The Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program enables partners to sell Microsoft Online services to customers with additional value added services like assessment, consulting, deployment, migration and monitoring, support and billing. As part of the CSP program, partners are able to create tenants, provide them Azure subscriptions and manage various services on behalf of the customer.
This document provides business guidance for CSP partners to build industry vertical end-to-end solutions and provides guidance on creating effective sales motion leveraging the power of Microsoft Azure Data Platform. It also highlights specific high value business opportunities that exist for CSP partners across various industry vertical scenarios such as Healthcare, Retail and Hospitality sectors, and highlights the benefits of choosing Microsoft Azure Data platform. The 3 key trends this document capitalizes are:
While these solutions may be built with specific components on public, private, or hybrid Azure cloud components, the core guidance is focused on public cloud Microsoft Azure implementations.
This section highlights the use case scenarios for 3 industry verticals – Healthcare, Retail and Hospitality/Hotel sector.
In the Healthcare sector, huge amount of data is amassed across EHR (Electronic Health Records) and EMR (Electronic Medical Records). Opportunities for CSP partners in healthcare are abundant. According to CDC, chronic diseases affect 52% of Americans and consume 86% of healthcare costs. The industry trend is to enable diagnosis efficiencies and the best patient outcomes at the lowest possible cost and according to Gartner, Healthcare IT is undergoing a transformational shift that dictates the future towards "Personalized Care" and this trend towards Personalized Care presents significant opportunity for offering both managed services and value-add services to lower TCO reducing inefficiencies, thereby reducing healthcare costs overall.
According to CDC, Diabetes is the leading cause for kidney failure and increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, neuropathy, retinopathy and various other health complications.
Type 2 diabetes affects 28 Million Americans in 2012 & is primarily due to sedentary lifestyle in patients who are genetically predisposed and makes up 90% of cases of diabetes.
Scenario 1: Diabetes Type 2 Prediction: Using the electronic health record (EHR) data set containing patient records from all 50 states in the United States, predict –
Machine learning with AzureML can be used to predict diabetes type 2 – Microsoft Data Platform provides a comprehensive suite of libraries that enables powerful supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms to aid predictive analytics.
Scenario 2: Remote Patient Monitoring with Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM): Internet of Things(IoT) powers a new class of scenarios around Remote Patient Monitoring. CGM is a new trend where devices and sensors are implanted subcutaneously to perform continuous glucose monitoring to provide timely medical aid with Remote Patient Monitoring to address episodes such as hypoglycemic conditions. Cloud driven Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) is a small wearable device that tracks your glucose vitals throughout the day and night – helping hypoglycemic or hyperglycemic incidents and alert you of highs and lows so you can take timely evasive action and thereby protecting the patient. CGM helps to minimize the guesswork that comes from making decisions based solely on a number from a blood glucose meter reading, for better diabetes management and in keeping your physician abreast with remote monitoring.
Retail industry vertical scenario presents plethora of opportunity both in terms of Hosting/Managed and Value-add service offerings. According to IDC Research - Success or failure in retail will be driven by an effective and profitable consumer experience. Product availability, information access, promotional relevancy, ease of checkout, and convenience are now key components of a competitive and differentiated Omni-channel strategy.
We anticipate stores to double down on these strategies and continue to find ways to bridge the gap between offline and digital channels. Retailers thus are on a mission to enable bridging the "brick-2-click" transition by offering rich & immersive shopping experience leveraging mobile and social strategy taking customer experience to a whole new level. This Omni-channel strategy presents an incredible opportunity for MSPs to multi-fold grow their business, enabling MSPs to cash in on this mega-trend.
In 2014, we saw more merchants venture into Omni-channel retailing and try in-store marketing solutions such as beacons to enrich the shopping experience. We anticipate stores to double down on these strategies and continue to find ways to bridge the gap between offline and digital channels.
Scenario: Immersive Shopping Experience: Retailers are on a mission is to enable a rich immersive shopping experience leveraging mobile and social strategy at all points of contact. Giving customers real-time relevant information on promotions based on their location, personal preferences and social influencers, is key to deliver a modern "e-tailer" experience opening new sources of revenue.
In the Hospitality/Hotel sector, huge opportunity exists for CSP Partners with data sprawl with Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios - both in terms of Hosting/Managed and Value-add service offerings. Gartner predicts that by the year 2020, 25 million connected devices will exist and this explosion of data leads to data ingestion growing at CAGR of 41% between 2013-2020.
