Transform – Sick Gaming

Posted on November 21, 2022 by — Leave a comment

‘Moments of truth’: Belgian company HB Antwerp is using blockchain to track each diamond’s story

Simply disrupting the traditional diamond supply chain isn’t quite what the founders of Belgian company HB Antwerp are aiming to do. They want a revolution.

The company launched in 2020 with the goal of using technology to bring visibility to the traditionally opaque diamond industry. Its founders hope to establish a new standard for diamonds by providing an end-to-end picture of each stone’s trajectory, from mine to consumer, while ensuring greater equity for diamonds’ countries of origin.

Those efforts center on using blockchain technology and the Microsoft Cloud to create a digital ledger of each diamond’s story — starting with where the stone came from, down to the precise excavation location, and following it as it is sorted, analyzed, transformed from rough stone to sparkling diamond and finally, delivered to the consumer.

Close-up photo of a man working in a diamond processing facility. — HB Antwerp’s mission is focused on empowering local communities to benefit from the diamond industry and have a greater stake in its future.

Those “moments of truth,” as HB Antwerp calls them, will enable diamond-mining countries to see how much value their stones generate, and conscious-minded buyers to know where their diamonds come from. They also create an enormous amount of data — over 3,000 verification points for each stone.

“The main challenge was that it’s never been done before,” says Shai de-Toledo, one of HB Antwerp’s founders.

Realizing the need for a partner capable of scaling the solution to any country, HB Antwerp turned to Microsoft. The companies worked together to develop a blockchain ledger built on Microsoft Azure and an enterprise resource planning system using Microsoft Dynamics 365. Data from each diamond is stored in a proprietary IoT device, essentially a minivault that can’t be opened without documenting that action in the ledger. (See a demo of HB Antwerp’s IoT capsule.)

Photo of smiling young woman working at a diamond processing facility. — The HB Antwerp Innovation Lab opened in Botswana in 2021 to train graduate students, particularly women, for careers in its facility there.

The data is then uploaded to Power BI, Microsoft’s data visualization platform, to provide governments and mining companies with a real-time view of their diamonds’ value appreciation. The goal, de-Toledo says, is to make information about each diamond available to consumers through a link to the ledger.

“We are trying to package this entire journey and deliver it to the consumer in a way that will create an environment that others find it very difficult to compete with,” he says. “Having a ledger and a representation of the journey means that for the first time, consumers can ask themselves, ‘Where did the diamond come from? What was its impact? Which people benefited from it?’”

The traditional diamond supply chain, de-Toledo says, has commodified diamonds and diluted their value, with many players involved and little benefit flowing to the countries and people who produce the diamonds.

“For more than a century, the diamond industry has made billions from obfuscating every stone’s journey,” he says. “Where it’s from, who added value to it, how the value is — or isn’t — benefitting local communities, or even what a fair price should be for consumers. We feel it’s done so much harm that simply ‘disrupting’ feels like an evolution. This is a revolution.”

Outdoor group shot of HB Antwerp employees and diamond industry workers in Botswana. — HB Antwerp’s approach to purchasing diamonds has resulted in 40% higher royalties to the Botswana government over the past two years.

A ‘seismic shift’ for Botswana

Integral to HB Antwerp’s mission is empowering local communities to benefit from the diamond industry and have a greater stake in its future. In Botswana, that has meant investing in the country, ensuring a fairer price for its diamonds and creating new opportunities for its people. The HB Antwerp Innovation Lab opened in Botswana in 2021 to train engineering and technology graduate students, particularly women, for careers in its facility there. Additionally, HB Antwerp will soon open an academy in Botswana to train local diamond polishers.

In 2020, HB Antwerp began implementing its new ecosystem under a partnership with the Lucara Diamond Corporation at its Karowe mine in Botswana. HB Antwerp is purchasing diamonds from the mine based on their value as polished stones, rather than the standard practice of paying for rough product. That has resulted in 40% higher diamond royalties to the Botswana government over the past two years, according to HB Antwerp.

Botswana President Mokgweetsi Masisi characterized the new approach as a “seismic shift” for the country. “I can tell you we do not want to revert to the standard we had,” he says.

Botswana President Mokgweetsi Masisi with Teresa Hutson, vice president of Microsoft’s Tech and Corporate Responsibility Group. — Botswana President Mokgweetsi Masisi, left, with Teresa Hutson, vice president of Microsoft’s Tech and Corporate Responsibility Group, during a U.N. General Assembly event.

At a U.N. General Assembly event in September, Masisi said he thinks HB Antwerp’s approach could be used by other African countries and can help meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by U.N. member states.

“We want to go out and really market this,” he said. “We want to see the relationship between African governments and those who they partner with fundamentally change. There’s no reason to think we’re going to attain the SDGs with (current) models. It just won’t work.”

Ultimately, says HB Antwerp co-founder Rafael Papismedov, the goal is to provide knowledge and training that will enable Botswana and other African countries to have greater ownership over their natural resources and grow their economies.

