streamed by a newly deployed Azure Web Job, AeroDataGenerator.

This synthetic data feeds into the Azure Event Hubs service as data points.

Two Azure Stream Analytics jobs analyze the data to provide near real-time analytics on the input stream from the event hub. One of the Stream Analytics jobs archives all raw incoming events to the Azure Storage service for later processing by the Azure Data Factory service, and the other publishes results onto a Power BI dashboard.

The HDInsight service is used to run Hive scripts (orchestrated by Azure Data Factory) to provide aggregations on the raw events that were archived by the aforementioned Stream Analytics job.

The Azure Machine Learning service is used (orchestrated by Azure Data Factory) to make predictions on the remaining useful life (RUL) of a particular aircraft engine given the inputs received.

Azure SQL Database is used (managed by Azure Data Factory) to store the prediction results received from the Azure Machine Learning service. These results are then consumed in the Power BI dashboard. A stored procedure is deployed in the SQL Database and later invoked in Azure Data Factory pipeline to store the ML prediction results into the scoring result table.

Azure Data Factory handles orchestration, scheduling, and monitoring of the batch processing pipeline.

Finally, Power BI is used for results visualization so that aircraft technicians can monitor the sensor data from an airplane or across the fleet in real time and use visualizations to schedule engine maintenance.

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https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/architecture/predictive-maintenance/

Inventory optimization


Internet of Things

ISV opportunityAutomated, real-time inventory management represents a big opportunity for ISVs to offer their customers a new premium service offering.

This solution is particularly relevant for the retail sector. Microsoft’s “IoT Signals” report notes that 50% of retailers are interested in taking advantage of IoT solutions to optimize inventories. However, the study also notes that the lack of internal skills and the complexity of building and deploying IoT solutions holds customers back. ISVs that offer a simple packaged solution will be very attractive to retail customers.

ISV benefits Provide a new value for customers through a

new service offering

What is it?

Inventory optimization allows retailers to more easily manage inventory of goods from a variety of sources. It is an important strategy to help drive more accurate production planning, reduce costs, and streamline operations. Azure IoT solutions offer real-time inventory access, removing manual errors and mitigating the risk associated with quality, and help plan for demand.

Customer benefits

Minimize inventory cost and reduce stockout events More accurately predict and plan for changes

in demand

Industries

Retail

ISV success storyGSX selects Azure to help scale a smart algorithm that helps manufacturers optimize spare parts inventory

“The ‘search’ process used to take four to six hours per day. With our new software and the help of Azure, search can now be completed in 15 minutes.”

Brian O’ConnellDirectorGSX Value Chain

Challenge: GSX Value Chain wanted to offer its clients a smart algorithm that helps with integrated spare parts optimization. It needed a solution to help it scale its offering in advance of it being offered to its own customers.

Solution: GSX improved its infrastructure by moving it to Microsoft Azure with the help of Microsoft Partner, Zitec. This move has resulted in huge time savings on a key client process, which now takes 15 minutes instead of four to six hours.

FULL STORY

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/763333-gsx-value-chain-manufacturing-azure-romania

Scenario building blocksInternet of Things / Inventory optimization


Products

Cosmos DBApache Kafka on HDInsight

Top resources

Scalable order processing on Azure

What is it?

This example scenario is relevant to organizations that need a highly scalable and resilient architecture for online order processing. Potential applications include e-commerce and retail point-of-sale, order fulfillment, and inventory reservation and tracking.

Inventory management

Event messages enter the system via customer-facing applications (synchronously over HTTP) and various back-end systems (asynchronously via Apache Kafka). These messages are passed into a command processing pipeline.

Each event message is ingested and mapped to one of a defined set of commands by a command processor microservice. The command processor retrieves any current state relevant to executing the command from an event stream snapshot database. The command is then executed, and the output of the command is emitted as a new event.

Each event emitted as the output of a command is committed to an event stream database using Cosmos DB.

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All events from the Cosmos DB Change Feed are also sent to a snapshot event stream microservice, which calculates any state changes caused by events that have occurred. The new state is then committed to the event stream snapshot database stored in Cosmos DB. The snapshot database provides a globally distributed, low-latency data source for the current state of all data elements. The event stream database provides a complete record of all event messages that have passed through the architecture, which enables robust testing, troubleshooting, and disaster recovery scenarios.

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https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/data/ecommerce-order-processing

Energy management


Internet of Things

What is it?

Efficient management of buildings, in particular the amount of energy they consume, can make a significant difference on a company’s bottom line. Energy management solutions drive reduced energy costs and improved efficiency by using IoT sensors and devices, coupled with AI and ML, to automatically manage and optimize energy usage.

Customer benefits

Businesses can reduce energy costs and improve efficiency by using IoT and smart building systems

Provide a better employee or customer experience with automated building adjustments

Industries

Manufacturing Retail Government Healthcare

ISV opportunityAs more organizations turn to smart-enabled capabilities to enhance and streamline building operations, energy management is a big area of interest for increasing efficiencies and decreasing operational costs. ISVs that invest in energy management solutions gain a new value-added service for their customers.