This mission is to transform hotel information systems (HIS) to Holistic Insightful Services to offer "m"-powered Guest Experience and this explosion of data and associated challenges of bid data presents an incredible opportunity for MSPs to multi-fold grow their business, enabling MSPs to cash in on this mega-trend. This gives a tremendous opportunity for hotels to provide a unique experience to their guests using predictive analytics and connected environment in their pre, during and post stay-experiences.
Scenario: This mission is to transform hotel information systems (HIS) to Holistic Insightful Services to offer "M"-Powered Guest Experience. The reimagined HIS Experience would combine feeds from relevant 3rd party providers with traditional hotel information systems to offer tailored guest experience.
Microsoft Azure Data Platform can be leveraged to develop a data collection and analysis platform that generates reports based on spend analysis and social weightage to offer tailored loyalty rewards thereby enhancing customer stickiness. The key is to ensure a truly informed, cross-channel, and personal experience.
Microsoft Data Platform offers a comprehensive suite of PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) offering that enables CSP Partners to create end-to-end solutions and provides unique advantages from a Go-To-Market perspective, with quicker Time-to-Market and reducing infrastructure costs. Microsoft Azure PaaS offerings enable CSP Partners to create differentiated E2E value add industry vertical specific solutions. Partners can bring solutions to market at a significantly reduced cost, yet allowing the ability to craft customer's data models to unlock richer and deeper insights with the help of deep and rich analytics and integration with Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities.
Microsoft Data Platform offers a comprehensive suite of PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) offering that enables CSP Partners to create end-to-end solutions and provides unique advantages from a Go-To-Market perspective, with quicker Time-to-Market and reducing infrastructure costs. Microsoft Azure PaaS offerings enable CSP Partners to create differentiated E2E value add industry vertical specific solutions. Partners can bring solutions to market at a significantly reduced cost, yet allowing the ability to craft customer's data models to unlock richer and deeper insights with the help of deep and rich analytics and integration with Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities.
PaaS provides built in scalability and elasticity to provide efficiency and resiliency to enable scale-out scenarios such as "cloud burst". PaaS helps CSP partners in the rapid construction of E2E solutions to integrate custom workflow essential to the creation of a targeted business application.
PaaS allows you to rent converged platform services for the period for which services will be used. It changes the cost structure from Capital expense (Capex) to Opex (Operational expense) for an enterprise. PaaS reduces TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) to run and deploy the application. From a pricing perspective, the pay per use / pay per go pricing model is quite effective in reducing unnecessary CAPEX build out costs, where there is no need to buy the software, middleware or full year license; its pay on the basis of usage.
PaaS is a perfect match for agile software development methodologies. An agile software development methodology is based on iterative and incremental development which may require iterations in need of software and other middleware platforms with progress and hence PaaS is the right match for agile application development methodology.
PaaS provides services required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services on the internet allowing you to build, deploy, test, host and maintain application – enabling you to deliver solutions faster, reducing time to market and in enabling you to build iterative solutions through build-measure-learn cycle effectively. Simplifying the tasks of application developers eliminates the need for time consuming configuration tasks, by offering a user-friendly "plug-and-play" interface.
Microsoft Power BI transforms your company's data into rich visuals for you to collect and organize so you can focus on what matters to you. Stay in the know, spot trends as they happen, and push your business further – the possibilities are endless with richer and deeper insights.
Thus, Microsoft Data Platform enables CSP Partners focus their efforts on building end-to-end solutions to enable recurring revenue streams and allowing partners to create differentiated offers, thereby driving customer stickiness when it comes to customer adoption and retention.
Microsoft Data Platform offers a continuum of services bridging "data silos" across Private, Hosted and Public cloud – several opportunities exist for CSP Partners in Healthcare to construct comprehensive offers to take advantage off. By using Azure Data Factory, CSP partners have the opportunity to abandon time consuming and expensive manual cloud resource management and move to on-demand cloud resource management, saving them time, money, and reducing their time to solution deployment.
Data lineage views and operational service health become easy to visualize and troubleshoot with the intuitive Data Factory monitoring and management UI available from the Azure Portal. End-to-End solutions can now be scheduled and managed so that processed data and insights can reliably be offered to medical practitioners, and data and processing dependencies are automatically managed without requiring human intervention.
For instance, in healthcare, by providing rich predictive analytics experience, Microsoft Azure enables faster pace of innovation on genome sequencing, DNA analysis – where the power of cloud and the rich machine learning capabilities Azure provides can spur innovation @ cloud speed, at a fraction of cost, not even thought possible a decade ago without mass supercomputing power.