“We believe the future of this industry is to transform the diamond in the country of origin,” he says. “This mineral belongs to the people, and it’s the people that will be involved in every step of it.”

Watch additional HB Antwerp videos and learn more about their story by visiting www.microsoft.com/industrysolutions/HBAntwerp.

Posted on June 15, 2022 by — Leave a comment

Wolverine Worldwide and its portfolio of popular brands tap the hybrid cloud to be fleeter of foot in reaching customers

As part of that digital upgrade, Michigan-based Wolverine Worldwide plans to increase customer personalization and make it even more intuitive and engaging to shop and buy goods from its portfolio of brands, which also includes Keds, Sweaty Betty and Merrell.

“With so many good retailers today, consumers have many choices, so they’ve become accustomed to, and gravitate toward, better user experiences,” says Chris Hufnagel, president of Merrell, also headquartered in Michigan. “Brands that can’t create seamless experiences are going to be at a competitive disadvantage.

“If we create a lot of friction for consumers as they try to engage with us, regardless of channel, that’s not good for the long-term health of the brand,” Hufnagel adds. “In the future, the road is going to be littered with brands that didn’t make it easy for consumers.”

By moving to Azure Arc – which allows data and apps to be securely shared between on-premises hardware, a cloud or multiple clouds (multicloud) – Wolverine Worldwide and its brands say they will ensure more stock availability and faster shipping, along with other enhancements.

A woman holds and examines a shipping box from Wolverine Worldwide while standing on her porch. — A consumer inspects her shipment of shoes from one of Wolverine Worldwide’s brands.

In time, the company and its brands also aim to personalize shoppers’ experiences, offering product-specific insights and individual recommendations as buyers peruse goods, enabling better informed buying decisions tailored to individual tastes.

“Think about one of our customers. Let’s call him ‘James.’ What do we know about James today?” says Dee Slater, chief information officer and senior vice president at Wolverine Worldwide. “We run our CRM (customer relationship management platform), so we know what James bought from us and if he’s returned any items. But that’s about all we know.

“In the future, as we build a data lake and a customer data platform, we’ll apply some AI (artificial intelligence) over that data, and we’ll know that James really likes the color blue,” Slater adds. “And we’ll know James is a hiker. So eventually, when James comes to our website or enters our stores, we’re going to present him with blue hiking shoes.

That innovation is part of a far larger tech transformation Wolverine is beginning under CEO and president Brendan Hoffman, who took over the top role in January 2022.

Sun shines on a water tower that carries the name Wolverine Worldwide — The company now known as Wolverine Worldwide was founded in Michigan in 1883. By 1903, the family business was making 300 pairs of shoes a day

The company’s digital push will invest in technology to bolster the supply chain, modernize how employees work, and enable Wolverine Worldwide and its distinct brands to scale production up or down based on seasonal or market demands, Slater says.

“We are on an overdue journey,” she says. “The move to Azure is all about supporting that initiative.”

At the same time, Wolverine Worldwide also is transitioning to RISE with SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud. That offering gives companies access to an array of SAP cloud-based services, solutions and tools through a single license. Running the solution on Azure accelerates cloud journeys and helps companies combine their advanced technologies, hardware, software and databases.

And by implementing Azure Arc, Wolverine Worldwide is shifting away from legacy, on-premises platforms to nimbler, multicloud, multitenant environments. The gains in business speed and agility derived from that deployment, Slater says, will be “transformational.” One example: Azure Arc has helped employees start using data to drive their decisions, moving from “hindsight to foresight with AI and machine learning.”

Dee Slater in a black sweater speaking in front of a window. — Dee Slater.

That set of technologies also will help ensure that employees can continue to securely share files, communicate and collaborate in the cloud, particularly while working remotely.

“Attracting and retaining talent today is mission critical to every brand on the planet, including ours,” Slater says. “People don’t want to come to work and use an abacus. They want to move quickly, use modern, easy-to-use productivity tools, and have access to data that drives insights. They want to know they’re making a difference.

“By moving to the Azure cloud – with the speed that we’ll be getting from that shift – and by having all that data at our fingertips, we’re also attracting and retaining the talent that’s going to bring the brands farther, faster,” she adds.

Each of Wolverine Worldwide’s 13 brands has differing needs and operates in different consumer segments. For example, Sperry, founded in 1935, is the market leader in boat shoes and has also expanded into casual shoes, boots and sneakers. Harley-Davidson Footwear sells motorcycle boots plus riding-approved shoes and sneakers online and through a network of dealers. Then, in 2021, Wolverine acquired Sweaty Betty, a London-based women’s activewear retailer.

With help from Azure Arc, those brands can more quickly test and deploy business solutions while the brands’ decision makers and developers gain access to expanded and accelerated data analysis.

Wolverine Worldwide's brands are listed by name on a vertical wall display. — At Wolverine Worldwide headquarters, the company’s many brand logos are displayed.

