87% of customers believe that AI will give them a competitive advantage,¹ but not every customer knows how to get started. Providing viable use cases, sharing best practices, and setting clear desired outcomes help organizations undergo successful AI implementations.

Azure OpenAI Service is a powerful offering that integrates OpenAI’s advanced language models and services into the Microsoft Azure platform. With Azure OpenAI, customers get the security capabilities of Azure while running the same models as OpenAI.

Let’s explore how the testing of various Azure OpenAI use cases led one innovative company to realize increased productivity and cost-savings across the business.

A culture of innovation drives AI initiatives

North Atlantic Industries (NAI) supplies rugged embedded computing solutions and power supplies for the world’s largest and most demanding defense, commercial aerospace, and industrial applications. With over 65 years of experience and a focus on delivering rapid, reliable solutions that meet mission-critical needs, NAI defines every action and investment based on the ability to help its customers “accelerate their time-to-mission.”

A small company of 250 employees, NAI fosters a culture of innovation and exploration of new technologies to help improve processes and drive initiatives around reducing technical debt and maximizing efficiency. This culture sets the stage for employees to test various AI use cases and take a company-wide, iterative approach to AI adoption, resulting in numerous successful implementations that enable intelligent automation of routine tasks to deliver significant time, cost, and efficiency gains.

I am extremely supportive of our teams leveraging emerging technologies to solve previously unsolvable problems. Azure OpenAI is a force multiplier that is accelerating our productivity and letting us compete on a higher playing field.”

– William Forman, President and CEO, NAI

Leading the charge and realizing impact with AI

Staying true to its innovation-driven culture, NAI’s software engineers began looking for ways to incorporate AI to drive efficiency in their daily tasks and, ultimately, for the business. The first use case that became apparent was during a modernization effort to add comments to and clean up a code base of over 100K lines of code, all written in C#. Making the updates manually proved to be an enormous effort, which inspired the idea to implement an AI-driven solution to help automate and accelerate the process. “We wrote a program with Azure OpenAI that takes the source code and writes a comment for every function automatically, and everyone is excited about that because it ensures consistency and helps save programmers a lot of time,” says Lacey Stein, Software Engineer at NAI. “It really got everyone interested in wanting to explore AI more.”

When it came to selecting an AI solution, Tim Campbell, Director of Workplace Technology at NAI, notes several reasons that made Azure OpenAI the obvious choice. “From a cost perspective, the context window and rate limit Microsoft is giving us is beating anything else on the market,” shares Campbell. “We were also already familiar with OpenAI, so realizing the partnership with Microsoft led us right to Azure OpenAI services, which is our bread and butter right now.”

Taking Azure OpenAI company-wide

Following the success that the engineering team was finding with its initial Azure OpenAI use case, interest and involvement in AI initiatives grew across the company. They established a regular “best practice” session with other business groups to share how AI initiatives are performing and discuss ideas for additional use cases that could bring improvements to other departments. “It’s not just IT or engineering who participate in these discussions, we bring everyone together across sales, purchasing, program management, and manufacturing to talk about this AI and how we can use it to our advantage,” says Campbell. “Every corner of the company knows about it.”

These company-wide sessions have led to a growing number of AI use cases that have driven productivity and efficiency gains across the business.

Engineering

To meet customer assurance requirements for embedded software, NAI must perform software testing at many levels of the electronic system integration process. This effort includes writing and executing unit tests covering 500 different product functions on hundreds of hardware modules. Despite bringing in a third-party vendor to help aid in this extensive, manual task, progress was too slow to meet customer schedules. To accelerate the testing process, NAI brought testing back in-house, leveraging Azure OpenAI to detect missing unit test cases and significantly reduce the manual work and time necessary to complete each test. Ultimately, this strategy will save the company thousands of outsourcing hours and millions in costs. The team is seeing additional efficiency gains with Microsoft Copilot. “All of our engineers now have Copilot installed on their IDEs and love it. When AI can scaffold out a bunch of code that would take them a lot of time to do themselves, it is a huge time saver,” remarks Campbell.

Sales

When statements of work (SOWs) and client inquiries are received, program managers have traditionally needed to manually review and respond by locating and referencing past SOWs, which is time-consuming and inefficient. “Now, when we feed a statement of work into OpenAI it can refer to our prior proposal responses and assist our proposal writers. This improves the quality of SOW responses and gives our program managers a head start, saving them about 16 hours of manual work per proposal while improving accuracy and accelerating response times,” notes Campbell. NAI is also expecting to implement AI to streamline the request for proposal (RFP) process in a similar way.