Smart buildings are applicable across most industries, but are of special interest to industries with either large and complex facilities and distributed location (or both). Smart energy management for manufacturing, for example, can help them rein in costs at key facilities. For retailers, as another example, the solution can help them better control costs across sprawling geographic facilities, from stores, to distribution centers, etc.

ISV benefits Energy management represents a premium, value-added

service that ISVs can offer customers

ISV success storyHoneywell builds smart thermostat solutions using Azure IoT and microservices

“I just love the convenience of adding a new service into Service Fabric applications. It gives you so much flexibility with your architecture and enables it to be truly microservice-oriented.”

Jiri KopeckyLCC ArchitectHoneywell

FULL STORY

Challenge: Several years ago, Honeywell Homes and Buildings Technologies (HBT) entered the IoT era with Total Connect Comfort, its first offering for connected thermostats. While wildly successful, the solution was a child of its time technologically: a monolith architecture hosted on-premises.

Solution: Hosted on Azure Cloud Services, Lyric is a solution to support a connected home offering, including thermostats that enable homeowners to control their home environment remotely and save on energy bills.

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/honeywell-builds-microservices-based-thermostats-on-azure

Scenario building blocksInternet of Things / Energy management


Products

Stream AnalyticsEvent HubsMachine Learning StudioAzure SQL DatabaseData FactoryPower BI

Top resources


What is it?

Accurately forecast spikes in demand for energy with Azure managed services. These services run in a high-availability environment, patched and supported, allowing you to focus on your solution instead of the environment they run in.

Forecast energy and power demand

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/architecture/forecast-energy-power-demand/

Remote inspection and maintenance


Internet of Things

What is it?

There are circumstances where business operations are remote in harsh conditions. This makes routine inspection and maintenance tasks challenging and even dangerous. Remote inspection and maintenance takes advantage of Internet of Things capabilities like instrumented or censored field devices, the cloud, and advanced analytics to support remote monitoring.

Customer benefits

Improved equipment uptime and performance Lower costs to maintain/support equipment Safer maintenance and support teams

Industries

Energy Transportation and Logistics Process Manufacturing Discrete Manufacturing

The ISV opportunity Remote inspection and maintenance represents a tremendous premium, value-added service that can be combined with other customer capabilities, such as preventative maintenance, and even future looking use cases like augmented reality or mixed reality. There are consistent horizontal needs that span across the four industries mentioned here. For example, Energy and Process Manufacturing often have far-flung operations with expensive capital assets that need to be monitored and maintained. For ISVs, being able to build once and apply to multiple industries represents a significant business opportunity.

As a partner, Microsoft provides sizable IoT commitment and resources. Microsoft has committed to investing $5 billion in IoT research and the intelligent edge—adding new services and features to IoT, but also driving business strategy and executive leadership discussions to define success in the age of intelligence. More tangibly for you, with Microsoft you get resources and tools to accelerate your IoT ambitions, including solutions accelerators for remote monitoring.

ISV benefits Remote inspection and maintenance is another

value-added IoT service to deliver to customers Microsoft Azure provides partners with a remote

monitoring solution accelerator

ISV success storyFueling the oil and gas industry with IoT

“With Microsoft Azure and the Internet of Things, we can now enable these multi-tenant solutions for the first time, where the machine builder can gain insight into its equipment in a new way to maintain it and improve it.”

Doug WeberBusiness Manager, Remote Application MonitoringRockwell Automation

FULL STORY

Challenge: With so many variables, finding a way to monitor expensive capital assets and use that data to improve efficiency, drive better performance, enable innovation, and keep fuel flowing has always been a major challenge for the oil and gas industry.

Solution: Based on Microsoft Azure Internet of Things services, the solution collects, integrates, and organizes sensor data from remote equipment across global supply chains to support real-time insight, predictive analytics, and preventive maintenance.

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/fueling-the-oil-and-gas-industry-with-iot-1

Building blocksInternet of Things / Remote inspection and maintenance


Products

Microsoft Azure IoT HubMicrosoft Azure Stream AnalyticsMicrosoft Azure Time Series InsightsMicrosoft Azure Cosmos DBMicrosoft Azure Active Directory

Top resources

Azure Remote Monitoring sample

GitHub Repository (.NET) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-accelerators/iot-accelerators-remote-monitoring-sample-walkthrough

What is it?

Connect to, control, and collect telemetry from multiple remote devices (like on-prem cooling systems or valves in remote pump stations). Use the remote monitoring dashboard to view telemetry from your connected devices, provision new ones, or upgrade firmware. Visualize simulated devices on a map and respond to alerts.

Microsoft has created a Remote Monitoring solution accelerator as a learning tool, or as the foundation for your own custom implementation. This solution accelerator implements an end-to-end monitoring solution for multiple machines in remote locations. The solution combines key Azure services to provide a generic implementation of the business scenario. You can use the solution as a starting point for your own implementation and customize it to meet your own specific business requirements.

Remote Monitoring solution accelerator overview

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-accelerators/iot-accelerators-remote-monitoring-sample-walkthrough

https://github.com/Azure/azure-iot-pcs-remote-monitoring-dotnet

Overview


AR, VR, and MR

What is it?

Augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) represent new ways to interact with both the physical and digital world–and to unlock the promise of new business opportunities and use cases. As hardware to support these types of new realities improves, along with the power of the cloud, we get closer to delivering on the potential.

AR: Augmented reality refers to an enhanced version of reality where live direct or indirect views of the physical world are augmented with superimposed digital images over the user's view of the real world, therefore enhancing or augmenting the user's perception of reality. Unlike virtual reality, where the user inhabits the entire virtual environment, AR uses the natural environment and overlays virtual information on top of it.

VR: Virtual reality refers to a computer-generated simulation in which a person can interact within a digital, three-dimensional environment using special technology devices such as goggles with a screen or gloves fitted with sensors.

MR: Mixed reality is a blend of the physical world and digital world. In mixed reality, digital information is represented by holograms—objects made of light and sound—that appear in the space around you. Through artificial intelligence, these holograms respond to commands and interact with real-world surfaces in real time for a more natural and intuitive experience.

The tools, the platform, the hardware, and the experience to grow your AR | VR | MR capabilities

AR, VR, and MR represent one of the most rapidly growing opportunities in technology. You want a partner that can provide you everything you need to take advantage of this high growth area. Microsoft and Azure give you the combination of:

Best-in-class hardware like HoloLens 2 and Kinect DK The cross-platform cloud that will allow you to quickly

and securely scale your new reality capabilities Intelligent services that allow you to make the world

your app canvas

These advanced immersive capabilities enable many new and compelling use cases across industries. Here are just a few to consider as you make plans to incorporate advanced reality capabilities into your product portfolio:

Enhance training and understanding with additional information on the product, space, and material in real time.

AR in marketing allows a customer to interact with a product on a new level, enhancing their engagement.

Provide first-hand experiences to the user who can experiment and learn without concern about negative consequences.

$16.3B total addressable market in 2023142.7% five-year CAGR (2023)



India 160%Australia 157%Western Europe 155%Germany 152%United Kingdom 149%France 147%Central Europe 145%

Greater China 145%Asia Pacific 144%Middle East and Africa 141%Canada 140%Latin American 140%USA 140%Japan 125%

Retail 175%Insurance 174%Financial Services Industry 174%Healthcare 171%

Immersive gamingCreate and run your immersive game experience with a global, secure cloud and game-specific services—for studios of all sizes and budgets.

LEARN MORE

The ISV opportunity As the gaming industry evolves, so does the need for gaming studios to explore new gaming capabilities to remain relevant. Mixed reality represents the new frontier for creating new gaming experiences.

Microsoft and Microsoft Azure give gaming studios and ISVs the tools, platform, and hardware to differentiate when building out new immersive gaming experiences. Then include Xbox, and you have a partner that stands out from the rest.

ISV benefits Accelerate game development time using best-in-

class developer tools Build mixed reality experiences with innovative

hardware

AR, VR, and MR

What is it?

Immersive gaming extends the typical gaming experience with AR, VR, and/or MR capabilities. These new immersive experiences can blend virtual and physical environments, opening new forms of storytelling and excitement.

ISV success storyRainbow Six Siege uses Azure to deliver immersive multiplayer games globally.

“Our team has no shortage of ideas for improving Rainbow Six Siege, and Azure gives us a great toy box for turning those ideas into realities.”

Benjamin AzoulayLive Operations ManagerUbisoft

FULL STORY

To maximize adrenaline for players and minimize headaches for developers, gaming giant Ubisoft runs its hugely popular eSports game, Rainbow Six Siege, in Microsoft Azure. With Azure, Ubisoft has the elastic scalability to deliver heart-pumping play to 3 million players a day engaged in hundreds of thousands of concurrent games. Because Microsoft delivers a global datacenter infrastructure tuned for gaming, Ubisoft is free to focus on making Rainbow Six Siege even more exciting to play.

Immersive gaming


https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/ubisoft-media-telco-azure

Scenario building blocksAR, VR, and MR / Immersive gaming


Top resources

Resource nameMicrosoft Game Stack“A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays” paper

UnityThe fastest path to building a mixed reality app is with Unity.

UnrealProduction-ready support for HoloLens 2 will also be included in Unreal Engine 4.23.

WebVRWebVR is an open specification that makes it possible to experience VR in your browser.

NativeCreate mixed reality apps by directly coding to the Windows Mixed Reality APIs.

What is it?

Immersive gaming is possible through mixed reality advancements, which is the result of blending the physical world with the digital world. Mixed reality is the next evolution in human, computer, and environment interaction and unlocks possibilities that before now were restricted to our imaginations. It is made possible by advancements in computer vision, graphical processing power, display technology, and input systems. The term mixed reality was originally introduced in a 1994 paper by Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino, "A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays."

Their paper introduced the concept of the virtuality continuum, and focused on how the categorization of taxonomy applied to displays. Since then, the application of mixed reality goes beyond displays. It also includes environmental input, spatial sound, and location.

Learn the tools and architecture Different technology paths based upon your needs

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/games/solutions

http://etclab.mie.utoronto.ca/people/paul_dir/IEICE94/ieice.html

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/development



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