For instance, in healthcare, Data Platform Managed Service Offering: In many cases, Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Electronic Health Records (EHR) straddle hybrid cloud boundaries. Microsoft Data Platform provides unique opportunity for CSP partners to bridge "data silos" across cloud boundaries and offer managed Data Quality, Data Movement (using Azure to backup, running secondary replica services in Azure for mission critical workloads) and Data Management Service - allowing the MSP to auto-move cold data into Azure Cloud for long term retention, reducing the need for expanding cold storage on premise.
For instance, in Retail sector, the above offers are a sampling of core services that can be offered by the partners to enable integrated provisioning and E2E management. Benefits include Unified Setup and Administration of the Azure Data Platform, 1-click deployment, E2E monitoring and a single "self-service" dashboard view to manage SLA, 1-stop Incident management and response, Hot to Cold Data Movement management including reports for compliance, auditing.
In addition, Retail data straddles POS devices, on premise datacenters and straddles hybrid cloud boundaries. Microsoft Data Platform provides unique opportunity for MSPs to bridge "data silos" across cloud boundaries and offer managed Data Quality, Data Movement (using Azure to backup, running secondary replica services in Azure for mission critical workloads) and Data Management Service - allowing the MSP to auto-move cold data into Azure Cloud for long term retention, reducing the need for expanding cold storage on premise.
Similarly, for hospitality sector, with connected hotels, sensors such as door sensors, thermostats, occupancy sensors etc. can all be connected with cloud presence with massive data ingestion into cloud to draw insights.
Microsoft Azure Data Platform provides tremendous opportunity for MSPs to build a very profitable, successful and sustainable business. The key questions lurking in every partner's mind are the following:
In order to address the above very grounded questions, long term sustainable and successful businesses in a "Cloud-First" economy is built with 4 key elements as shown below:
Sustainability of businesses is determined overall based on ability to differentiate from competition - for instance, Microsoft transacts with over 70,000 partners during the course of last 12 months – clearly indicating the opportunity to provide "me-too" plain vanilla VM-as-a-service and the competitive edge associated with it is eroding away sharply. Thus differentiation is key to success by "developing focus", or a "Center of Excellence" around key segments in order to offer depth expertise – such as an industry vertical.
Thus aligning with the Cloud-First economy requires ability to adapt your business to capitalize on the opportunity to maximize wallet share offering rich Managed and Packaged-IP value-add services. MSPs have offered 4 key Revenue Lines to date with "Cloud-First" economy:
Putting all of the above together, the chart below showcases the BEP (Break Even Point) across the billed revenue and contribution margin, the charts showcase both on premise vs. cloud comparison from a growth rate perspective, clearly indicating the ROC (Rate of Change) on the cloud curve, measured by the angle of slope is much steeper with Cloud clipping the on premise stream at a faster pace, growing exponentially as scale increases.
Overall, from a revenue and profitability standpoint, being aligned with "Cloud-First" economy garners the following outcome:
As described above, reducing overall healthcare costs for chronic diseases become a primary pivot for sales motion. Hospitals and Insurance industry including Medicare, Medicaid and employers providing medical insurance to their employees'/dependents care about reducing overall healthcare costs. As indicated above, according to CDC, chronic illnesses consume 86% of the healthcare costs and a huge trend emanates from a Healthcare perspective to provide "Personalized Care" reducing overall TCO cost.
In order to create an effective sales motion, there are 4 primary angles to consider:
Some of the key best practices to enable an affective sales motion are outlined below:
As described above, Product availability, information access, promotional relevancy, ease of checkout, and convenience are now key components of a competitive and differentiated Omni-channel strategy. According to IDC Research - Success or failure of a retailer will be driven by an effective and profitable consumer experience. We anticipate stores to double down on these strategies and continue to find ways to bridge the gap between offline and digital channels.
This Omni-channel strategy presents an incredible opportunity for CSP partners to multi-fold grow their business, enabling MSPs to cash in on this mega-trend. Retailers thus are on a mission to enable bridging the "brick-2-click" transition by offering rich & immersive shopping experience leveraging mobile and social strategy taking customer experience to a whole new level.
The "Internet of Me" offers unique opportunity for CSP partners to create effective "Sell to" and "Sell through" offers to end customers taking Hospitality Information System (HIS) to a whole new level. Various upsell opportunities exist to cross-sell and up-sell unique customized offers for patrons.
