- Welcome to episode five of "Inside Azure for IT."
I'm Erin Chapple, CVP of Azure Core Product and Design.
We find ourselves again facing swift
and dynamic market changes with macroeconomic headwinds,
geopolitical tensions,
and labor constraints in multiple industries,
presenting continued challenges for IT leaders to navigate.
And just as companies of all sizes across all industries
turned to the cloud to adapt during the pandemic,
they continue to do so
to help them digitally optimize their businesses.
In this episode, we'll take a look at three strategies
that can help you successfully navigate
some of the uncertainty that we're all facing today
and emerge stronger, more agile, and more efficient.
I've invited three guests to share their perspectives
on how you can use the full power of the cloud
to gain efficiencies and scalability,
how you can optimize cloud investments to maximize value,
and how you can strengthen your security
to become more resilient while you continue to innovate.
Before we get started, remember,
this is part one of a three-part episode.
In our second segment, I talk with Henry O'Connell,
CEO and co-founder of Canary Speech,
about how they're powering their vocal biomarker technology
using Microsoft Azure
and how they're optimizing their cloud investments
to maximize value.
And in the third segment, I talk with Vasu Jakkal, CVP
of Microsoft Security, Governance, Identity, and Privacy,
about today's security landscape
and why implementing a comprehensive security strategy
is so important to growing your business.
Now I'd like to welcome Sathish Rajappa, Vice President
of Global Platform Technology Sales at Blue Yonder,
to chat with us about how, together with Azure,
they're helping customers achieve efficiency, scalability,
and other game-changing benefits
by migrating to the cloud.
Hi, Sathish. I'm so glad you could join me on "Inside Azure for IT."
- Thanks for having me, Erin.
- I love when we have a Microsoft partner on the show
because it gives people a unique view
into how we innovate together
to create new opportunities for customers.
Your solution technology at Blue Yonder
specifically helps retailers,
manufacturers, and logistic providers
accelerate their digital transformation
by unifying their data, supply chain,
and retail commerce operations.
Before we dive into how you're helping customers
modernize their operations, could you talk a little bit
about Blue Yonder's modernization journey?
What impact has migrating to the cloud had
on your own organization, Sathish?
- Happy to, Erin.
Blue Yonder embarked on a journey
to transform our portfolio products to a SaaS platform.
We chose Azure as our cloud provider
and formed a very strategic partnership with Microsoft.
We chose Azure for a few reasons, Erin:
the global reach with 60 plus regions,
the commitment to security with a billion plus
dollars in investments in cybersecurity,
the flexibility with a wide range of services and tools
and the pay-as-you-go model,
the integration with other Microsoft technologies,
and finally, to be seen as a neutral choice
with our retail customers.
We are bringing along many customers
who have deployed solutions on-prem to the cloud
by migrating them to the SaaS platform
that we call Luminate.
Luminate is an end-to-end cognitive business platform
that helps retailers, manufacturers,
and logistics providers fulfill customer demand
from planning through delivery.
- Luminate is a great example of how combining the strengths
of both companies can deliver innovative,
intelligent solutions for customers.
When I think about retailers,
manufacturers, and logistic providers,
they took on incredible challenges over the past few years.
And many of them have adapted
by moving all or portions of their business to the cloud.
Now we're facing a new wave of disruption.
And again, we're dealing with changing markets,
labor shortages, and more.
Can you share some of the challenges
you see customers trying to solve
with the cloud technology in this current environment?
- I hear the following five consistent themes
from IT executives to help their business teams
provide value and gain competitive advantage.
The first is scalability,
the ability to quickly and easily scale up or down resources
as needed to meet changing business demands.
Second is cost management,
the ability to optimize their spending
and reduce costs on IT infrastructure
via consolidation of systems to a few solution providers.
Third would be data storage and management,
storing and managing substantial amounts of data
in the cloud, including data backup and disaster recovery.
Fourth in the area of security,
ensuring that their data and applications are secure in the cloud.
And finally, agility and innovation,
adopting innovative technologies such as AI and ML
at production scale to solve specific use cases
to improve their business operations
and gain a competitive advantage.
- I'm hearing similar things from customers,
and these concerns are shared
by those in other industries too,
healthcare, finance, and the public sector, for example.
Many businesses turned to the cloud
as a way to combat headwinds during the pandemic.