Service

Currently in the proof-of-concept phase is a new AI-driven return merchandise authorization (RMA) system that improves the data infrastructure. With unstructured data, the current system requires service technicians to manually note problems and resolutions and then appropriately categorize the issues for future reference. The new system will leverage OpenAI to use the unstructured data and a set of standardized reason codes to automate RMA categorization and save technicians considerable time and manual effort.

In addition to the millions in cost savings achieved by eliminating outsourced code testing, NAI estimates that Azure OpenAI has delivered 60-70% time and efficiency gain by automating time-consuming, manual processes while dramatically increasing employee productivity.

Figure 1. Azure OpenAI delivers both cost savings and a gain in time and efficiency for customer NAI.

NAI has no plans to slow its exploration and expansion of AI use cases across the business and has several new implementations already in mind. One such initiative is creating an AI-driven Microsoft Teams site that has a complete knowledge base of the company’s products and manuals to answer queries on things like tolerances and tests right within the collaborative foundation of Teams.

The marketing team is similarly looking to incorporate a customer-facing AI bot for the company website that can leverage a deep knowledge base to help answer customer questions, as well as exploring AI-generated content to help the marketing team accelerate customer-facing content creation.

The engineering team is also working toward creating an AI program to automate hardware documentation. Currently, module manual writers must search and gather information across various sources, which is difficult and inefficient. Knowing how AI needs to ingest information has already inspired the team to start creating a central database of information in the hopes of eventually harnessing an AI-driven program to automate the documentation process. “Even if the program isn’t ready yet, just the thought of having AI has already been really helpful to our process,” says Stein.

Learn more about Azure OpenAI

What is Azure OpenAI Service? – Azure AI services | Microsoft Learn

Azure OpenAI Service | Microsoft Azure Blog | Microsoft Azure

Join the conversation

Want to explore this and other topics you care about with Microsoft and other US partners? Head over to the Microsoft Americas Partner Community on LinkedIn.

¹ Expanding AI’s Impact with Organizational Learning, Findings from the 2020 Artificial Intelligence Global Executive Study and Research Project, MIT Sloan Management Review, October 2020.

Microsoft Fabric is a comprehensive data and analytics platform designed to help organizations democratize data, share insights, and drive data-driven decision-making. Fabric presents Microsoft partners with the opportunity to provide leading analytics capabilities to customers in a SaaS solution, and at a price point that resonates with customers in the small and medium enterprise range. Leverage Fabric to help your customers improve data literacy and drive business.

Let’s look at a successful implementation by one of our partners.

Anatomy of a partner win

Microsoft partner Wipfli is a seasoned digital and business services consulting firm that delivers integrated solutions to help organizations transform through digital innovation. Microsoft Fabric fits well with Wipfli’s strategic “listen and learn before we advise” approach, having completed implementations of Microsoft Fabric to simplify, unify, and accelerate their customers’ digital transformation journey.

The challenge

In a recent customer deployment, Wipfli was working with a customer in the nonprofit industry that was having difficulty measuring the impact and effectiveness of their programs across disparate locations. The customer was actively using Microsoft Power BI, but they hadn’t seen widespread adoption across the organization and were looking for a more comprehensive solution. The decentralized nature of the business resulted in siloed data that required extensive data cleansing and made broader performance and production reporting difficult, labor-intensive, and inconsistent.

Additionally, the customer’s limited infrastructure support team was burdened with extensive data engineering work for Azure SQL and other Microsoft data tools without a cohesive data strategy in place, which resulted in fluctuating, unpredictable costs.

They needed a solution that would provide centralization and visualization, while capitalizing on existing investments.

The considerations

Wipfli went to work developing a strategic data foundation roadmap to meet their customer’s needs. The customer had existing investments in Microsoft technology (PowerBI, Azure SQL Server Database, Azure Data Factory) and was looking for options that would limit total implementation costs.

Wipfli knew that part of the project would entail building out a centralized data hub to allow all the customer’s locations to leverage and access a single data source. A centralized hub would better support local reporting and analytics, along with several automated reporting and benchmarking capabilities for different business groups.

 “Fabric is specifically designed to bring information together, centralize how you manage data, standardize how you structure it for reporting, create a single source of truth, and then report off that one source of truth instead of a number of different siloes,” says Matt Sabo, Director of Analytics Delivery at Wipfli.

