Microsoft has unveiled three new industry cloud offerings for financial services, manufacturing and nonprofits, coming shortly after the tech giant announced similar offerings for healthcare and retail.
The company bills these new cloud offerings as a solution to industry challenges, including ones that emerged over the past year due to the COVID-19 pandemic as companies in every industry accelerated their digital transformation and migration to the cloud.
According to Microsoft, its industry clouds bring together common data models, cross-cloud connectors, workflows, APIs and industry-specific components and standards along with Microsoft’s cloud services, collaboration tools and security solutions.
“Through these industry clouds, we aim to empower everyone to deliver value faster, adapt quickly to changing conditions, build for the future and do all of this with security at the core,” Alysa Taylor, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for business applications and global industry, wrote in a blog post.
Taylor wrote that the company has added industry experts to its employee base to help shape Microsoft’s industry-specific products and offerings.
The cloud offerings include Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit.
For financial services, the offering unifies “Microsoft solutions, unique templates, API’s and additional industry-specific standards, along with multi-layered security and compliance coverage to deliver differentiated customer experiences, improve employee collaboration and productivity, manage risk and modernize core systems.”
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According to Taylor, this enables retail banks to create a 360-degree view of customers with greater insight and embed digital collaboration into their process workflows to create real-time visibility to status, streamline hand-offs and reduce fraud.
The cloud offering includes a new feature called Loan Manager designed to help lenders close loans faster by improving transparency via automation and collaboration.
Public preview is scheduled for March 2021.
For manufacturing, Microsoft’s new cloud offering is designed to support core processes and requirements of the manufacturing industry. It brings together new and existing capabilities across Microsoft’s products and partner solutions that can help connect people, assets, workflows and business processes, according to Taylor.
Public preview for the manufacturing cloud is scheduled for the end of June.
For nonprofits, Microsoft’s new offering is designed to offer a connected, intelligent platform that connects Microsoft’s cloud tools with common nonprofit scenarios like constituent engagement, program design and delivery and volunteer management and fundraising.
This too will launch at the end of June, Taylor writes.
Microsoft also said its previously announced Microsoft Cloud for Retail will be in public preview next month, and the first update to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will be available in April.
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