“Some of the challenges we have working with so many brands are the various business requirements,” says Jason Miller, vice president of IT at Wolverine. “Some brands have very complex business models. Some are more international. Some have third-party joint ventures. All those different requirements – and being able to meet those from an analytics perspective – is the challenge for us here at Wolverine.

“Moving to the cloud enables us to compile all of the data pools that the brands have built up over time into one place so that all the brands can take advantage of it,” he adds.

Indeed, tapping such cross-channel opportunities is crucial, Slater says. Wolverine Worldwide will be better able to decipher, for example, which Sweaty Betty customers also buy products from Keds and Merrell. Gaining that kind of data intelligence currently takes “a lot of heavy lifting,” she explains.

Employees at Wolverine Worldwide sit at a table with open laptops and in front of a large screen showing visualized data displays. — Employees at Wolverine Worldwide are using more data to drive their decisions.

But when all that consumer data is safely and securely connected to the cloud, mapping that kind of customer-focused Venn diagram will be much simpler and will enable Wolverine Worldwide to specifically market to people who, say, are highly loyal to both Saucony and Sperry.

“One of the reasons we bought Sweaty Betty was not just because it’s an amazing brand, but they have consumer-focused skillsets and mindsets,” Slater says.

“How do we harness that so we can grow even faster, so we can learn that and apply it to our other brands?” Slater adds. “This is about getting our data in the cloud so we can connect in ways we have not done before, making that data even more powerful.”

Check out this Microsoft customer story to learn more about how Azure Arc is fueling innovation at Wolverine Worldwide.

Posted on June 8, 2022 by — Leave a comment

Procter & Gamble’s CIO believes passion is contagious. His latest passion: digitally remaking the 185-year-old company

At age 17, Vittorio Cretella left school to enlist in the Italian Army, eager to work with missile and radar systems.

Now truth be told, what he really wanted as a gung-ho teenager was to fly helicopters.

Problem was, the Italian military required chopper pilots to be 18. So, facing that stern rule, Cretella simply tweaked his ambitions. He donned his Army fatigues and immersed himself in a new mission: learning all he could about electronic engineering.

“Going in the Army was following my dreams,” says Cretella, chief information officer at Procter & Gamble. “But if I had become a helicopter pilot, who knows where I would be now?”

And just where is he now? In Cincinnati, leading a massive digital transformation at one of the world’s largest companies.

“Passion is contagious. Technology today offers massive opportunities to companies like P&G to build superior solutions that can solve the daily problems of billions of consumers around the world and make their lives better,” he adds. “That is a passion.”

As part of that tech modernization, P&G and Microsoft on Wednesday announced a new, multi-year, collaboration that will leverage the Microsoft Cloud to accelerate and expand P&G’s digital manufacturing platform and enrich the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

A man operates a fork lift loaded with Bounty paper towels. — P&G manufactures some of the most recognizable brands in the world.

P&G makes and sells dozens of consumer product brands, including Pampers, Bounty and Gillette. Through that collaboration, P&G expects to improve productivity, bring products to consumers faster, boost customer satisfaction and reduce costs.

Recently, Transform spoke with Cretella to hear more about his latest and perhaps biggest mission: spearheading a digital shift across a 185-year-old company that operates in about 70 countries.

TRANSFORM: You served six years in the Army and emerged with a computing diploma. I imagine you still draw on lessons from your military days. How do those experiences continue to shape you?

CRETELLA: I learned the importance of agility, the importance of being always open to learn, to experiment. If you choose a career in technology, you must be ready to embark on a never-ending learning journey.

I always tell our junior recruits, our interns, what they learned in college would be obsolete in fewer than five years. That should not depress them, but rather motivate them to work in a professional field that gives you the opportunity to learn throughout your career.

We have so many examples at P&G of data and AI (artificial intelligence), cloud capability, DevOps, APIs, creating better business models. A critical part of my job is to help connect the dots between technology and business opportunity, and to share the passion of creating consumer value through technology with my colleagues and the rest of the organization.

Plastic-wrapped packs of Charmin toilet paper move along on a conveyor belt at a P&G manufacturing facility. — Packs of Charmin move along a conveyor belt at a P&G manufacturing facility.

TRANSFORM: With Microsoft Azure serving as the foundation, this effort marks the first time P&G will be able to digitize and integrate data from manufacturing sites around the world. Scale is the story here. How rare is it for a consumer goods company to access this level of data at scale?

CRETELLA: You’re right. We are implementing this technology at scale at hundreds of manufacturing sites around the world. Billions of products are coming out on those manufacturing lines.

However, we have a large manufacturing footprint built over a long period and the shop floor equipment is not the same in each of manufacturing facilities. That lack of standardization makes it difficult to digitally transform at scale. The digital IoT edge and cloud power platform that we are co-developing and co-innovating with Microsoft will allow us to work with our diverse environment and overcome those challenges.

We need the capability of making the data compatible from those different sources, so that we can work on those and replicate success. The result will be faster deployment, faster time to market, more productivity and doing things once instead of many times.

