Technology Record - Issue 22: Autumn 2021

63 Alam. “Organisations need to be able to record their environmental footprint, report to stake- holders, reduce their resource usage, remove their footprint through carbon offsets or recy- cling, and replace high-footprint resources with low-footprint ones. “With the Cloud for Sustainability, we’re creating a whole new category, going beyond capturing data to helping customers aggre- gate sustainability data in an actionable way. It includes SaaS offerings that can discover and connect to real-time data sources, accelerate data integration and reporting, provide accu- rate carbon accounting, measure performance against goals and enable intelligent insights for organisations to take more effective action.” The cloud also integrates with Dynamics 365 to allow users to bring in real-time data from the supply chain and other operations for further real-time insights. But Microsoft is not working alone to deliver new opportunities to its customers. “Partners are an immensely critical part of our strategy and value proposition,” says Alam. “No business on the planet can ever realistically claim to provide complete solutions for any single customer, let alone any single industry. That’s where a robust, healthy and growing partner ecosystem comes in. “Partners help us provide solutions and capa- bilities that build upon the Microsoft cloud to provide the last mile specificity to unique cus- tomer and industry needs. Our apps and our platform enable independent software vendors (ISVs) to build solutions in a way that maintains the SaaS promise we make to our customers yet provides out-of-the-box capabilities that customers need so that customisation can be reduced as much as possible.” Microsoft continues to foster this collaboration to ensure the end-consumer has the best tools for the job. “We take supporting our partners very seriously at Microsoft and have ISV programmes as well as FastTrack programmes that are spe- cifically designed to keep our ISVs very close to our engineering teams from a product roadmap and technical architecture perspective, as well as advise our consulting partners on best, most effi- cient ways of deploying our solutions.”