Cross Sell and Upsell Opportunities with B2B chaining based on a geography tailored to individual customers' taste can become a very powerful scenario CSP partners can take advantage off. For instance, connecting locale specific tour attractions, spa reservations, dinner arrangements based on customers' likes/dislikes can really become very powerful catalyst from a Hotelier's standpoint to ensure utmost customer satisfaction.
Loyalty programs can be tested with real customers with A/B testing and insights along with surveys/market research can be value add services CSP partners can use to gauge effectiveness of loyalty programs.
Data Marts on Social Trends: Microsoft Data Platform provides powerful capabilities to conduct Sentiment Analysis on Hot trends/products which can be sold to large retailers – hoteliers can use this data to do promotional offers, inventory management and also offer loyalty programs based on data specific to locates/geographies. Demographic based insights can be derived from Social trends using "Sentiment Analysis" for various products using data social sites such as Twitter.
The following table notes a rough outline for the described scenario in terms of Professional Services, Managed Services, and Azure Services in each of the above industry vertical scenario environment:
For Healthcare sector, cost modeling on an annualized basis (including one-time cost) would range from USD $125K – $145k, with expected profitability margin in the range of 25% - 45%.
Disclaimer: Please note that although not all services mentioned in the document are available in CSP - Microsoft will be enabling all of the services mentioned in this document and they will be made available soon for CSP. Contact Microsoft for more details on services availability for CSP. For those Azure services not available yet through the CSP, we took the web direct price from Azure.com
Assumptions and detailed cost break-down is summarized in the table below: (all prices below are based on CSP price sheet as of June 2016 where applicable and for those services not available through CSP, azure.com web direct pricing is shown below for illustrative purposes for overall costs – all prices below are based on West US region priced in USD)
Item | Quantity | Unit Cost $ | Monthly $ | Total Annualized $ |
ProfSrvs-Envisioning and Architecture | 2-weeks | $10k/week |
| $20,000 |
Prototype Development (Application) | 4-weeks | $10k/week |
| $40,000 |
Azure Data Factory | based on 200 High Frequency Activities + 50 Reruns + 80 Data movement hours | $0.14/day/activity (averaged across on-prem and cloud) | $818/mo. | $9,822 |
Azure SQL (S0 Single DB) | 2 | 10 DTUs, 250GB per DB, $0.02/hr. | $25/mo. | $306 |
Hadoop (Head Nodes) – A3 | 1 | $404/mo. | $4,848 | |
Hadoop (Worker Node) – A3 | 1 |
| $202/mo. | $2,476 |
Power B.I. | 10 users | $10/user/mo. | $100/mo. | $1,200 |
Azure ML | 30 Prediction hours/mo. | $10/mo. + $4/prediction hour | $150/mo. | $1800 |
Azure ML Studio | 40 experiments | $1 /experiment | $40/mo. | $480 |
Monthly Support (Managed Services) | 1 | $1200/mo. | $1200/mo. | $14,400 |
Tenant Support (Tenant Customization) | 30 | $100/mo. | $3000/mo. | $36,000 |
|
|
|
|
|
TOTAL Professional Services |
|
|
| $60,000 (1-time) |
TOTAL Azure Services |
|
|
| $20,932/year |
TOTAL Recurring Managed Services |
|
|
| $50,400/year |
For Retail sector, cost modeling on an annualized basis (including one-time cost) would range from USD $110K – $130k, with expected profitability margin in the range of 20% - 35%.