TRANSFORM: P&G now will be able to digitize and integrate data on a larger scale, enabling workers to check production and make quicker decisions. Can you describe some of the decisions that P&G workers will make even faster from the manufacturing floor?

CRETELLA: Right now, we are tapping the opportunity of using AI and machine learning in the manufacturing space. We already have compelling use cases for our manufacturing IoT and edge analytics initiative.

Those pilots include quality – making sure we check quality, real-time, on the production line. There is also resilience – making sure that all the different parts of the (production) lines run effectively with preventative maintenance, with early signs and early warnings of problems. And third, sustainability. AI and machine learning help us control energy consumption and water consumption, reducing our carbon footprint.

For example, thanks to those algorithms, a line operator will immediately know if a machine is not cutting sheets of paper to the correct length, and they can adjust.

The grounds and external entry at a P&G plant in West Virginia that was built to follow sustainable practices. — The P&G manufacturing facility in West Virginia is one of the most sustainable plants among P&G’s global manufacturing and supply-chain operations.

TRANSFORM: How will P&G optimize environmental sustainability in manufacturing through this digital transformation?

CRETELLA: One use case that we will replicate across many plants is using machine learning to optimize energy and water consumption. That will reduce the carbon footprint and support our 2040 carbon neutrality goal.

We can achieve this, on one hand, by investing in alternative energy sources. But on the other hand, we can use machine learning to optimize consumption. This is where the Industrial IoT initiative will make a significant difference, by using these algorithms to fine tune the use of manufacturing assets and to minimize waste.

TRANSFORM: For many people, sustainability is a personal passion. Why is sustainability important to you?

CRETELLA: Number one, it’s the responsibility of what you leave behind for future generations. Second, for me, it is second nature to avoid unnecessary waste. All our natural resources must be used wisely.

Those two things make me personally excited about using technology for sustainability.

Top photo: Vittorio Cretella. All photos courtesy of P&G.

Posted on May 23, 2022 by — Leave a comment

American Airlines’ move to the cloud lands more connected tech and travel experiences for employees and customers

As air travel and tourism returns to pre-pandemic levels, the commercial aviation industry is ready to welcome travelers back into the air. And digital technology has the potential to help airlines create a smoother travel experience, especially for those who may not have traveled in the past few years.

American Airlines, the world’s largest airline, is one of the first global airlines to recognize and embrace this opportunity. To minimize disruptions in the airport, on the tarmac and throughout the system, American and Microsoft are partnering to streamline operations, better empower team members and enhance customer experiences using the Microsoft Cloud.

Through this partnership, the airline is equipping its frontline workers with access to information and insights that streamline ground operations and make travel a more pleasant experience for customers, as well as applying data and other technologies to enhance business processes.

“Reliably operating thousands of flights around the world to take customers to hundreds of destinations is critical to American, which is why the airline has chosen Microsoft’s technology to support our applications,” says American Airlines’ Chief Information Officer Maya Leibman.

Improving costs and increasing efficiency

For airlines and customers who are trying to make a connecting flight, minutes count. Together, American and Microsoft are applying the power of AI, machine learning and data analytics to reduce the taxi time for flights, giving connecting customers extra time to make their next flight while also saving thousands of gallons of jet fuel and decreasing CO2 emissions for the American Airlines fleet. Built on Azure, American’s intelligent gating program provides real-time analysis of data points, including routing and runway information to automatically assign the nearest available gate to arriving aircraft.

Gating decisions for American’s 136 gates at Dallas/Fort-Worth International Airport (DFW), for example, have traditionally required more manual involvement from gate planners. Now, the program can look at multiple data points simultaneously for the hundreds of daily arrivals, saving more than a minute of taxi time per flight. That can not only eliminate up to 10 hours of taxi time per day but also 870,000 gallons of jet fuel each year at DFW – equating to a CO2 emissions reduction of more than 2,600 metric tons annually.

Empowering frontline teams

Prior to the pandemic slowdown, technology investments across all industries tended to focus on simplifying customer experiences. In the travel industry, high-visibility customer-facing systems and smartphone apps received significant funding. Meanwhile, frontline systems received less attention, prompting mobile employees without regular access to desktop or laptop computers to rely instead on texting and consumer apps.

In fact, according to a Microsoft Work Trends Index Special Report, one-third of all frontline workers say they do not have the right technological tools to do their job effectively; that number rises to 41 percent for those in non-management positions.

American Airlines is addressing its frontline workers’ technology needs, equipping them with solutions like ConnectMe, a Microsoft Teams-based solution leveraging PowerApps and Azure, which the airline developed in partnership with Microsoft. Using the app, team members can access real-time data from any mobile device. With key arrival, boarding, baggage and gate information now at their fingertips, American’s frontline teams have accelerated aircraft turn times at dozens of airports in the United States.

By empowering its team members with modern technology to streamline communication and coordination, the airline is driving operational efficiency while also creating a more connected, inclusive worker-friendly culture.

