Business Guidance of Analytics Managed Practices for CSP partners

Introduction

The Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program enables partners to sell Microsoft Online services to customers with additional value added services like assessment, consulting, deployment, migration and monitoring, support and billing. As part of the CSP program, partners are able to create tenants, provide them Azure subscriptions and manage various services on behalf of the customer.

This document provides business guidance for CSP partners to build industry vertical end-to-end solutions and provides guidance on creating effective sales motion leveraging the power of Microsoft Azure Data Platform. It also highlights specific high value business opportunities that exist for CSP partners across various industry vertical scenarios such as Healthcare, Retail and Hospitality sectors, and highlights the benefits of choosing Microsoft Azure Data platform. The 3 key trends this document capitalizes are:

1. Using Predictive analytics with machine learning to transform Big Data to "Huge" Insights with Microsoft Azure Data Platform
   
2. Leveraging open source with Azure to perform real-time stream analytics and sentiment analysis capitalizing social trends.
   
3. The Explosion of Data with IoT and how to make money riding the IoT wave
   

While these solutions may be built with specific components on public, private, or hybrid Azure cloud components, the core guidance is focused on public cloud Microsoft Azure implementations.

Use Cases & Scenarios

This section highlights the use case scenarios for 3 industry verticals – Healthcare, Retail and Hospitality/Hotel sector.

Healthcare Scenario Description

In the Healthcare sector, huge amount of data is amassed across EHR (Electronic Health Records) and EMR (Electronic Medical Records). Opportunities for CSP partners in healthcare are abundant. According to CDC, chronic diseases affect 52% of Americans and consume 86% of healthcare costs. The industry trend is to enable diagnosis efficiencies and the best patient outcomes at the lowest possible cost and according to Gartner, Healthcare IT is undergoing a transformational shift that dictates the future towards "Personalized Care" and this trend towards Personalized Care presents significant opportunity for offering both managed services and value-add services to lower TCO reducing inefficiencies, thereby reducing healthcare costs overall.

According to CDC, Diabetes is the leading cause for kidney failure and increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, neuropathy, retinopathy and various other health complications.

• Detecting diabetes involves various factors, including, body mass index, high blood pressure, sedentary lifestyles and hereditary conditions. In 90% of cases, detection happens after the fact.
  
• The total estimated cost of diagnosed diabetes in 2012 is $245 billion, including $176 billion in direct medical costs and $69 billion in reduced productivity.
  

Type 2 diabetes affects 28 Million Americans in 2012 & is primarily due to sedentary lifestyle in patients who are genetically predisposed and makes up 90% of cases of diabetes.

Scenario 1: Diabetes Type 2 Prediction: Using the electronic health record (EHR) data set containing patient records from all 50 states in the United States, predict –

• whether a patient will have type 2 diabetes diagnosis within the next year so that preventive interventions can be administered to patients at high risk for type 2 diabetes
  
• whether a diabetes patient will be admitted to the hospital next year – the goal is to proactively sign up high risk patients to diabetes case management program
  

Machine learning with AzureML can be used to predict diabetes type 2 – Microsoft Data Platform provides a comprehensive suite of libraries that enables powerful supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms to aid predictive analytics.

Scenario 2: Remote Patient Monitoring with Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM): Internet of Things(IoT) powers a new class of scenarios around Remote Patient Monitoring. CGM is a new trend where devices and sensors are implanted subcutaneously to perform continuous glucose monitoring to provide timely medical aid with Remote Patient Monitoring to address episodes such as hypoglycemic conditions. Cloud driven Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) is a small wearable device that tracks your glucose vitals throughout the day and night – helping hypoglycemic or hyperglycemic incidents and alert you of highs and lows so you can take timely evasive action and thereby protecting the patient. CGM helps to minimize the guesswork that comes from making decisions based solely on a number from a blood glucose meter reading, for better diabetes management and in keeping your physician abreast with remote monitoring.

Retail Scenario Description

Retail industry vertical scenario presents plethora of opportunity both in terms of Hosting/Managed and Value-add service offerings. According to IDC Research - Success or failure in retail will be driven by an effective and profitable consumer experience. Product availability, information access, promotional relevancy, ease of checkout, and convenience are now key components of a competitive and differentiated Omni-channel strategy.

