We are thrilled to announce that Incorta has been named the 2020 Microsoft US Partner Award Winner in the “Startups” category. Approximately 3,300 companies worldwide were nominated for partner awards in various categories.
Although we have a long standing partnership and many customers on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform, the award is mainly in recognition of the business value we’ve delivered together for one of Microsoft’s most strategic customers.
The journey to this milestone began when this customer, one of the world’s largest retailers, approached us because they needed to be able to generate fast data insights to help them optimize their product selection for maximum profitability, in 30,000+ locations worldwide. With tens of thousands of SKUs and data residing in a bunch of different systems, it was a complex project. They had spent about two million dollars and a year’s time working to accomplish this with a legacy vendor, and couldn’t get it done.
Like a lot of companies, they had large amounts of data they couldn’t access because it was locked, or siloed within legacy technologies. Since Incorta does not require that data be reshaped and aggregated to fit an analytical or dimensional model, it is able to access and analyze complex, full-fidelity business data in real-time, enabling faster, more informed decision making.
That made Incorta a front runner to take over the project, which they wanted built on Azure. But to help this customer meet their goals, we needed to deepen our partnership with Microsoft.
We were able to build a tighter relationship between the Azure engineering team and ours, and then also strengthen the integration between our technology and the Azure platform.
We could also scale up beyond the normal limits of our Azure cloud usage to meet the needs of this customer, in case of a massive load of data that needed to be processed within the hour, or a spike in throughput, or a sudden technical need we hadn’t anticipated.
All of this support from Microsoft set the stage for Incorta to perform, and it did. The solution took eight weeks to deliver and helped the retailer increase profitability while reducing food waste by 40 percent, contributing to their 2030 sustainability commitments.
But that was just the beginning. Eight more teams at the retailer are now using Incorta for fifteen different use cases in supply chain, equipment maintenance, transportation and logistics. Eighteen months into the deployment, Incorta had become one of the top Azure-consuming technologies within their strategic tech stack.
As the need for faster access to data and better insights continues to grow, so does our partnership with Microsoft. We’re expanding across APAC and EMEA, and are working together on a first-party application that will be unveiled soon.
It’s always a challenge to deploy a complex, global solution for a large enterprise. Microsoft opened doors for Incorta in order to drive better customer outcomes. With faster insights comes faster decision making, finally delivering on the promise of real time in a way that legacy technology never could. As more teams within companies become empowered with this capability, they can ask and answer their own questions when they have them and quickly.
And that could be addictive.