Driving innovation

Running the world’s largest airline is no small feat. Through its partnership with Microsoft, American is on track to migrate and centralize its entire portfolio of strategic operational workloads in the cloud. Operations Hub on Azure will connect American’s data warehouse, several legacy applications and other tools in one place, making the airline one of the first to embrace a comprehensive cloud strategy for all areas of its business. The move will allow American to save costs, increase efficiency and scalability, and make progress toward its ambitious sustainability goals.

“With the power of Microsoft Azure, American can innovate and accelerate its technology transformation, giving our team members augmented tools to provide our customers with an enhanced travel experience,” says Leibman.

It’s been rewarding to see how the world’s largest airline has embraced technology to propel innovation, and we’re excited to reach new heights together for years to come.

(Photos courtesy of American Airlines)

Posted on December 14, 2020 by — Leave a comment

Behind the scenes of Crocs’ ‘Free Pair for Healthcare’ initiative

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, media images of health care workers caring for COVID-19 patients provided some of the first glimpses into the devastating impacts of the global crisis.

Executives at Crocs not only saw those stressed, overwhelmed frontline workers, but also started getting requests from them for shoes to keep them going during the long hours. The company realized it had an opportunity to offer a little kindness and comfort to a group of loyal customers at a particularly challenging time. Crocs came up with an ambitious idea: to give away 10,000 pairs of shoes every day to people working on the front lines of the COVID-19 epidemic.

Less than a week later, Crocs was ready to launch its “Free Pair for Healthcare” initiative, a 45-day event starting in late March during which the company donated more than 860,000 pairs of Crocs to workers mostly in the U.S., but also in Canada and Europe.

Close-up photo of a turquoise colored pair of Crocs clogs with a stethoscope draped over them. — Crocs donated more than 860,000 pairs of shoes during its 45-day campaign for health care workers.

Crocs’ iconic foam clogs — in black and white, in lemon and mint and leopard print — arrived on the doorsteps of grateful health care workers and frontline responders, who posted messages and photos of their Crocs, some personalized with the brand’s proprietary Jibbitz charms, on social media.

“Thanks so much Crocs for thinking of us during this time,” Kristy Baron, a registered nurse from Fort Wayne, Indiana, wrote on Facebook. “I’m a nurse working on the front lines and your caring is much appreciated.”

Adam Michaels, Crocs’ chief digital officer, says the company created the campaign to help as many people as possible and provide comfort where it was needed most.

“It became obvious that we have a product that a group of our consumers have been buying from us for years, and that particular group had an immediate and real need,” he says. “We thought the best way to give back was to give them the footwear they needed on the front lines of fighting COVID-19.”

Behind the scenes, the campaign was an enormous undertaking. It required building a platform that could fulfill orders, communicate with customers and handle up to 500,000 daily visitors to the site — while still maintaining enough inventory to fill orders while production was scaled back because of the pandemic. Microsoft Teams was integral to the effort, enabling employees working remotely around the U.S. to quickly share designs and documents, provide input and make decisions in real time without getting bogged down by email chains, Michaels says.

The campaign ramp-up, he says, was “one of the fastest turnarounds we’ve had for any project, especially of that magnitude. Teams was key to that. It allowed us to iterate so much faster than traditional channels. Doing that remotely, without Microsoft Teams, in the timeframe we had, we probably wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

Teams has been a critical tool for Crocs in other ways during the pandemic. Employees in Europe hosted a sales meeting via a live Teams event, showing and talking through the Crocs line to potential retail customers. Teams was also used to design and launch two seasons of new products, an undertaking that would typically involve flying employees from around the world to Crocs’ headquarters in Niwot, Colorado.

Smiling man wearing an RN badge holding up a pair of red, white and blue, stars and stripes-patterned Crocs clogs. — Crocs’ iconic foam clogs were sent to health care workers in the U.S., Canada and Europe through the “Free Pair for Healthcare” initiative.

And regular town hall meetings on Teams have allowed employees to connect with each other and hear directly from the company’s CEO, Andrew Rees, whose dog, Cooper, sometimes makes an appearance.

Mike Feliton, Crocs’ senior vice president and chief information officer overseeing technology, chose Teams for the company’s collaboration platform because it allows users to easily work together in a shared space. Crocs rolled out Teams in the summer of 2019, and when the pandemic hit — forcing Crocs to temporarily close most of its 360 stores — employees companywide immediately turned to Teams to connect and collaborate.

“We adopted the platform from our CEO down almost instantaneously,” Feliton says. “Teams has been central to our business.”

Feliton was so impressed with how Teams helped facilitate Crocs’ health care campaign that he sent an email to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, thanking him for the technology.

“As we were so successful with that campaign, I couldn’t do anything but reach out to Satya and thank him for that product, because I felt like he not only heard me, but everybody else in the business world that was looking for a collaboration tool that really worked, and this did,” he says.

