SYDNEY – October 17, 2018 – Australian software-as-a-service company Panviva has announced that it has transitioned its Omnichannel Knowledge Cloud to Microsoft Azure, reaping performance and reliability improvements, as well as providing access to Azure cognitive services which will allow Panviva to infuse artificial intelligence capabilities across its product line.
The company, which numbers ANZ, Westpac, Bank of Queensland, Foxtel, Medibank, Origin Energy and Telstra as local customers for the global service, has built a strong international reputation for delivering a secure, scalable cloud-based platform that takes out the guesswork for front line staff. By giving users instant access to the right information they need to perform their jobs well – when and where they need it – companies have reported significant operational benefits.
In finance applications the Panviva Omnichannel Knowledge Cloud has been credited with helping to cut error rates by 80 per cent and boost productivity by 45 per cent; while in insurance it has reined in call handling times by 25 per cent.
According to Ben Cordeiro, Chief Technology Officer, Panviva’s transition to Microsoft Azure has already delivered significant benefits both for Panviva and its customers in terms of enhanced performance and resilience, while Microsoft Azure’s global reach ensures that the service is scalable and secure wherever Panviva’s users are.
“The feedback from customers has been very positive – building on Azure has meant application start-up is faster, pages load quicker, it’s much more responsive and the improvement in stability has been a major tick,” he added. Meanwhile, the time taken to deploy software updates; “is now measured in minutes rather than the hours of the past.”
Moving their SaaS business to the Azure platform has allowed the company to pass on immediate benefits to its customers, such as 24 per cent improvement in APDEX and 77 per cent reduction in cloud application response times at the user interface.
The move to Azure also helps to future-proof the business as Panviva now has access to the full array of Azure cognitive services which it is using to infuse artificial intelligence into the Omnichannel Knowledge Cloud.
It is already into its second AI project with Microsoft, its most recent being a collaboration with a major Australian bank and a team of Microsoft developers based in New York.
Infusing AI in a financial services context can help ensure that an employee – or a chatbot – follows procedure and regulation when engaging with a customer or prospect. It also ensures that the information delivered to the frontline, chatbot, and customer matches that in the back office – ensuring a single source of truth across the enterprise.
Leveraging Azure Cognitive Services will allow Panviva’s system to better assess what information would be most useful at any point in time – effectively acting as an intelligent assistant at the employee or customer coalface.
Panviva will shortly announce an extension of the service that it describes as a ‘digital orchestrator’. This will allow channel owners to ‘curate’ the information available through the knowledge management solution to contextualise and customise it for the various digital channels and customer interaction points that an enterprise has to manage. Orchestrating knowledge from a single point, across the increasing number of digital and traditional channels, ensures that information is accurate and centrally managed while also being tailored for the specific language and contexts required for the wide range of employee and customer channels being served.
The service also creates a full audit trail, which is useful to financial service institutions that need to demonstrate regulatory compliance in the engagement they have with customers.
Access to the array of Azure services, including AI platforms, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure SQL PaaS has delivered Panviva with a “night and day difference from a cost management and performance perspective – also the complexity of management is greatly reduced,” according to Cordeiro.
“Kubernetes allows us to move further and faster into containerisation of our solution’s microservices-based architecture, an Azure-enabled design strategy that will help future-proof our business by enabling Panviva to respond quickly to new and emerging market or customer needs”.
About Panviva
Panviva is a secure, scalable cloud-based platform that gives users rapid access to the right information they need to perform their jobs well — every time, everywhere.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more.
