Azure Digital Experience stack: Business Applications

Microsoft Azure is winning the Cloud game. In the first part of this series, we focus on Business Applications provided on a SaaS model.

Microsoft Azure is winning the Cloud game. With more data centres, higher investment in security and a broader array of services, it is no surprise that it is ploughing ahead of AWS. Across Business Applications, Development and Infrastructure, it allows organisations to scale and secure solutions whilst managing costs.

Cloud delivers Digital Experiences with tools from 3 broad categories: Business Applications provided as Software as a a Service (SaaS); App Development on a Platform as a Service (PaaS); and deployment on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In the first part of this series, we will focus on Business Applications provided on a SaaS model.

Content, Customer and Commerce for Azure

Killer digital experiences are orchestrated data flows matching Content with Customers to drive Conversions or Commerce. CMS, CRM and Conversion architectures deployed on Azure are closely integrated, helping reduce cost and time to market.

Content management systems

Open-source or enterprise, your CMS is the cornerstone of your digital experience solution. A mission-critical system, your CMS provides your organisation’s face to the world. When we deploy Umbraco or Optimizely websites on Azure, we ensure high availability, security and performance.

Customer relationship management

To create personalised experiences, organisations need to bring together Content and Customer. Azure lets you integrate all common systems and especially the native Dynamics 365 CRM. Linked to your web solution, Dynamics 365 helps increase customer engagement and brand loyalty.

Conversions and Commerce

Whether in B2B or B2C, driving conversions is probably the heart of your digital objectives. Azure gives you an array of tools to improve profitability including intelligent chatbot assistants; powerful search engines; secure payment integration and ML-driven recommendation engines.

The above is a mere sample of the Business Applications available on Azure. In the October 2018 release, Microsoft announced additions for Business Intelligence with PowerBI, Augmented Reality as well as the Open Data initiative, a partnership with Adobe and SAP to allow mutual customers to combine data from diverse platforms.

Read next: in part 2 of our Azure Digital Experience stack series, we will explore how you can leverage Azure PaaS toolkit to develop bespoke Web and Mobile apps.