We anticipate stores to double down on these strategies and continue to find ways to bridge the gap between offline and digital channels. Retailers thus are on a mission to enable bridging the "brick-2-click" transition by offering rich & immersive shopping experience leveraging mobile and social strategy taking customer experience to a whole new level. This Omni-channel strategy presents an incredible opportunity for MSPs to multi-fold grow their business, enabling MSPs to cash in on this mega-trend.

In 2014, we saw more merchants venture into Omni-channel retailing and try in-store marketing solutions such as beacons to enrich the shopping experience. We anticipate stores to double down on these strategies and continue to find ways to bridge the gap between offline and digital channels.

Scenario: Immersive Shopping Experience: Retailers are on a mission is to enable a rich immersive shopping experience leveraging mobile and social strategy at all points of contact. Giving customers real-time relevant information on promotions based on their location, personal preferences and social influencers, is key to deliver a modern "e-tailer" experience opening new sources of revenue.

• Retailers commonly want to entice their customers to purchase products by presenting them with products they are most likely to be interested in, and therefore most likely to buy.
  
• Using Cognitive services, customize shopping experience leveraging customer demographics such as age, customized preferences, social shopping "hot" trends tailored to particular demographic. Microsoft Data Platform can be leveraged to build a recommendation engine taking into account customer demographic, including historical shopping behavior data, product information, newly introduced brands, hot trends and social trends.
  
• The goal of these retailers is to optimize for user click-to-sale conversions and earn higher sales revenue. They achieve this by delivering contextual, behavior-based product recommendations based on customer interests and actions.
  

Hospitality Scenario Description

In the Hospitality/Hotel sector, huge opportunity exists for CSP Partners with data sprawl with Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios - both in terms of Hosting/Managed and Value-add service offerings. Gartner predicts that by the year 2020, 25 million connected devices will exist and this explosion of data leads to data ingestion growing at CAGR of 41% between 2013-2020.

This mission is to transform hotel information systems (HIS) to Holistic Insightful Services to offer "m"-powered Guest Experience and this explosion of data and associated challenges of bid data presents an incredible opportunity for MSPs to multi-fold grow their business, enabling MSPs to cash in on this mega-trend. This gives a tremendous opportunity for hotels to provide a unique experience to their guests using predictive analytics and connected environment in their pre, during and post stay-experiences.

Scenario: This mission is to transform hotel information systems (HIS) to Holistic Insightful Services to offer "M"-Powered Guest Experience. The reimagined HIS Experience would combine feeds from relevant 3^rd party providers with traditional hotel information systems to offer tailored guest experience.

• Hotels can analyze the social activity of their loyalty program to decipher that their guest has boarded an early flight on the way to the hotel – the Hotel Information System, a smart management platform can alert housekeeping for an early check-in – the alert tells the staff to prepare the guest's room right away in anticipation of an early check-in. Once the guest arrives, the staff members greet them by name, the hotel staff can very well be aware of preferences to customize dinner reservations based on the guest's profile, be aware of their typical workout schedule, favorite foods, sleeping patterns, temperature preferences, favorite TV channels, and more.
  
• The "connected hotel" builds on enabling rich scenarios through a "connected" ecosystem – for instance, guest preferences such as favorite foods can enable a waiter at the restaurant to be aware of the guest's dietary requirements, food allergies etc., before they've even met them in person – this allows the restaurant to provide tailored guest specific experiences to make the guest feel "special".
  
• With Azure analyzing device usage, the hotel can decipher that the guest stayed up late. The front desk then instantly sends a notification to the guest's smart device, telling them that late checkout has been arranged.
  

Microsoft Azure Data Platform can be leveraged to develop a data collection and analysis platform that generates reports based on spend analysis and social weightage to offer tailored loyalty rewards thereby enhancing customer stickiness. The key is to ensure a truly informed, cross-channel, and personal experience.

Market Opportunity

Microsoft Data Platform offers a comprehensive suite of PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) offering that enables CSP Partners to create end-to-end solutions and provides unique advantages from a Go-To-Market perspective, with quicker Time-to-Market and reducing infrastructure costs. Microsoft Azure PaaS offerings enable CSP Partners to create differentiated E2E value add industry vertical specific solutions. Partners can bring solutions to market at a significantly reduced cost, yet allowing the ability to craft customer's data models to unlock richer and deeper insights with the help of deep and rich analytics and integration with Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities.

Why bet on Microsoft Data Platform?