Disclaimer: Please note that although not all services mentioned in the document are available in CSP - Microsoft will be enabling all of the services mentioned in this document and they will be made available soon for CSP. Contact Microsoft for more details on services availability for CSP. For those Azure services not available yet through the CSP, we took the web direct price from Azure.com
Assumptions and detailed cost break-down is summarized in the table below: (all prices below are based on CSP price sheet as of June 2016 where applicable and for those services not available through CSP, azure.com web direct pricing is shown below for illustrative purposes for overall costs – all prices below are based on West US region priced in USD)
Item | Quantity | Unit Cost $ | Monthly $ | Total Annualized $ |
ProfSrvs-Envisioning and Architecture | 1-week | $10k/week |
| $10,000 |
Prototype Development (Application) | 4-weeks | $10k/week |
| $40,000 |
Azure Data Factory | based on 100 High Frequency Activities + 20 Reruns + 40 Data movement hours | $0.07/day/activity (averaged across on-prem and cloud) | $414/mo. | $4,911 |
Azure SQL (S0 Single DB) | 2 | 10 DTUs, 250GB per DB, $0.02/hr. | $25/mo. | $306 |
Hadoop (Head Nodes) – A3 | 1 | $404/mo. | $4,848 | |
Hadoop (Worker Node) – A3 | 1 |
| $202/mo. | $2,476 |
Power B.I. | 10 users | $10/user/mo. | $100/mo. | $1,260 |
Azure Event Hub | 1 | $623/mo. | $7476 | |
App Insight | 3 Applications, 1 Million data points | ~$21.75/app | $63.75/mo. | $765 |
Azure IoT Hub – S1 | 1 x S1 IoT Hub | $42.5/mo. | $510 | |
Monthly Support (Managed Services) | 1 | $1200/mo. | $1200/mo. | $14,400 |
Tenant Support (Tenant Customization) | 30 | $100/mo. | $3000/mo. | $36,000 |
TOTAL Professional Services |
|
| $50,000 (1-time) | |
TOTAL Azure Services |
|
|
| $22,552/year |
TOTAL Recurring Managed Services |
|
|
| $50,400/year |
For Hospitality sector, cost modeling on an annualized basis (including one-time cost) would range from USD $120K – $140k, with expected profitability margin in the range of 20% - 35%.
Disclaimer: Please note that although not all services mentioned in the document are available in CSP - Microsoft will be enabling all of the services mentioned in this document and they will be made available soon for CSP. Contact Microsoft for more details on services availability for CSP. For those Azure services not available yet through the CSP, we took the web direct price from Azure.com
Assumptions and detailed cost break-down is summarized in the table below: (all prices below are based on CSP price sheet as of June 2016 where applicable and for those services not available through CSP, azure.com web direct pricing is shown below for illustrative purposes for overall costs – all prices below are based on West US region priced in USD)
Item | Quantity | Unit Cost $ | Monthly $ | Total Annualized $ |
ProfSrvs-Envisioning and Architecture | 2-week | $10k/week |
| $20,000 |
Prototype Development (Application) | 3-weeks | $10k/week |
| $30,000 |
Azure Web (landing page and main app) | 3 | $75/mo./web | $225/mo. | $2,700 |
Azure SQL (S0 Single DB) | 2 | 10 DTUs, 250GB per DB, $0.02/hr. | $25/mo. | $306 |
Hadoop (Head Nodes) – A3 | 1 | $404/mo. | $4,848 | |
Hadoop (Worker Node) – A3 | 1 |
| $202/mo. | $2,476 |
Power B.I. | 10 users | $10/user/mo. | $100/mo. | $1,200 |
Azure ML | 30 Prediction hours/mo. | $10/mo. + $4/prediction hour | $150/mo. | $1800 |
Azure Event Hub | 1 | $623/mo. | $7476 | |
Azure IoT Hub – S2 | 1 x S2 IoT Hub | $425/mo. | $5100 | |
Azure Web (aggregation hosts & logic apps) | 3 | $75/mo./web | $225/mo. | $2,700 |
Azure SQL (S1 Single DB) | 1 | $30/mo. | $30/mo. | $360 |
Azure Stream Analytics | 5 | $0.03/GB/Streaming hour | $115/mo. | $1,380 |
Cognitive Services | 30k Transactions/mo. | $1.25/1k Transactions with FaceAPIs | $38/mo. | $459 |
Monthly Support (Managed Services) | 1 | $1200/mo. | $1200/mo. | $14,400 |
Tenant Support (Tenant Customization) | 30 | $100/mo. | $3000/mo. | $36,000 |
TOTAL Professional Services |
|
|
| $50,000 (1-time) |
TOTAL Azure Services |
|
|
| $30,805/year |
TOTAL Recurring Managed Services |
|
|
| $50,400/year |
This section covers industry specific value-add offerings MSPs can build leveraging the powerful capabilities of Microsoft Data Platform.
CSP partners looking for accelerating their time to market by embracing the "Cloud-First" economy should consider leveraging Microsoft Azure Data Platform to construct offers that are rich, captivating and immersive customer experiences. Microsoft Azure Data Platform offers a continuum of rich capabilities that partners can take full advantage of – given the trend towards data explosion, there is a significant opportunity for MSPs to benefit from a business value proposition and offers tremendous competitive edge harnessing the power of data, insights and analytics. By complementing traditional batch based analytics implementations with real-time analytics, and unifying the data visualizations experience into a single dynamic interface, companies can empower their staff to decide and act on information faster.
While this document covers the business guidance for CSP partners, refer to the "Technical Guidance" document for details on Reference for different industry vertical scenarios described above.