All posts by afoellmi@yahoo.com

Retail as a service


Innovative solutions that increase revenue and generate industrywide disruption are the Holy Grail of digital transformation. Developing such solutions isn’t simple, though. It requires accurate insights, significant research and development (R&D), and a stable, accessible platform that can make the solution easily available to partners and clients. The effort can be well worth it, as groundbreaking applications can open up new revenue streams, enable complementary capabilities, and foster long-lasting partnerships that can elevate a business to new heights.

In this video, you’ll learn how the Kroger Co. technology division is leading the industry by leveraging Microsoft tools to provide its own innovations as a new offering: retail as a service.

Map to Your Customers’ Sales Expectation

What do your customers expect from sellers? Wouldn’t it be great to easily answer this question! This infographic includes powerful statistics and insight into the minds of customers.

According to McKinsey, the top customer request is to speed up interactions with sellers. This was mentioned two times more often than price. What’s more, according to TOPO, 60 percent of companies lack a well-designed sales process.

Great news! Dynamics 365 Sales Professional helps your sellers stay engaged with customers and provides virtual collaboration via Teams.

View: Map to Your Customers’ Sales Expectation

Producing a high yield and better quality of life


Sustainable energy and digital transformation can combine to provide new avenues to success and increase convenience for people in isolated areas. This is especially true in places without a modern electrical infrastructure where residents rely on labor-intensive tasks. Innovative solutions can help them automate simple tasks, often making the difference between mere survival and prosperity. In many parts of Africa, for example, farmers lack access to running water. Instead they rely on wells to sustain their families, water their crops, and support their livestock.

In this video, you’ll see how Monica, an independent farmer in Kenya, increased her yields and quality of life by implementing a solar-powered irrigation system based on Microsoft Azure IoT.

City of Houston: Collaborative tools


One of the defining aspects of modern productivity and collaboration tools is their ability to unify an entire organization in a single hub where ideas can be proposed and shared. This capability is crucial for keeping information from being siloed and ensuring that stakeholders have the highest possible visibility into their projects.

Collaboration tools also play a key role in fostering innovation and mobility. They allow team members to instantly propose ways that ideas and processes can be improved, and do so from virtually any device or location in the world.

In this video, you’ll see how the city of Houston, Texas, is using digital transformation to increase efficiency by empowering its employees via the collaboration capabilities of Microsoft 365.

Northrop & Johnson boosts sales and marketing efforts with Dynamics 365


Marketing technology is not something that has been widely adopted in the luxury yacht industry. Yet, targeting this niche demographic requires precision and little room for mistake.

Watch as Northrop & Johnson, a luxury yacht company, implemented Dynamics 365 Sales Pro and achieved a 70% increase on their charter sales. Dynamics 365 gave them a real competitive advantage, providing them with a window into the customer the entire way through the sales cycle.

Use this testimonial video to demonstrate to your customers how one company easily implemented Sales Pro and was able to strengthen customer relationships, predict buying behaviors, and be much more precise in their marketing activities.

Give Your Sales Team the Winning Edge: Quick Time to Value with Dynamics 365 Sales Professional

Do you struggle with outdated, legacy sales automation solutions that still place data in silos and prevent your sales team from working remotely? You’re not alone! Many SMBs believe that new, cutting edge digital solutions are too expensive and out of reach.

Fortunately, there is a better way. Modern digital-first solutions like Dynamics 365 Sales Professional empower sellers to work remotely and access customer data like never before possible. It provides unparalleled customer insights and works seamlessly with the rest of Dynamics 365 and Office 365.

Use this eBook to illustrate how Sales Professional is designed specifically for SMBs and delivers improved customer experiences, a better sales process, and usable customer data. For those companies without distinct business units, Sales Professional acts as an extended team empowering businesses to deliver superior digital customer experiences.

View: Give Your Sales Team the Winning Edge: Quick Time to Value with Dynamics 365 Sales Professional

Where Artificial Intelligence Will Disrupt Next

With so many possible artificial intelligence (AI) applications, predicting trends can be challenging, especially in an age when innovation reigns supreme and new breakthroughs occur every day. So, in an effort to gain further insights into the future of AI, researchers from Stanford University and the Brookings Institution analyzed keywords in patents to identify where the technology will have its greatest impact on jobs and companies in the years ahead.

Read this article to learn about their predictions about the future of AI and gain insights into what industries will be most impacted by artificial intelligence and its applications.

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Retail in the 2020s: The death of consumerism?

Thanks to new technologies and rising customer expectations, retailers have become experience hubs for millions of shoppers around the world. It’s no secret that retail has fully embraced digital transformation, leading many experts to speculate about where the industry is heading next and what to expect from retail experiences going forward.

In this article, you’ll learn about the six main forces that will play key roles in determining this decade’s retail technology.

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The Benefits Of SaaS For Managing Cloud Security Threats

As business become more digitalized, they must learn to contend with the increasing number of cloud security threats and incidents. Therefore, investing in the tools that can give them the ability to deal with and overcome these issues is quickly becoming every modern organization’s primary concern. These tools, however, must ensure the security of enterprises’ data while allowing them to remain flexible, productive, and efficient. In this regard, software-as-a-service (SaaS) has become the top choice for today’s leading organizations thanks to its ability to safeguard information while reducing costs and providing employees with intuitive applications.

In this article, you’ll learn how SaaS models like Microsoft 365 have become key in helping businesses’ IT departments keep information secure in today’s highly connected world.

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The Network in 2020: Faster, Closer, Smarter

It’s no secret that more people, more than ever, are more digitally connected. The underlying network needed to support this connectivity must be faster, closer, and smarter, according to Forbes contributor Steve Alexander.

“On-demand content, bandwidth-hungry mobile apps, IoT devices, and new cloud-based applications are driving the need for more bandwidth and network capacity,” Alexander writes. He reminds us that “fast ethernet” used to be the descriptive phrase for the network edge, and that over time we have quickly increased connectivity times—because users’ needs demand it. This is no exception. “Since its inception, the internet has a been a catalyst for service providers to facilitate faster connectivity, an imperative that will increase over time,” states Alexander.

Read the entire article, “The Network in 2020: Faster, Closer, Smarter” for valuable insight on why network requirements will continue to align with the need for cloud services.

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