Microsoft Data Platform offers a comprehensive suite of PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) offering that enables CSP Partners to create end-to-end solutions and provides unique advantages from a Go-To-Market perspective, with quicker Time-to-Market and reducing infrastructure costs. Microsoft Azure PaaS offerings enable CSP Partners to create differentiated E2E value add industry vertical specific solutions. Partners can bring solutions to market at a significantly reduced cost, yet allowing the ability to craft customer's data models to unlock richer and deeper insights with the help of deep and rich analytics and integration with Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities.

Benefits of leveraging Microsoft PaaS – Quicker Time to Market, Reduced Cost

1. Faster Time to Market
   

   PaaS provides built in scalability and elasticity to provide efficiency and resiliency to enable scale-out scenarios such as "cloud burst". PaaS helps CSP partners in the rapid construction of E2E solutions to integrate custom workflow essential to the creation of a targeted business application.

2. Lower Costs and Higher Computing Efficiency
   

   PaaS allows you to rent converged platform services for the period for which services will be used. It changes the cost structure from Capital expense (Capex) to Opex (Operational expense) for an enterprise. PaaS reduces TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) to run and deploy the application. From a pricing perspective, the pay per use / pay per go pricing model is quite effective in reducing unnecessary CAPEX build out costs, where there is no need to buy the software, middleware or full year license; its pay on the basis of usage.

3. Agility in Development
   

   PaaS is a perfect match for agile software development methodologies. An agile software development methodology is based on iterative and incremental development which may require iterations in need of software and other middleware platforms with progress and hence PaaS is the right match for agile application development methodology.

4. Reduce Complexity
   

   PaaS provides services required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services on the internet allowing you to build, deploy, test, host and maintain application – enabling you to deliver solutions faster, reducing time to market and in enabling you to build iterative solutions through build-measure-learn cycle effectively. Simplifying the tasks of application developers eliminates the need for time consuming configuration tasks, by offering a user-friendly "plug-and-play" interface.

5. Rich Analytics and Insights
   

   Microsoft Power BI transforms your company's data into rich visuals for you to collect and organize so you can focus on what matters to you. Stay in the know, spot trends as they happen, and push your business further – the possibilities are endless with richer and deeper insights.

Thus, Microsoft Data Platform enables CSP Partners focus their efforts on building end-to-end solutions to enable recurring revenue streams and allowing partners to create differentiated offers, thereby driving customer stickiness when it comes to customer adoption and retention.

Opportunities across Healthcare, Retail and Hospitality

Microsoft Data Platform offers a continuum of services bridging "data silos" across Private, Hosted and Public cloud – several opportunities exist for CSP Partners in Healthcare to construct comprehensive offers to take advantage off. By using Azure Data Factory, CSP partners have the opportunity to abandon time consuming and expensive manual cloud resource management and move to on-demand cloud resource management, saving them time, money, and reducing their time to solution deployment.

Data lineage views and operational service health become easy to visualize and troubleshoot with the intuitive Data Factory monitoring and management UI available from the Azure Portal. End-to-End solutions can now be scheduled and managed so that processed data and insights can reliably be offered to medical practitioners, and data and processing dependencies are automatically managed without requiring human intervention.

For instance, in healthcare, by providing rich predictive analytics experience, Microsoft Azure enables faster pace of innovation on genome sequencing, DNA analysis – where the power of cloud and the rich machine learning capabilities Azure provides can spur innovation @ cloud speed, at a fraction of cost, not even thought possible a decade ago without mass supercomputing power.

1. Integrated Data Platform:
   

• Microsoft Azure Data Platform offers an extensive array of services – CSP Partners have the opportunity to provide bundled service offers such as:
  
  • Offer #1: Core Relational Database-as-a-Service integrating core components such as Azure SQL DB, Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Analytics with Power BI.
    
  • Offer #2: Non-Relational Data Store-as-a-Service integrating HDInsight, Azure ML with Power BI
    
  • Offer #3: Real time event processing: Azure Event Hubs, Azure Stream Analytics and Azure ML with Power BI
    

For instance, in healthcare, Data Platform Managed Service Offering: In many cases, Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Electronic Health Records (EHR) straddle hybrid cloud boundaries. Microsoft Data Platform provides unique opportunity for CSP partners to bridge "data silos" across cloud boundaries and offer managed Data Quality, Data Movement (using Azure to backup, running secondary replica services in Azure for mission critical workloads) and Data Management Service - allowing the MSP to auto-move cold data into Azure Cloud for long term retention, reducing the need for expanding cold storage on premise.

