Microsoft CEO Nadella Declares on the strategy for "Industry-First Focus"

As most of the world’s most-powerful cloud vendors invest massively in expanding their industry-specific solutions and capabilities, mighty Microsoft has boosted the stakes dramatically by declaring it now has an “industry-first focus.”.

Today we are building on this industry-first focus and announcing new clouds for manufacturing, financial services, and nonprofits. Each offering is designed to work as one seamless solution and to enable cross-industry workflows.

For example, retailers and manufacturers can work across clouds to manage inventory and production in real time, from shelf to warehouse to factory. Our comprehensive and modern tech stack, along with our partner ecosystem, allow us to deliver this breakthrough value to organizations.

These new industry clouds bring together the breadth of our offerings across Azure, Power Platform, Microsoft 365 and Teams, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Security, and are underpinned by a common data model.

We’ve also added new capabilities, customizations and standards unique to each industry. For example, in retail our cloud connects physical and digital experiences to better serve customers in new and more-personalized ways, getting them to the goods they want where, when and how they want them.

In manufacturing, our cloud ensures the safety of front-line workers and creates more resilient and agile factories and supply chains so companies can rapidly respond to changes in demand.

In financial services, institutions can modernize core banking services like payments, manage risk throughout the organization, and create new innovative financial-services models…

Our industry clouds are designed to be modern and extensible so organizations can start with what they need today and adapt as they grow. They also create opportunities for our partners to build new revenue streams across the value chain.

Our industries will help businesses make faster and more-intelligent decisions, ultimately providing better experiences for their customers and employees. And they will help organizations improve time to value, lower cost, and increased agility.

By speaking on the company’s accelerated and expanded industry-cloud strategy and portfolio. He has also spoke on the world’s largest enterprise-applications companies, SAP and Oracle, crank up their own aggressive, wide-ranging, and innovative industry-cloud solutions.

For SAP, it means a tricky balancing act. The two companies are close partners on a number of fronts, including SAP’s choice of Microsoft Azure as a major and perhaps even preferred infrastructure provider for SAP workloads moving to the cloud. Will that collaboration be strained in any way as Microsoft begins to compete aggressively with SAP in industry clouds, which is a highly strategic growth area for SAP? It’s hard to imagine the relationship being unchanged by this imminent competition.

For Oracle, it means intensified head-to-head competition with Microsoft in all three layers of the cloud: infrastructure, where Azure has a massive lead over small but fast-growing OCI; cloud databases, where Microsoft executives have been quite blunt in stating that Cosmos and Synapse are aimed squarely at replacing legacy databases, of which Oracle is by far the dominant player; and now in vertical-market cloud applications as well.