The pandemic also prompted Crocs to intensify the digital-first strategy it embarked on about five years ago. Recognizing that more consumers were shopping online, the company closed some stores and ramped up its marketing efforts on digital channels. When COVID-19 hit, Crocs invested heavily with Microsoft Advertising and increased its focus on paid search to target customers who might not have previously bought Crocs online.

Company official say those efforts contributed to Crocs’ reported record third quarter revenue of $361.7 million, with digital sales up 35.5.%.

Crocs has shifted almost all its operations to Microsoft Azure, with help from the Azure Migration Program, and is using Power BI, Microsoft’s data visualization platform, to pull together data from various sources. Previously, if the company wanted to see, for example, how its clogs were selling compared with sandals in a particular region, it had to rely on analysts pulling data from multiple systems. Now, Crocs is getting detailed data reports several times a day through Power BI.

“The huge benefit is that we know what’s going on with our business essentially in real time,” Michaels says. “That allows us to make decisions and react much more quickly to impact the future. Power BI has democratized the data so our teams can make better decisions at every level.”

Smiling young woman slightly blurred in the background, standing against a white backdrop and holding up a pair of bright pink Crocs clogs adorned with charms, known as Jibbitz — Crocs have had a resurgence in recent years, and its limited edition collaborations often sell out within minutes.

Crocs have been hailed as the ultimate pandemic shoe — comfortable and affordable, easy to clean and appropriately casual for legions of employees working from home. The New York Times declared that Crocs had “won 2020,” noting that while U.S. retail footwear sales are down 20 percent this year over the same period in 2019, sales of Crocs are up 48 percent. According to fashion search platform Lyst, searches for Crocs spiked 41 percent in Q3.

Crocs are clearly having a moment, but the brand’s resurgence predates the pandemic. In 2016, British designer Christopher Kane debuted marbled-design Crocs encrusted with geode Jibbitz charms on runways at London Fashion Week. The next year, design house Balenciaga released an outrageously high platform version of Crocs Classic clogs that retailed for $850.

Additional Crocs collaborations followed with the Grateful Dead, Justin Bieber and Puerto Rican pop star Bad Bunny, among others. The limited edition collaborations, which have also included a Kentucky Fried Chicken clog topped with a scented drumstick Jibbitz, often sell out within minutes.

Michaels acknowledges that Crocs is in the enviable position of having the right product for a moment no one could have anticipated.

“It would be much tougher to be in the dress shoe and dress apparel line of work right now,” he says, “but the more casual footwear has become more relevant to consumers now than it was even a few months ago.

“And because of the work we’ve done in the health care space, I think our brand actually has even more momentum than it did when COVID hit,” Michaels says. “We’re very fortunate for that.”

Top photo: Workers at Children’s Hospital Colorado wearing Crocs clogs donated by the company. (Photos courtesy of Crocs)

Posted on December 4, 2020 by — Leave a comment

Companies who migrated to Azure before the pandemic find the cloud was a silver lining

In challenging times, innovative companies don’t panic, they pivot.

So when the coronavirus traveled the globe, disrupting everything from grocery shopping to tax preparation, resilient companies around the world responded with ingenious solutions that ensured the safety of their employees, met the needs of their customers and kept their IT operations humming.

For some, it meant quickly enabling employees to work from home instead of at the office, while others rushed to re-engineer their supply chains, so their customers could continue to buy the products they needed to stay safe and healthy. Their solutions were custom but the step that allowed them to react so rapidly was common: They had migrated their operations to Microsoft Azure.

Even before COVID-19, companies were hungry to enable secure remote work, achieve operational efficiency, address IT budget constraints and accelerate innovation, and migrating to the cloud was the critical first step to unlocking those accomplishments.

“Azure has always helped our diverse customers adapt to new ways of doing business,” says Jeremy Winter, director, Azure management and migration.

“While some are moving beyond crisis mode and others look to the cloud to stay resilient, we’re seeing an acceleration in business’ cloud migrations. We’ve spent a lot of time with customers who are both considering and executing migrations and understand the challenges they are facing. We also recognize that our customers are counting on us more than ever to recover and ultimately transform.”

Here’s how a handful of those Microsoft customers discovered during the health crisis that the cloud didn’t just have a silver lining – it was the silver lining.

Actavo

Dublin, Ireland-based Actavo is a multi-disciplinary, global engineering services business that designs, builds and maintains the vital infrastructure we rely on every day.

Among their many services, they design, construct and maintain networks for the telecommunications and utilities industries; design, construct and install modular buildings; provide scaffold and rope access solutions along with the installation of insulation and removal of asbestos in the industrial sector; and provide hundreds of in-home technicians to companies who provide residential services like gas boiler repair, satellite installation or broadband internet installation to a half-million homes every year.

With so many essential industries relying on their round-the-clock support, even before the pandemic Actavo sought to increase operational efficiency and improve agility by migrating to Azure.

“Moving to the cloud gave us the versatility to be able to scale up and scale down in any country where we needed to operate, but it also gave us the robustness from a disaster recovery perspective,” says Willie Ryan, global Environmental Health and Safety and IT director.