And now they're doing everything they can
to maximize the value of those IT investments.
How are you helping customers address
some of the pain points you just mentioned, Sathish?
- Great question, Erin.
Our selection of Azure, like I mentioned,
as our cloud provider and forming a strategic partnership
with Microsoft is helping Blue Yonder
address customers' end-to-end supply chain challenges,
for example, in the area of scalability and cost management.
Blue Yonder built a cloud management platform for Azure
and Kubernetes that help Blue Yonder solutions
to deploy, scale, and run SaaS services
at a reduced cost and effort.
This provides availability, reliability, scalability,
security, and deployment in a very cost-effective manner,
thereby helping application teams
focus on building differentiated products
and operate a resilient solution in the cloud.
In the area of agility and innovation,
Blue Yonder uses a variety of Azure services and tools
within the Luminate platform and solutions.
Our Blue Yonder machine learning studio capability
uses the power of Azure ML
to provide a robust, integrated MLOps experience
that is curated for data scientists.
Also, Blue Yonder machine learning studio capabilities,
integrated with Jupyter Notebooks
and other standard environments
with access to machine learning libraries,
provides a familiar developer experience
to a customer IT organization.
- The heart of modernization is about empowering people
to do more of the things
that matter most for their business.
And in the scenarios you just mentioned, Sathish,
that means data scientists can simplify
and accelerate the way that they develop models
because they have ready access to data sets,
and application teams can focus on innovating,
and developers can leverage familiar tools
rather than having to build new skill sets.
- That's absolutely right, Erin.
- Now, for companies wanting
to accelerate digital transformation with fewer resources
or companies early in their cloud adoption journey,
taking on a migration project
might seem like a daunting task right now.
But in our experience, migrating to the cloud
can actually help customers better navigate
these times of uncertainty.
They're able to achieve unprecedented efficiencies,
unlock new business value,
enable secure remote work scenarios, and many more.
As someone who has helped customers
modernize critical components of their operations
over the last few years,
has this been your experience as well?
- It absolutely has been, Erin.
For example, customers that deployed Blue Yonder solutions
in SaaS on Azure experienced little disruption
when the pandemic hit.
Blue Yonder was able to maintain productivity
and continuity of operations
as we were able to continue to remotely run their business
and help customers continue to derive value
from the Blue Yonder solutions
and the investments they made.
It also helps organizations
to focus on their core competencies
and leave the management of the entire solution
to the solution experts.
This can help them focus on what they do best
and continue to grow their business.
- Maintaining productivity and operational continuity
is critical for delivering on customer demand,
enabling a hybrid workforce, and staying competitive.
Cloud-based infrastructure gives you more IT resilience,
which means you're better equipped
to mitigate new disruptions and future-proof your business.
Now, one of the great things about our partnership
is that we wanna make migrating and modernizing
easier for customers.
Blue Yonder and Microsoft are working
on a few exciting things together
that can help customers get started, right, Sathish?
- Absolutely. We are very grateful for the partnership.
We value the partnership.
We are a key ISV partner on the Microsoft Industry Clouds.
Together, we will continue to strategically align
on empowering our joint customer base to achieve more
and partnering with them to innovate
and solve their current business challenges
through digital transformation.
One example of this is the work we are doing
with the current solutions
such as the Microsoft Cloud for retail
and Microsoft Cloud for sustainability.
We are placing the tools our customers need
into their day-to-day systems to provide real-time data,
streamline operations, reduce supply deficiencies,
and improve conversion and profitability.
- The Microsoft Cloud i ndustry solutions are a great place
to start if you're looking for tailored solutions
to drive benefits for customers,
employees, and your organization.
Sathish, thank you so much for joining me
on this episode of "Inside Azure for IT."
It was great to chat with you.
- This was great. Thanks a lot, Erin.
- Don't forget to check out the other segments
of this episode of "Inside Azure for IT."
I talk with Henry O'Connell at Canary Speech
about how they're powering their vocal biomarker technology
and optimizing their cloud investments using Azure.
And I also chat with my colleague
and Microsoft leader Vasu Jakkal
about why implementing a comprehensive security strategy
is just so important to growing your business.
For all our videos, deep dives, and skilling content,
head to azure.com/insideazureforit
And I'll see you next time.