1. Application Lifecycle Management and SLA Monitoring:
   

• Data Platform SLA management: Data specific SLA management can be offered as an offer – for instance, in the case of a disaster recovery, CSP Partners could offer having the database up and running within seconds of a disaster with High Performance/High Scale Replica Service in Cloud to ensure mission critical workloads are not affected.
  
• Support efficient operations of the Azure Data Platform: Partners have the opportunity to offer managed services to ensure smooth operations of the integrated data platform. This includes Data Retention, Data Movement, Data Quality, Data Backup and Retrieval including audit/compliance reporting. In order to have highly available data as a service, efficient monitoring of underlying systems holistically is critical. This would include E2E monitoring, alerting and auto-remediation, auto-scale out with what-if analysis enabling predictive pricing models for their customer offerings.
  

For instance, in Retail sector, the above offers are a sampling of core services that can be offered by the partners to enable integrated provisioning and E2E management. Benefits include Unified Setup and Administration of the Azure Data Platform, 1-click deployment, E2E monitoring and a single "self-service" dashboard view to manage SLA, 1-stop Incident management and response, Hot to Cold Data Movement management including reports for compliance, auditing.

In addition, Retail data straddles POS devices, on premise datacenters and straddles hybrid cloud boundaries. Microsoft Data Platform provides unique opportunity for MSPs to bridge "data silos" across cloud boundaries and offer managed Data Quality, Data Movement (using Azure to backup, running secondary replica services in Azure for mission critical workloads) and Data Management Service - allowing the MSP to auto-move cold data into Azure Cloud for long term retention, reducing the need for expanding cold storage on premise.

Similarly, for hospitality sector, with connected hotels, sensors such as door sensors, thermostats, occupancy sensors etc. can all be connected with cloud presence with massive data ingestion into cloud to draw insights.

Best Approach to Sell Solutions

Microsoft Azure Data Platform provides tremendous opportunity for MSPs to build a very profitable, successful and sustainable business. The key questions lurking in every partner's mind are the following:

1. How do I make money in the cloud?
   
2. How do I compete effectively?
   
3. How do I drive up valuation of my business overall?
   
4. How do I drive shareholder value?
   

In order to address the above very grounded questions, long term sustainable and successful businesses in a "Cloud-First" economy is built with 4 key elements as shown below:

Sustainability of businesses is determined overall based on ability to differentiate from competition - for instance, Microsoft transacts with over 70,000 partners during the course of last 12 months – clearly indicating the opportunity to provide "me-too" plain vanilla VM-as-a-service and the competitive edge associated with it is eroding away sharply. Thus differentiation is key to success by "developing focus", or a "Center of Excellence" around key segments in order to offer depth expertise – such as an industry vertical.

Thus aligning with the Cloud-First economy requires ability to adapt your business to capitalize on the opportunity to maximize wallet share offering rich Managed and Packaged-IP value-add services. MSPs have offered 4 key Revenue Lines to date with "Cloud-First" economy:

1. Product services – revenue generated from licenses (in the modern Cloud-First economy, this approach would bag 10-15 points from a valuation perspective), examples of such an offer could include Linux-VM-as-a-service, hosted SharePoint offer etc. From a valuation standpoint, this offer would bag the least, close to about 10 – 15 points on a percentage scale.
   
2. Project services – Offering Monitoring services, Cloud migrations of existing LOB apps by hosting pieces of application in the cloud inside a VM and offering Live Site services to do incident management, triaging and troubleshooting fall in this category. The recurring nature of this revenue stream is very questionable, from a valuation standpoint would bag 25-30 points on a percentage scale.
   
3. Managed services – The true value to enhance Life Time Value of a customer begins with Managed services. The customer value chain begins here and significant opportunity exists for MSP partners to take advantage of various managed services offers. From a valuation standpoint, in the new "Cloud-First" economy with constant evaluation and adaptation of the business to evolve with customers' needs, the valuation would bag 45-50 points on a percentage scale.
   
4. Packaged IP value-add services – The Packaged IP value-add services straddles the boundary between a MSP and ISV – this approach allows you to manifold increase your IP and insulate you from your competition.
   

Putting all of the above together, the chart below showcases the BEP (Break Even Point) across the billed revenue and contribution margin, the charts showcase both on premise vs. cloud comparison from a growth rate perspective, clearly indicating the ROC (Rate of Change) on the cloud curve, measured by the angle of slope is much steeper with Cloud clipping the on premise stream at a faster pace, growing exponentially as scale increases.

