Industry Clouds 2022 Update: Introduction

• Microsoft industry clouds, solutions tailored for specific vertical industries, continue to evolve; joining healthcare, new supported clouds include retail, manufacturing, and sustainability.
• Industry clouds can speed up solution development by providing industry data models and templated applications based on existing cloud services.

 

This series of reports describes feature and licensing updates to Microsoft’s industry cloud portfolio, which was first covered in the report “Microsoft Industry Clouds: More (and Less) than Meets the Eye” on page 7 of the Sept. 2021 Update. The following reports cover each of the industry clouds in more detail:

 

• Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
• Microsoft Cloud for Retail
• Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services
• Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit
• Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
• Other industry clouds and open-source accelerators.

 

Introduction to Industry Clouds

 “Industry clouds” has become an IT vendor term describing cloud applications and services customized for specific vertical industries. For example, an industry cloud for financial services might layer custom data models and applications supporting wealth management or investment banking, supplementing core functions in enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), collaboration, and other cloud services. By offering industry-specific solutions data models, message formats, application templates, and samples, vendors like Microsoft can speed deployment of solutions on their technologies, coordinate industry partners on a common architecture, and focus the efforts of the vendor’s own product development team. Apart from Microsoft, IBM (arguably first with its Bank of America partnership), SAP, Salesforce, and Google now provide cloud-based industry solutions of varying completeness and capability.