A novel coronavirus may not have been the disaster that Actavo had in mind, but when it arrived, the decision to migrate to the cloud proved even more valuable. With the new, versatile infrastructure in place, Actavo was able to quickly pivot to remote work for its employees, ensuring that they could continue to support their clients around the world.

“We’ve got a very solid platform, and that was quite evident as we came through COVID and the pandemic, in terms of, we moved from an on-prem operation to everybody working from home, seamlessly, quickly, easily, without any major headaches,” Ryan says.

“Within the space of a week we were able to tick a box that said, ‘If lockdown comes, we’re ready to go.’ The lockdown announcement came at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. We actually had everybody that needed to be working at home, working at home on Monday morning.”

Additiv

Additiv partners with the world’s leading financial institutions to help them digitalize their wealth management activities. Their ability to advocate for change and innovation in an industry that is highly regulated is dependent on building trust with their clients by adhering to the highest standards of security and compliance.

So when the company moved its enterprise software offering for its clients to the cloud, they worked with Microsoft to ensure a seamless transition that would strictly adhere to regulations across multiple locations – a prerequisite for a global company that is headquartered in Switzerland and has offices and clients on three continents.

Now, Additiv can offer its clients innovative, flexible software-as-a-service solutions that can scale easily and that adapt to their specific needs, no matter where they’re located. “Digital collaboration means breaking down these virtual borders, and Azure allowed us to integrate better so that our clients can provide a holistic solution to their customers out of the cloud,” says Silvan Schriber, head of corporate development.

“The benefits of Azure for Additiv are 100 percent trust that the solutions adhere in each location to regulations,” he adds. “So it helps us in centrally managing our solutions and placing them in each country of our clients, with virtually the click of a button.”

That consistency and efficiency will be critical as Additiv’s financial services customers increasingly embrace digital strategies and omni-channel distribution to reimagine their businesses post-pandemic.

“The pace of change pre-pandemic was rapid, but there’s no reason to think these trends won’t accelerate post-pandemic,” the company writes in a report published earlier this year. “… the companies that are faring best are those that are either digitally native or have invested the most in digital.”

An Albertsons storefront. — Azure migration helps Albertsons Companies deliver a better shopping experience. (Photo courtesy of Albertsons Companies)

Albertsons Companies

Long before this past spring, people were changing the way they shop for groceries, and Albertsons Companies – one of the largest food and drug retailers in the United States with some 2,200 stores operating under banners including Albertsons, Safeway and Vons – was evolving along with them.

“I believe that every customer – from millennials to baby boomers – is transforming how they shop,” says Ramiya Iyer, senior vice president of Data, Digital & Merchandising at Albertsons Companies. “The retail industry is undergoing its own transformational journey to meet customers where they are and be relevant to them. It’s imperative that we do that to succeed and grow as a business.”

To stay competitive and give customers the modern, convenient shopping experience they had come to expect, Albertsons migrated from an aging on-premises server farm to Microsoft Azure.

The move allowed them to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive services, and empowered an environment where developers can innovate and efficiently test new ideas, propelling Albertsons to introduce apps that make shopping faster and more convenient.

“With Azure, we can bring new ideas to market faster and deliver releases on shorter time cycles,” says Param Deivreddy, vice president, IT architecture. “We think Azure also encourages exploration and innovation, because you don’t have to spend a huge amount on infrastructure to quickly test a new idea.”

The company’s easy-to-use apps offer the kinds of personalized and streamlined experiences digitally savvy shoppers demand, allowing them to create shopping lists, easily find the products they want, skip long check-out lines, even save time at the fuel pump by claiming rewards, activating the pump and paying for gas with a tap of the phone.

“Grocery shopping shouldn’t be a chore,” says Iyer. “We want to provide our customers with a totally frictionless experience that lets them enjoy the food they’re putting on the table with a minimum of fuss and stress.”

H&R Block

Few things in life are certain, but as the adage goes, taxes are one of them. Even during a health crisis, Americans are responsible for filing their annual return, and millions of them lean on Kansas City, Missouri-based H&R Block to navigate the process.

To streamline its operations and improve its ability to ramp up during tax season, H&R Block migrated its computing workload to Microsoft Azure, a move that would, “help the company better process millions of tax returns annually while allowing the firm to build financial software products with greater speed, quality and security,” writes CIO’s Clinton Boulton in a recent interview on cloud migration with H&R Block CIO Alan Lowden.

“It’s what we need to do to enable our strategic vision of putting customers at the center,” Lowden tells CIO. “We have to give them a convenient experience of serving them any way they want to be served.”

So this past tax season, H&R Block was able to spring into action to support their customers while protecting the safety of their employees and the communities they serve. To keep their workforce safe during their busiest season – which was even longer this year to give taxpayers more time to file – they shifted to a work-from-home model that allowed 80,000 tax professionals to serve customers virtually.