Overall, from a revenue and profitability standpoint, being aligned with "Cloud-First" economy garners the following outcome:

• 46% more revenue over 7 years
  
• 5x more contribution margin
  
• # Revenue generating customers > 7x within 7 years
  
• 10-12% of gross revenue spent on marketing for customer acquisition cost (CAC)
  

Guidance on Healthcare

As described above, reducing overall healthcare costs for chronic diseases become a primary pivot for sales motion. Hospitals and Insurance industry including Medicare, Medicaid and employers providing medical insurance to their employees'/dependents care about reducing overall healthcare costs. As indicated above, according to CDC, chronic illnesses consume 86% of the healthcare costs and a huge trend emanates from a Healthcare perspective to provide "Personalized Care" reducing overall TCO cost.

In order to create an effective sales motion, there are 4 primary angles to consider:

1. Data Acquisition Pipeline: Partnership with National Institute of Health (NIH) or American Diabetes Association (ADA) is key from a data acquisition standpoint. This partnership would enable CSP partners to acquire PII scrubbed data across 50 states for instance, to perform effective data correlation analysis to run machine learning models to do predictive analytics. Analysis of large sampling of data across 50 states would serve as a key first step in ensuring the prediction models with machine learning can be pruned, fine-tuned to improve model accuracy, reducing false positives/false negatives.
   
2. Partnership with Hospitals specializing in Chronic Illnesses could serve as a critical step in validating the outcomes of those models and in evaluation of accuracy including necessary steps needed to prune the model to improve the overall outcome.
   
3. Once the model accuracy and fine-tuning is performed, the model can be applied to existing patient records based on EMR/EHR data. Hospitals/Insurance Industry would greatly benefit applying the model on existing patient records to tailor "personalized care" and in ensuring costs can be reduced with predictive algorithms in place that can identify risk factors that contribute to chronic illnesses, so that they can be better managed, thereby reducing overall insurance cost.
   
4. Partnership with Medical Devices Companies also offers interesting avenues to explore "Remote Patient monitoring". An avenue to consider is "Continuous Glucose Monitoring", where sensors which can act like IoT devices can send data which can be processed "near real time" to alert the patient of alluding danger if certain thresholds on their vitals are hit.
   

Some of the key best practices to enable an affective sales motion are outlined below:

• Understanding the business opportunity from a customer's standpoint – be it hospitals or insurance industry becomes vital in constructing effective offers. Understanding the customer and their unique needs are the first step in crafting effective offers and solutions. The needs of medical practitioners around scenarios they need to enable could be vastly different than those of insurance providers – for instance, medical practitioners could care more on effective patient management and running an effective diabetes maintenance program, where they could care more around analytics and insights around patient vitals monitoring and in enabling remote patient management, while the insurance industry could care more on reducing insurance cost for maintenance medications. Thus understanding the unique needs of each customer segment and the target customer segment becomes critical in crafting offers and solutions.
  
• Hiring a data scientist to come up with effective data models and performing correlation analysis is key to success. Business Analysts, Data Scientists and DBAs need to work in tandem to ensure effective end-to-end solution taking into account compliance and privacy policies.
  
• Breaking "data silos" for effective data analysis and data management taking into account data governance, data sovereignty with greater focus on healthcare acts such as HIPAA becomes critical. In many cases, Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Electronic Health Records (EHR) straddle hybrid cloud boundaries. Microsoft Data Platform provides unique opportunity for partners to build insights breaking the "data silos" across cloud boundaries and offer managed Data Quality, Data Movement (using Azure to backup, running secondary replica services in Azure for mission critical workloads) and Data Management Service.
  
• Partnering with Hospitals/Medical practitioners to hone in on opportunities specific to chronic diseases offer lucrative avenues to create differentiated offers – Diabetes Type 2 is an example cited in this document as an area ensures focus, rather than diluting the efforts to create generic offering.
  

Guidance on Retail

As described above, Product availability, information access, promotional relevancy, ease of checkout, and convenience are now key components of a competitive and differentiated Omni-channel strategy. According to IDC Research - Success or failure of a retailer will be driven by an effective and profitable consumer experience. We anticipate stores to double down on these strategies and continue to find ways to bridge the gap between offline and digital channels.