Microsoft Fabric was the right tool for the job. Fabric is also able to support the need for diverse system integrations with its multitude of community partnerships through OneLake, a consolidated data repository that can leverage and allow queries across all data types, both structured and unstructured.

The sales win

Wipfli proposed Microsoft Fabric as a comprehensive data management and analytics platform to help streamline costs and utilization of Azure toolsets while consolidating, managing, and analyzing data all in one place. Fabric also provides simplicity and predictable pricing by “bundling” tools that the customer was already using with new capabilities. The customer would avoid having to manage usage and costs of each individual component.

Wipfli also used as a selling point the customer’s existing Power BI Premium investment automatically transferring to support Fabric workloads.

“That’s part of what has made this a really easy conversation,” recounts Dean Roder, Director of Alliances at Wipfli. “We’re able to show them, here’s this new consolidated set of tools you were already using and paying for, with added functionality and simpler management, and you don’t have to buy anything additional or swap anything out. It was a really easy ‘yes’ for them.”

To empower its diverse organization with access to consolidated datasets and insights to improve reporting, decision-making, and experiences, Wipfli used their “Level-Up initiative” to digitally transform their data estate and ensure that the implementation was successful.  Delivering technology requires training customers and ensuring that stakeholders are able to make the most of their investment.

The implementation

Leveraging Microsoft Fabric to transform the customer’s data estate is accelerating the delivery time for Wipfli by roughly 20 percent (as compared to previous customer implementations using Azure PaaS solutions), with less effort spent on data engineering and navigating complications.

Fabric is also much simpler to manage and administer than individual tooling, enabling the customer to adopt a powerful data management and analytics platform without staffing a high-cost IT specialist.

“Microsoft took all the tools we love the most and use all the time and put them together in a perfectly aligned, engineered framework with a simplified pricing model and made our lives a lot easier in doing what we need to do,” remarks Sabo.

“They don’t need to have someone who understands all the working components of the individual Azure products, they only have to learn one thing—Fabric, and how to manage it. Everything is lined up to work together so it makes it much easier for them.”

Furthermore, Fabric creates an ideal foundation to facilitate future artificial intelligence (AI) vector models and queries as their data maturity progresses.

“I really think it’s amazing that Microsoft can make something like this, a best-in-class platform for cloud data management, attainable for a non-profit like Junior Achievement. Fabric is providing an easy, affordable path for companies that already have a PowerBI Premium license to bring a lot of tools together for even greater capability. You’re getting a database, data science, real-time analytics—it really delivers a lot of value for the money,” remarks Sabo.

Next steps

Interested in learning more about Microsoft Fabric? Get started with Microsoft Fabric or register for a virtual technical workshop live event on June 11-13, 2024.

Join the conversation

Want to explore this and other topics you care about with Microsoft and other US partners? Head over to the Microsoft Americas Partner Community on LinkedIn.

Cloud migration is the next step for partners looking to grow their managed services practice.  Selling cloud services provides benefits to customers, and opportunities for you. Microsoft estimates a $13.7 billion migration opportunity in the SMB market,¹ and Microsoft partners earn an average of $7.51 in follow-on services for every dollar in Azure consumption.²

Customer interest in cloud solutions is also increasing, but security remains top of mind as a key challenge for many.  According to a Flexera report, 79% of organizations list security as a top challenge to address in their cloud adoption strategy.³ 

As a Microsoft partner, you can capitalize on this opportunity by helping customers securely and efficiently migrate to Azure. You can then provide valuable management services to ensure that they’re spending efficiently and staying secure as their environments change.

Why Azure?

The Microsoft Cloud is the most trusted and comprehensive commercial cloud available to help protect and defend your customer’s business. To help them migrate securely, leverage our Azure-focused partner enablement resources, including our Azure bootcamps and our Azure Depth Enablement series.

Another benefit of the Microsoft Coud is that it brings with it our ecosystem of partners that have built solutions to help you deploy, manage, and secure customers in the cloud. To help you securely migrate your customers to the cloud, we’ve partnered with Datto to develop Datto Backup for Microsoft Azure (DBMA). Backup and disaster recovery services are often the first workloads that customers move to the cloud, and they want a trusted solution with easy-to-understand pricing. Designed specifically for managed service providers (MSPs), DBMA is a complete business continuity and disaster recovery solution with simple pricing and native integration into Datto’s suite of tools.

