Demand for offerings from the Microsoft Cloud in Switzerland continues to grow unabated. Additional Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications, new Azure services and additional Microsoft 365 functionalities ensure that Swiss companies of all sizes and the public sector can use state-of-the-art technology with local data storage. Long-standing customers such as UBS are constantly being joined by new ones, such as Halter, the Gebäudeversicherung Bern Group and the Kantonsspital Baden with its startup heyPatient.
Dynamics 365 (D365) started last December with the Sales, Customer Service and Field Service applications and is being further rolled out as planned. D365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, Commerce, Sales Insights and Audience Insights are now available with local data storage. Also available is D365 Marketing, which many companies in Switzerland use to orchestrate personalized contact histories across all touchpoints and expand customer relationships. The Power Platform, highly valued for its ease of use with low- or even no-code, is also being further expanded: Power Apps Portals, available now, can provide secure access to data for internal and external users. In addition, Power Virtual Agents were launched, which can be used to create intelligent and scalable chatbots without any programming effort.
New Azure Services and Virtual GPUs Available
Microsoft Azure has become the standard cloud platform for many companies in Switzerland. Increasingly, customers are also using services in the field of artificial intelligence. Therefore, the expansion of locally available services continues steadily. Newly available are, among others, various cognitive services such as Azure Search, Azure Translator or Azure Language Understanding in addition to previously provided services such as Speech Services, Text Analytics or Computer Vision.
Especially for compute- and graphics-intensive as well as visualization-oriented workloads, the virtual GPU machines of the type «NCv3» and «NVv3» are now available in Switzerland.
Teams Live Events and Dataverse for Teams now available from local data centers
A continued expansion is also taking place with Microsoft 365. With Microsoft Teams, which is very heavily used throughout Switzerland due to the current situation, Teams Live Events can now also be conducted with local data storage. Microsoft Teams is increasingly becoming a central collaboration and communication platform. With Dataverse for Teams, the Power Platform can now be integrated even better into Teams. The database component, which is now also available locally, offers the possibility to create low-code apps and integrate them into Teams.
Customers from all industries trust the Microsoft Cloud in Switzerland
The Microsoft Cloud in Switzerland has established itself as a cloud platform for many companies and organizations from regulated industries. This is also confirmed by Mike Dargan, Chief Digital and Information Officer (CDIO) and member of the Group Executive Board of UBS Group. It has been «a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the way we work,» Dargan said in a recent interview with Microsoft’s Transform blog. By moving to the cloud, including Azure and Microsoft 365 with Teams, the leading wealth manager can respond more quickly to clients› needs and ensure the security that is the foundation of the financial industry, Dargan said. The cloud has also strengthened the company’s agility, which was critical in dealing with the recent pandemic, while delivering better results for clients. Developers can work more agilely and develop applications with new methods (Read the interview here).
Microsoft Switzerland also has new customers to announce in the healthcare sector. The Kantonsspital Baden (KSB) works in the KSB Health Innovation Hub with startups, technology partners and research and educational institutions. One of these cooperation partners is heyPatient AG. The Zurich-based startup has developed a cloud-based platform with an integrated patient app that simplifies the many interactions between the hospital and patients and makes them paperless. «We relied on the Microsoft Cloud from the very beginning,» confirms Regula Spühler, COO and Co-Founder of heyPatient. «In addition to flexibility and scalability, it was primarily our very high requirements for security and data privacy, which are guaranteed by local Azure data storage in Swiss data centers.» (Read the customer story here)
Among the first Dynamics 365 and Power Platform customers from the Swiss data centers is Halter, one of the leading construction and real estate services companies in Switzerland. «As a Swiss company, it is important for us to source solutions and services here in Switzerland,» confirms Marc Funcek, Head of IT at Halter. «Switzerland is also considered a safe haven for data. That’s why we opted for local data storage.» (Read the customer story here)
The Gebäudeversicherung Bern (GVB) Group, consisting of Gebäudeversicherung Bern (GVB) and its subsidiaries GVB Privatversicherungen AG, GVB Services AG and SafeT Swiss AG, uses Microsoft Azure from its Swiss data centers as its infrastructure for digital transformation. In addition, Microsoft 365 including Teams is used. «We’ve had a cloud and data strategy since 2019,» confirms Thomas von Gunten, who is responsible for IT on the Executive Board, «which we’ve aligned with the requirements of regulators and data protection.» Indeed, according to von Gunten, the GVB Group not only has to comply with strict legal requirements. «Because of our subsidiaries, which operate freely in the market, we also have to meet the requirements of the financial supervisory authority FINMA.» (Read the customer story here)