This Omni-channel strategy presents an incredible opportunity for CSP partners to multi-fold grow their business, enabling MSPs to cash in on this mega-trend. Retailers thus are on a mission to enable bridging the "brick-2-click" transition by offering rich & immersive shopping experience leveraging mobile and social strategy taking customer experience to a whole new level.

• Data Marts on Social Trends: Demographic based insights can be derived from Social trends using "Sentiment Analysis" for various products using data social sites such as Twitter. Microsoft Data Platform provides powerful capabilities to conduct Sentiment Analysis on Hot trends/products which can be sold to large retailers – these retailers can use this data to do promotional offers, inventory management and also offer loyalty programs based on data specific to locates/geographies.
  
• The goal of these retailers is to optimize for user click-to-sale conversions and earn higher sales revenue. They achieve this by delivering contextual, behavior-based product recommendations based on customer interests and actions. This can be accomplished with partnership with ISVs to build "product recommendation engines" leveraging current demographic, including historical shopping behavior data, product information, newly introduced brands, hot trends.
  
• IoT and POS (Point of Sale) Device Telemetry can be used to tailor "personalized shopping" experience for customers integrating "Click to brick" scenarios. For instance, "in-store" presence can be augmented with mobile shopping experience where a modern "e-tailer" would be interested in cutting down "wait times" at checkout counters through mobile "instant" checkout and seamless payment experience.
  

Guidance on Hospitality

The "Internet of Me" offers unique opportunity for CSP partners to create effective "Sell to" and "Sell through" offers to end customers taking Hospitality Information System (HIS) to a whole new level. Various upsell opportunities exist to cross-sell and up-sell unique customized offers for patrons.

Cross Sell and Upsell Opportunities with B2B chaining based on a geography tailored to individual customers' taste can become a very powerful scenario CSP partners can take advantage off. For instance, connecting locale specific tour attractions, spa reservations, dinner arrangements based on customers' likes/dislikes can really become very powerful catalyst from a Hotelier's standpoint to ensure utmost customer satisfaction.

Loyalty programs can be tested with real customers with A/B testing and insights along with surveys/market research can be value add services CSP partners can use to gauge effectiveness of loyalty programs.

Data Marts on Social Trends: Microsoft Data Platform provides powerful capabilities to conduct Sentiment Analysis on Hot trends/products which can be sold to large retailers – hoteliers can use this data to do promotional offers, inventory management and also offer loyalty programs based on data specific to locates/geographies. Demographic based insights can be derived from Social trends using "Sentiment Analysis" for various products using data social sites such as Twitter.

Profitability Model and Assumptions

The following table notes a rough outline for the described scenario in terms of Professional Services, Managed Services, and Azure Services in each of the above industry vertical scenario environment:

Healthcare:

For Healthcare sector, cost modeling on an annualized basis (including one-time cost) would range from USD $125K – $145k, with expected profitability margin in the range of 25% - 45%.

Disclaimer: Please note that although not all services mentioned in the document are available in CSP - Microsoft will be enabling all of the services mentioned in this document and they will be made available soon for CSP. Contact Microsoft for more details on services availability for CSP. For those Azure services not available yet through the CSP, we took the web direct price from Azure.com

Assumptions and detailed cost break-down is summarized in the table below: (all prices below are based on CSP price sheet as of June 2016 where applicable and for those services not available through CSP, azure.com web direct pricing is shown below for illustrative purposes for overall costs – all prices below are based on West US region priced in USD)

Retail:

For Retail sector, cost modeling on an annualized basis (including one-time cost) would range from USD $110K – $130k, with expected profitability margin in the range of 20% - 35%.

Disclaimer: Please note that although not all services mentioned in the document are available in CSP - Microsoft will be enabling all of the services mentioned in this document and they will be made available soon for CSP. Contact Microsoft for more details on services availability for CSP. For those Azure services not available yet through the CSP, we took the web direct price from Azure.com

Assumptions and detailed cost break-down is summarized in the table below: (all prices below are based on CSP price sheet as of June 2016 where applicable and for those services not available through CSP, azure.com web direct pricing is shown below for illustrative purposes for overall costs – all prices below are based on West US region priced in USD)

Hospitality:

For Hospitality sector, cost modeling on an annualized basis (including one-time cost) would range from USD $120K – $140k, with expected profitability margin in the range of 20% - 35%.

