Over the course of my 30 career in technology, I have never seen a more exciting time for Canada’s business community. Technology presents us with unprecedented opportunities. Secure cloud services have levelled the playing field, empowering Canadian businesses to innovate, to disrupt, and to reinvent their organizations to compete and win in a digital economy.

Amazing Canadian stories

Colliers International

Learn how Colliers is using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to increase sales efficiency and create a culture of sharing among salespeople.

Calfra

See how Calfrac leverages Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online as the platform to streamline the documentation and management of customer contacts as well as to improve tracking of the sales pipeline.

Scientist in School

Learn how Scientists in School uses Dynamcis CRM to manage its rapid growth.

But what about you?

Do you have a digital transformation vision? Do you have an idea of what your organization will look like in just a few years, say by 2020? And how do you plan to identify and take advantage of the most powerful and cost-effective new platforms?

Time to adapt & innovate!

Digital transformation is not simply about technology—it’s a business strategy that requires leaders to re-envision existing business models and operations. It’s about embracing a different and better way of engaging customers; empowering employees; optimizing operations; and, yes, even transforming your products and services—all so you can meet the changing needs of customers.

An Intelligent Business Applications Platform

Are you running your entire business from end to end with intelligent applications that work seamlessly together in the cloud? With a platform like Dynamics 365, you can now unify the traditionally-siloed capabilities of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems into one, single, truly integrated solution.

Intelligent business apps

From sales and marketing to operations, organizations can capture and transform all the data they collect into intelligence that generates action and drives outcomes. As organizations adopt more of these apps, they unleash synergies in the form of new processes that proactively guide employees and customers to generate better outcomes.

One app helps another

Take the Project Service Automation application in Dynamics 365, for example. Project teams can use it as standalone app in close alignment with Office 365, but when combined with Operations, the time and expense reports that project members submit automatically go to accounting, HR, Payroll, etc. The team saves a ton of time and gets access to real-time intelligence, as well.

Scaling up fast

One of the great advantages of Dynamics 365 is that it allows organizations to scale on their terms. You can start with one intelligent app, adapt, and adopt it in your environment, then gradually integrate it with more purpose-built applications. The apps seamlessly integrate with each other, and with familiar tools like Outlook and Excel, to help further boost productivity.

Where to start

So, what’s the single most important step you can take to jumpstart your Intelligent Business Applications journey? Explore the possibilities, that’s what! Sit down with your business team/partner and develop a plan for your company that lets your organization experience the benefits of Dynamics 365.

To learn more about the importance of going down the path of digital transformation, download this free e-Book and begin to build your transformation roadmap today.

If you are in the Greater Toronto Area, we have a Dynamics 365 Bootcamp you can attend, being hosted by our partner, DynamicsU. Additionally, you can join us virtually for a Dynamics 365 virtual demo, or in-person for a Microsoft BizLabs session in our Microsoft Technology Centre.

Engage the Microsoft team or a partner today

If you don’t have an IT Partner already, the team at Microsoft is happy to work with you.  Also, you can do a search or ask for an introduction at the Microsoft Partner Center. We can introduce you to a Dynamics 365 specialist near you!

The post Your digital transformation journey starts with a powerful step appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Greg Verdino at Innovation Nation

On Friday, January 27^th, we hosted the Innovation Nation Summit at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto. The Summit brought together business leaders to discuss Canada’s changing economy and how businesses can harness the power of their data in order to succeed in a rapidly transforming world.

Among those who joined us was Greg Verdino, Digital Transformation Expert and Futurist. I had the chance to speak to Greg about digital transformation and how Canadian businesses can use technology to disrupt and stay ahead. Here’s what he told me:

It’s clear that technology has changed the way we do business across industries. Can you explain the difference between “disruption” and “transformation” when it comes to technology?

Digital change will happen with or without you, so for companies, it’s all a matter of where that change originates. When change happens to your company because of digital challenges coming from the outside, you are in the process of being disrupted. On the other hand, when change happens at your company because of deliberate decisions your own team is making and strategic actions your people are taking, you are pursuing your own digital transformation.

Many companies have spent years or even decades building their business processes and operations. How would you suggest they manage the changes ahead?

Business leaders need to rethink their model. Identify the areas of your business that are most vulnerable to disruption, and prioritize those areas in your transformation plan. For some companies, this might be a question of customer experience. For others, perhaps it’s a matter of what products you provide and how you deliver them. No established business can start from scratch, change everything all at once, or let go of the positive points that give them a competitive advantage. But a sound digital transformation plan must jettison the dead weight, put in place an achievable roadmap for incremental improvements and radical innovation and lead the organization to a different, better future.

Ask yourself what your company would look like if their very first customer were a digital native? What would she expect? How would you meet those expectations? This simple exercise forces leaders to adopt a new mindset and see their business in a new and different way, that can shine a light not only on how they might be disrupted but how they could leapfrog disruption by acting on a clear vision for the future of the business.

