By Venkat Krishnan, Executive Director, Commercial Partners, Microsoft India. This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
The impact of the global pandemic is growing exponentially. In this moment of deep crisis, our ultimate priority is the health and wellbeing of our customers, partners, suppliers, and employees. There’s uncertainty all around us. But there’s also hope, even as we cope with this new normal. We’ve witnessed some remarkable examples of innovation and partnership in these hard times. Our partners have been on the front lines as we continued to constantly live our mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Microsoft partners are helping organizations adjust to this new way of working. As workplace productivity is getting redefined, our partners are delivering remote work and business continuity solutions across industries and geographies, for educational institutions and governments, to SMBs and large enterprises. One of our services partners, KPMG in India, turned to the Microsoft portfolio, among other technologies, to continue seamless operations and services while ensuring the safety of their employees. Employees of KPMG in India began maximizing technologies like cloud, communication and collaboration platforms with Microsoft’s foundational commitment of security and privacy. Using the Microsoft stack, EY has developed a host of COVID-19 solutions for its customers, including a health bot built grounds up on the Azure Bot Framework, crisis communication app using Power Platform, data dashboards leveraging Power BI and security offerings built on Azure Sentinel Services.
As customers try to do more with less, it’s amazing how independent software vendors (ISVs) are responding quickly to the situation by developing unique solutions to combat the crisis. In less than 48 hours post the lockdown, nearly 15 of our ISVs and services partners presented business continuity solutions for our customers.
ZingHR’s business continuity HRMS solution includes integration with Microsoft Teams and offers chatbots for remote workers, geo-fenced mobile attendance, multilingual mobile learning platforms, digital onboarding, performance appraisals, expense claims and zero-touch payroll. Smarten Spaces is offering free access to Jumpree WorkSafe, an app for employees to help implement social distancing measures, connect and chat securely, manage visitors with contactless entry and health declaration, track hygiene supplies, reach out to the emergency helpline and share information with employees. With people working remotely, IT services across all organizations have been critical enablers right from offering new productivity solutions, issue resolution, agent effectiveness, and complete IT control. Employing a 24×7 service desk experience, CINDE, SummitAI’s conversational interface, allows employees to interact using natural language through webchat and Microsoft Teams, among other tools.
Managing contracts for maintaining business continuity, mitigating disrupted supply chains and identifying risk is crucial at this hour. Contract lifecycle management provider Icertis has moved all its operations to the cloud and is offering 24X7 free support for all end users at customer organizations. While educational institutions are switching to remote learning and are moving their curriculum to Microsoft Teams, there are some innovative solutions for a transformative digital learning experience. Wheebox offers a digital assessment suite that enables academic institutions to assess skills using an AI-powered secure remote proctor platform. While these solutions are enabling business and learning continuity, there are some solutions that are helping battle the impact of the virus. Abhyutthaan’s Command Center solution for countering the spread of the virus provides end-to-end automation of all processes, including facility management, transport management, inventory management, GPS based tracking and data analytics and dashboards among other things.
It’s inspiring to see how these innovative solutions from our partners are helping us extend the value of our technologies to each of our customers. We support our partners in many ways, be it through our tech portfolio, our global GTM reach, our increased focus on best-in-class skilling investments. We are listening to partner feedback as they realign themselves with this new world order. We are doing all that we can to help at this crucial hour and are prioritizing investments for new opportunities that position our partners for future growth. We want to ensure our partner ecosystem is set up to reach its full potential and can make ‘more’ possible. #WeAreTogether