Learn more about this opportunity by registering to watch the on-demand webinar, How to quickly and safely migrate your clients to Azure with Microsoft and Datto.

Next steps

If you’re ready to get started moving your customers to Azure, register for an upcoming workshop in the Kaseya + Datto Connect Local series. In the coming weeks we’ll be hosting joint events in cities across the globe. We look forward to seeing you there!

And let’s continue the conversation through the Microsoft MSP Community Hub!

Related posts

Maximize your cloud hosting strategy in 2024: Success stories from our partners | Microsoft
Help your customers secure their cloud workloads | Microsoft
Showcase the value of Azure migration with Solution Assessments and Evaluations | Microsoft

Join the conversation

Want to explore this and other topics you care about with Microsoft and other US partners? Head over to the Microsoft Americas Partner Community on LinkedIn.

¹ Estimate from Microsoft data based on on-premises install base and average cloud server spend
² Microsoft internal data
³ Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud | Report

How to quickly migrate customers to Azure with Microsoft and Datto. Join Henrik Gutle, Azure GTM Leader for Microsoft Americas, and Brent Torre, Datto GM of Unified Backup, for a conversation on the customer opportunity to securely migrate cloud workloads to Azure with Datto Backup for Microsoft Azure. Register here for this on-demand webinar.

As the pace at which organizations are moving their workloads to the public cloud continues to accelerate, understanding their current IT landscape is critical to a smooth migration. Together with our partners, we aim to empower SMB customers to harness the full potential of Microsoft Cloud Services in their cloud migration and modernization journey.

To this end, Microsoft has launched the SMB Assessment Desk to deliver evaluations, rapid cloud migration, and security assessments for SMB customers with Azure Migrate. Partners can leverage this service to provide customers with a comprehensive understanding of their current IT landscape through actionable reports that help speed the pace of migration.

US partners: Fill out this form to request a Solution Assessment for your customer.
CA partners: Fill out this form to nominate your customer for a Microsoft Evaluation.

Learn more about Solution Assessments.

How do Assessments and Evaluations benefit you and your customers?

Solution Assessments and Evaluations are valuable tools to help showcase the value of migration to your customer, and to guide them to a successful implementation through our tried and tested Cloud Adoption Framework. Assessments can be an integral part of your customer’s cloud migration journey and an opportunity for you to present the full benefits of migrating to the cloud.

Migrating to the cloud has a financial, business, and operational impact on how a customer runs their business. With support from Microsoft, you can guide them through this process by showing performance impacts, total cost of ownership comparison, and a detailed breakdown of what their cloud environment would include. Evaluations provide a more holistic view of the customer’s environment. Evaluations are an opportunity to provide your customers with a comprehensive look at their IT environment and recommendations for potential technology solutions that can drive efficiency and cost savings in their operations.

What is Azure Migrate?

Azure Migrate is one of the Assessment tools available. It’s a free tool that simplifies Azure migration and modernization with a unified platform. Use Azure Migrate to assess a customer’s environment and provide an actual cost estimation so you can offer specific recommendations based on their actual environment. And now, Azure Migrate has a business case built right into the tool. Use the business case capability to build a business proposal to understand how Azure can bring the most value to your customer’s business.

Partner incentives

We recently launched a new Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) incentive for new customer acquisition and we want to make sure you have the tools you need to successfully migrate customers. Check out the Partner Incentives page for details on our Microsoft Commercial Incentive Launch for Azure Customer Adds (ACA). Direct and indirect resellers can earn 15 percent on new customer adds over $100 for the first year, up to $250K. Indirect providers can earn 11 percent on new customer adds over $100 for the first year, up to $250K.

Additional resources

Introduction to the Azure migration guide – Cloud Adoption Framework | Microsoft Learn

Join the conversation

Want to explore this and other topics you care about with Microsoft and other US partners? Head over to the Microsoft Americas Partner Community on LinkedIn.

You’ve built your solution—now take it to market

In part one of this two-part series, we talked about why more and more partners are deciding to build on Azure. Now let’s explore the benefits after you build your application and are ready to take it to market.

Reach millions of customers in the Microsoft commercial marketplace

By listing your application or service in the Microsoft commercial marketplace, companies can find, try, buy, and deploy your solution. The commercial marketplace contains two storefronts: Microsoft AppSource, designed for software as a service (SaaS) business solutions, and Azure Marketplace, designed for solutions that are built on Azure.