For many businesses, digital transformation will sound like boiling the ocean. Where should they begin?

The most common question I get is probably, “Where should we start?” My answer is always, “With strategy.” That sounds contradictory, but I think many leaders think digital transformation starts with technology, requires them to make a key hire, or begins with a specific project or some pre-defined first step in a linear process. But any of these things is unlikely to move the business in the right direction, until they’re clear on where they’re trying to go.

Let’s shift gears: experts have been talking about “big data” for almost a decade. How can businesses harness the power of data to compete and stay ahead?

I think that big data can become something of a Holy Grail for some business leaders: We could make smarter decisions, if only we had more data. Approached the wrong way, these companies risk death by analytics – which isn’t what anyone intends…

There is incredible power in data and analytics, but some of the biggest insights can come from the information you already have at your fingertips, if you know what you’re looking for. What matters most is not how much data you have, but how you use your data. Democratize data in your organization so that everyone across all areas of the business can use it to make intelligent decisions – but also recognize that data is a means to an end, and not the end in itself.

How can cloud based CRM tools like Dynamics 365 help businesses make sense of their own data?

Companies are moving critical applications to the cloud because the cloud provides better, more seamless access to those applications, improves employees’ ability to connect, share and collaborate, and allows the entire business to operate more efficiently. And applications that democratize the business’s data – makes it accessible and understandable to individuals across all areas of the business, so that they can make smarter choices – can increase effectiveness, agility and performance.

Click here to find out more about how to harness the power and thrive in a digital world!

The post Advice: How Canadian businesses can get ahead of disruption and thrive in a digital world appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

As an actor in the digital transformation of your organization, you are faced with many new opportunities. To fully embrace these opportunities and move forward, you must think about security beyond traditional perimeter protection and you must be willing to entrust your cloud provider with one of your must valuable assets- your data. That might be scary to you. We understand.

But you need to know: the organizations perpetrating cybercrime continue to expand their business models but still use dated technical means such as exploiting unpatched systems. Cloud technology helps you improve cyber hygiene by ensuring you are running modern software and keeping it up to date which has always been an important first line of defence.

When you invest in Azure, you are able to trust that your customer data is safe, that the privacy of your data is protected, and that you retain ownership of and control over your data—that it will only be used in a way that is consistent with your expectations.

With Microsoft Azure, Microsoft strives to earn your trust. And to help deliver the technology that you rely on, we’ve established a set of principles where we deliver concrete engineering work, legal work and compliance work. These principles are security, privacy and control, transparency, compliance and availability.

Our long experience running online services has involved extensive investment in foundational technology that builds security and privacy into the development process. Over time, we’ve developed industry-leading security measures and privacy policies, and participated in international compliance programs with independent verification of how me measure up.

We’re committed to the trust we are building with you, that’s why we spend over a billon dollar a year on our security practices and our technologies. This enables Azure to protect your data wherever it may be. Is your data in the datacenter, on a phone, on a desktop, or en route through the internet? Good news, wherever it is: It’s protected.

The cloud has enabled us to correlate massive amounts of cyber threat intelligence with user, device and application behaviours to quickly identify suspicious or malicious activity. This allows attacks or breaches to be discovered in hours instead of the industry average 200+ days.

We really think Azure would be the right fit for just about any enterprise- including yours! We’re confident you’ll love what it can do for you! You can make it yours, and most importantly make your data secure!

The post The cloud you can trust appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

1 . Dive deep into Azure Container Service

Microsoft Azure Container Service optimizes the configuration of popular open source container tools and technologies on Azure. We will take a deep dive into the service and the components found within it. We will examine how they come together to provide a highly scalable and resilient environment for your Linux containers (Windows in private preview). Finally, we’ll explore a demo application that will neatly illustrate why Azure Container Service is important to any company.

2. Dive deep into Operations Management Suite for applications and infrastructure

With Operations Management Suite you can take advantage of the power of Azure to manage and secure your IT environment, in the cloud and on-premises. Explore the deep capabilities of OMS that enable you to gain visibility into key workloads, automate tasks and ensure consistent configuration, troubleshoot issues and address security threats faster. You will see how cloud-based backup and disaster recovery can help you ensure the availability of your apps and data.

3. Explore Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Security

This foundation session will walk you through the current threat environment and the security principles guiding principles that Microsoft used for building Windows Server 2016. Windows Server 2016 delivers layers of protection that help address these emerging threats so that the server becomes an active component in your security defenses. These security protections were built with the mindset of how we deal with the overall threat of ongoing attacks inside the datacenter environment and range from threat resistance and enhanced detection to managing privileged identity and protecting virtual machines from a compromised fabric.

Be sure to check out the Microsoft Tech Summit sessions agenda before you go. Which are you most looking forward to attending? Tweet us – we would love hear more about your expectations for 2016! See you at the Summit.

The post The Hybrid Cloud: Top 3 at Sessions for IT Pros at Microsoft Tech Summit appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.