The digital transformation era is here. While many business leaders have felt a digital shift coming for some time, the pandemic has accelerated companies' reliance on technology so much that many consumers now expect these tools to be offered indefinitely. As such, business leaders are reevaluating their digital toolkits to keep up with future demands — and it's clear that relying on real-time information and personalization isn't possible with solutions retrofitted for each industry.
For forward-thinking business leaders, this is a pivotal moment to leverage industry-specific cloud solutions. With Gartner predicting the public cloud market will be worth nearly $600 billion by 2023, industry clouds — on-demand cloud systems that meet specific industry needs — are driving the next big shift in digital transformation. Here's a breakdown of what industry clouds are and why they're projected to be the next big thing in AI adoption.
What are industry clouds?
Industry clouds are a bundle of cloud services, applications, and tools that specifically focus on an industry's most critical needs. Instead of using cloud services that are built for broad use or several industries, industry clouds are targeted to deliver specific solutions to a given industry. For example, industry clouds for retailers are built for the unique challenges retail businesses face, as opposed to the challenges a manufacturer or an airline might face.
Industry clouds are, essentially, extra brain power that can help companies solve business, compliance, and management challenges within their particular vertical. They are more economical than building out a full-time service and more efficient than simply cobbling together a patchwork solution.
Which industries benefit from industry clouds?
While every industry will likely move to an industry cloud approach in the future, these are the three main industries benefiting from industry clouds today:
Manufacturing
As a leader in adopting on-premises tech, manufacturing is using digitization to drive cloud service innovation. On-premises solutions aren’t keeping up with the real-time needs of manufacturing anymore, and systems that used to run manufacturing-specific processes in on-premises solutions – like factory lines, material sourcing, and even production (matching workers to a specific part of the assembly line) – required more internal resources to keep them running efficiently. Hiring more people and allotting more budget to these solutions isn’t scalable.
Tech has infiltrated the assembly line, and the cloud is making it easier for manufacturing to keep up with demands, communicate with global partners, and better forecast problems. When Google Cloud announced the launch of two revolutionary AI solutions for the manufacturing industry, its goal was to provide tools to enable engineers to be more self-sufficient on the factory floor. Not only do these cloud solutions help manufacturers streamline labor and production, but they can help close critical gaps that are often disruptive to the global supply chain.
Retail
Investments in commerce tech continue to soar in response to increasing e-commerce sales of both B2C and B2B products and services, and analysts from Forrester Research predict more retail organizations will turn to the cloud to take control of the customer experience at every touchpoint. In response, retailers also collect an increasingly large volume of data – from customers and vendors – and seamless cloud solutions are a key requirement in scaling data collection, organization, and storage. Plus, cloud systems offer better real-time insights for retailers across multiple locations.
In a May 2022 MJFChat discussion, Corey Sanders, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Cloud for Industry and Global Expansion Team, shared several insights about retail industry clouds. In one example, he mentioned the customer data science company dunnhumby. "They're available in our AppSource marketplace, and they deploy on Azure…they give retailers…quick, self-service access to the sort of the insights that shoppers want and help those sort of retail customers decide and determine exactly what to put on their shelves and where to put it on their shelves," he said. With retail-specific software, retailers can get more actionable data, reach customer-specific expectations, and deliver a better retail experience.
Healthcare
The healthcare industry manages an increasingly large amount of sensitive data for patients, providers, and larger healthcare systems. Instead of on-premises solutions, cloud services allow healthcare systems of all sizes to manage patient data more securely and effectively. Cloud systems offer increased security for those private records and a more centralized location for data storage. They would make it easier for providers to track success rates, correlate scenarios, understand drug reactions, etc. Plus, specific patient insights are easier to gather with cloud solutions, which is why the global healthcare cloud computing market is poised to reach $90.46 billion by 2027 — a CAGR growth rate of 17.9% from 2020.
Three reasons industry clouds will drive digital transformation
While it's clear that digital transformation is driving the need for cloud solutions in multiple industries, industry clouds will spur even more digital transformation as they're implemented, used, and modified to fit the needs of businesses.
Here are three reasons industry clouds will drive even more digital transformation:
1. Industry clouds offer more efficiency
Rather than customizing a general solution — or heavily personalizing or altering a solution if your use cases are specific — industry clouds are already built for your particular industry. This improves time-to-implementation, adoption levels, and, best of all, outcomes for both the business and its customers.
Plus, with solutions built for specific industry needs, building a solution in-house (that likely won't keep up with industry standards) is eliminated. Industry clouds offer solutions that are built for industry-specific use cases. They save time and add convenience.
2. Industry clouds help companies deliver better customer experiences
Industry-specific solutions provide industry-specific results — better customer experiences that meet the expectations customers have for each industry.
For example, a solution built to track luggage as it travels through an airport and onto an airplane is more likely to deliver that luggage to the final destination than a solution retrofitted from another industry for a travel-specific use case. This not only increases the efficiency of the airline's business model, but it also leaves customers satisfied with knowing their money is well-spent with that particular airline.
3. Industry clouds bring new products and services to market faster
Industry clouds offer ways to save time building or implementing new solutions and offering personalized industry experiences. They offer a faster way to bring new products and services to market. For example, in manufacturing, industry clouds built specifically for the industry can help speed up the production of goods, product testing, and even the delivery of those products. And as more products are produced and delivered faster, time is carved out for new product testing and new product production. In fact, businesses that have adopted cloud platforms are reported to bring both products and services to market 20 - 40% faster than businesses that don't adopt cloud platforms.
The next big thing in AI
Whether it’s a doctor’s office securely storing a patient’s medical records or a manufacturing facility that wants to improve productivity by leveraging AI to predict when machine maintenance is due, industry clouds deliver efficiency and reduce wasteful spending across a variety of industries. As AI solutions continue to scale in ways that serve niche needs — for companies and customers alike — industry clouds just may be the next big thing in digital innovation.
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