More than just a storefront, the commercial marketplace is your path to co-selling with Microsoft. And now we’ve reduced the marketplace transaction fee to 3 percent, so you can keep more of your margin to reinvest in your business.

Enroll in the commercial marketplace program in Partner Center.

Extend your reach by connecting with Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners

More than just a storefront, publishing your solution in the commercial marketplace gives you access to Microsoft’s network of over 90K Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners worldwide. By configuring your solution to sell through the CSP program, you can scale your reach and license your CSP partners to re-sell your solution.

The new margin flexibility feature allows you to create private offers and extend margin to CSP resellers, incentivizing them to sell your offer and, in turn, helping you drive revenue and scale. Take these steps to get started:

• Create a new private offer in Partner Center.
• Enter private offer details, including CSP partners you’d like to sell through and margin you’ll pass to the CSP partner.
• Submit and save your private offer.

You’ll receive payment from Microsoft for sales of your offer through the CSP, less 3 percent agency fee.

Unlock the benefits of Marketplace Rewards

Once your solution is available through the commercial marketplace, you can activate Marketplace Rewards. The Marketplace Rewards program is designed to help you find customers and scale your business through the marketplace. As your engagement grows, new benefits designed to help you convert customers and close deals will be unlocked.

To maximize your benefit from the program, make sure to list your solution as a “Transact” offer. Transact offers reduce buyer friction and allow you to scale your solution to customers effectively. When you publish a “Transact” solution and activate Marketplace Rewards you’ll be paired with an Engagement Manager that will help you realize the full potential of the program. Learn more about your commercial marketplace benefits.

Take advantage of members-only invitations to Marketplace Office Hours

As part of the Azure Partner Builder’s Program, ISVs receive members-only invitations to monthly technical and marketing office hours with Azure specialists. Learn more about how to successfully publish and market your solution from the experts by attending the Azure Marketing Office Hours.

Next steps

The Azure Partner Builder’s Program provides personalized guidance, invitations to exclusive events, and curated resources for a premium customer experience. To learn more, visit the Azure Hub for ISVs. And if you haven’t already become an APBP member, join today!

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PART ONE:  Start your guided journey to building on Azure

Build solutions designed for scale and grow your business with Azure Marketplace

Reach 4M active customers by publishing on Microsoft commercial marketplace

Sign up today and start building your application your way.

Why build on Azure?

Customers want to build on a trusted cloud. Ninety-five percent of Fortune 500 companies trust Microsoft as their security cloud provider.1 They also want best-in-class technology. With Azure you can build applications quickly, scale for peak demands, migrate with built-in tools, and be confident that your application uses the latest cloud-native technology. And now, partners that build on Azure can see more impact to their bottom line.  Marketplace transaction fees have been lowered to three percent, and Microsoft just launched new functionality to help ISVs find new customers by incentivizing Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners to help scale your marketing efforts.

To learn more, visit the Azure Hub for ISVs. And read our earlier blog series on how Azure can help you build future ready and differentiate your business.

What are the benefits of being an APBP member?

As a member of the Azure Partner Builder’s Program, you’ll receive the following benefits when building your solution.

	Personalized guidance on building and selling Azure solutions, including: If you’re a qualifying APBP member that meets specific requirements, you may be eligible for migration support from Microsoft engineers through FastTrack, or eligible for a Marketing consultation. See programs and eligibility requirements here. Assistance understanding the process of connecting to CSP partners to help extend your sales reach. Guidance navigating Microsoft Partner Network benefits.
	Hands-on experience at exclusive Azure technical events Learn about cloud-native technology from Azure specialists, self-guided content, and practical hands-on training.
	Members-only invitations to monthly technical and marketing office hours with Azure specialists

Next steps

Read part two in this series, where we talk about the benefits of publishing your solution in the Microsoft commercial marketplace; how to extend your reach by connecting with CSP partners; tapping into the benefits of Marketplace Rewards; and more.

To learn more about the Azure Partner Builder’s Program now, sign up for the webinar. And if you haven’t already become an APBP member, join today!

¹ Microsoft Internal Research

Other posts you may like

Build for the future. Differentiate with Azure and reach more customers.

Build for the future. How Azure can help ISVs differentiate their business – Part 2.

Build solutions designed for scale and grow your business with Azure Marketplace