Disclaimer: Please note that although not all services mentioned in the document are available in CSP - Microsoft will be enabling all of the services mentioned in this document and they will be made available soon for CSP. Contact Microsoft for more details on services availability for CSP. For those Azure services not available yet through the CSP, we took the web direct price from Azure.com

Assumptions and detailed cost break-down is summarized in the table below: (all prices below are based on CSP price sheet as of June 2016 where applicable and for those services not available through CSP, azure.com web direct pricing is shown below for illustrative purposes for overall costs – all prices below are based on West US region priced in USD)

Value Added Services for MSPs

This section covers industry specific value-add offerings MSPs can build leveraging the powerful capabilities of Microsoft Data Platform.

Healthcare:

• Remote Patient Monitoring: In the case of Type-2 Diabetes Patients, Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) devices can emit data to cloud for historical pattern analysis with Azure ML. Prediction of hypo-glycemic events and hyper-glycemic events are possible with continuous cloud-based monitoring so that Patients in remote locations can be connected with Doctors in large hospitals over Skype for Remote Patient Monitoring.
  

• Data as a Service: Healthcare Data Marts such as EMR and EHR records across 50 states that are PII scrubbed can be offered for Predictive Analytics. For instance, the bio-pharma industry presents numerous opportunity for storing genomes and in conducting genome sequencing analysis – Microsoft Azure Data Platform presents numerous opportunity for MSPs in this front.
  

• Sensor Monitoring and Senor Health as a Service (SMASH): Given CGM devices are growing in popularity, pacemakers and other patient monitoring devices connected to cloud will be the norm moving forward. MSPs can play a key role in ensuring that every sensor is monitored for its health and faulty sensors or sensors running low on battery could be detected with "cloud monitoring" to ensure if the time lag between sensor reporting exceeds a certain threshold, alerts can be dispatched to local ambulances to ensure patient safety.
  

Retail:

• POS and Beacon device management (Device analytics health monitoring): Point of Sale devices (POS) and device management with custom data monitoring services can enable rich analytics around device health. Device health and downtime can significantly reduce the throughput and increase latency. Monitoring device health and alerting including auto-remediation to update the POS devices with device software updates can be a great avenue for MSPs to host value-add services.
  
• Self-Service Dashboards and visualizations: Live Site operations for all device management, Data movement (since most data is straddled between host, warm and cold data straddling hybrid cloud boundaries) – an intelligent data retention service that is "thermal-aware" based on data access patterns could be offered.
  
• Cognitive Ambient Intelligence Service (Shopper Insights & Hot Trends, including Abandonment) can be a very powerful post-stay analysis that a hotel chain may be interested in ensuring utmost customer satisfaction.
  

Hospitality:

• Cognitive Ambient Intelligence Service (Shopper Insights & Hot Trends, including Abandonment
  
• "Internet of Me" automation (akin to Home Automation as a Service): Personalization of travel experience can begin from the patron leaving his/her house. Powerful Microsoft Xamarin based .Net apps can be developed to harness personal preferences and insights to tailor hospitality experience enabling a whole new value chain that emphasizes the following:
  

• Customer Loyalty program – Loyalty programs can be tested with real customers with A/B testing and insights along with surveys/market research can be value add services that the MSP can cater to.
  
• Analytics and Dashboards: With the explosion of data, managed services to ingest data, data movement and orchestrating the pipeline with Azure Data Factory could present very interesting opportunity for Analytics and Dashboards specific to the hospitality industry.
  
• Social Trends in Hospitality Industry – Data Acquisition and Insights: An extension of the previous discussion around Analytics could evolve into mining social media trends – for instance, feedback on the hotel from customers all around the world could be used to perform sentiment analysis – Microsoft Azure ML provides a comprehensive set of capabilities to enable sentiment analysis seamlessly.
  

Conclusion

CSP partners looking for accelerating their time to market by embracing the "Cloud-First" economy should consider leveraging Microsoft Azure Data Platform to construct offers that are rich, captivating and immersive customer experiences. Microsoft Azure Data Platform offers a continuum of rich capabilities that partners can take full advantage of – given the trend towards data explosion, there is a significant opportunity for MSPs to benefit from a business value proposition and offers tremendous competitive edge harnessing the power of data, insights and analytics. By complementing traditional batch based analytics implementations with real-time analytics, and unifying the data visualizations experience into a single dynamic interface, companies can empower their staff to decide and act on information faster.

While this document covers the business guidance for CSP partners, refer to the "Technical Guidance" document for details on Reference for different industry vertical scenarios described above.