That quick pivot wouldn’t have been possible if the company hadn’t migrated to Azure. Because they didn’t need to buy new hardware, or set up or configure additional infrastructure, they were able to make the critical change to remote workstations in less than two weeks. The company’s tax pros were able to provide the expertise their customers needed, and the even more critical refunds they were counting on.

When the demands of tax season return to normal, H&R Block will continue to inspire confidence in their customers through a seamless experience – wherever they like, however they like.

“Now we can present tax tips and offerings to our clients that are most relevant to them,” says Aditya Thadani, vice president of architecture and information management at H&R Block. “Migrating our platforms to Azure has really allowed us to serve our clients better.”

Top photo by Halfpoint Images/Getty Images.

Posted on November 11, 2020 by — Leave a comment

A duty to protect: How the VA is keeping veterans safe amid the pandemic. Civilians too

One quiet chat in the middle of a war thrust Dr. Jennifer MacDonald’s career into motion.

It took place 10 years ago at a troop clinic on the U.S. military base in Basra, Iraq. That day, a soldier walked in, complaining of joint pain. MacDonald, then a third-year medical student stationed on the base, decided to dig deeper into the soldier’s story. The real problem soon surfaced.

Amid her fourth combat tour, the soldier was merging long duty shifts with grueling gym sessions – all to work through some conflicting emotions. She missed her family, she said, but worried going home might be even harder. That moment marked a mental breakthrough for the soldier and an epiphany for MacDonald.

“It shaped my concept of transition for veterans and my desire to serve,” says MacDonald, who deployed to Iraq as a member of the Minnesota Army National Guard. “From a medical perspective, it shaped my desire to offer physical healing – and healing from a holistic perspective.”

Dr. Jennifer MacDonald, wearing a mask, testifying before Congress on behalf of the VA. — Dr. Jennifer MacDonald testifying before Congress on behalf of the VA. (Courtesy of Dr. Jennifer MacDonald)

Today, those same commitments still fuel MacDonald, a family medicine physician in Washington, D.C. and an executive at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), where she serves as chief consultant to the deputy under secretary for health.

At the VA, MacDonald spends “most of the day, every day,” she says, helping to monitor and manage the agency’s pandemic-era efforts to protect 9 million VA-enrolled veterans. (There are more than 18 million veterans in total in the U.S.) MacDonald also helps to maintain quality health care at 170 VA Medical Centers (VAMCs) and at more than 1,200 VA sites of care.

Early in the pandemic, at the height of uncertainty over COVID-19, MacDonald and other VA leaders, including senior executives at the VA Office of Information and Technology, began collaborating with industry partners to address new and existing challenges highlighted by the national emergency. One of those partners, Microsoft, was called upon to help transform key VA business processes and accelerate modernization efforts already underway across the agency.

Now, to track and react to active COVID-19 cases among veterans, as well as current bed space at VA hospitals, MacDonald and other VA leaders rely on a series of cloud-based dashboards, built with Microsoft’s Power BI, Bing Maps Platform and Azure App Service. The dashboards offer a first-hand view at near real-time data across the largest integrated health care system in America.

A woman in a lab coat and a mask looks into a microscope. — A VA health care employee at work during the pandemic. (Courtesy of the VA)

An executive-level dashboard provides VA leaders with situational awareness of COVID-19 cases and virus impacts in an aggregate view across the entire department. Another dashboard delivers mission-critical information to health care system leaders who manage the 170 local VAMCs. The final dashboard summarizes what is known about the status of COVID-19 patients who have been tested or treated at VA facilities.

These tools access a single, authoritative VA data source built on Microsoft’s SQL Server technology. The system harmonizes VA data on patient information, system capacity, staffing and inventory.

“It gives us a common operating picture and decisional information in near real time,” MacDonald says. “Our early planning and the early development of tools like these have enabled us to keep veterans safe. Veteran safety has been the true north of our response.”

The pandemic also prompted the department to activate its crucial but little-known “Fourth Mission.” During national emergencies, the VA can be activated to provide support to national, state and local efforts spanning emergency management, public health, safety and homeland security.

“VA is committed to helping the nation in this effort to combat COVID-19,” VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said earlier this year. “Helping veterans is our first mission, but in many locations across the country we’re helping states and local communities. VA is in this fight not only for the millions of veterans we serve each day; we’re in the fight for the people of the United States.”

A U.S. soldier in Army fatigues stands on a stage flanked by three Iraqi people on each side, all of them signing together. — MacDonald, center, sings with Iraqi people. During her tour of duty in Iraq, she performed music to help boost troop morale. (Courtesy of Dr. MacDonald)

The executive-level dashboard is a key tool in that fight, MacDonald says. In addition to offering an interactive map of current coronavirus cases at each VA Medical Center, the tool shows supply-chain and hospital-capacity metrics at every facility. Equipped with that data, the VA can shift resources as needed.

“That near-real-time information from the COVID-19 dashboard enables us to make decisions as we look cohesively at the COVID-positive patients we have hospitalized in a specific location, the number of beds there, our staffing and our inventory of ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE),” MacDonald says.

“As we see COVID-19 take root in more areas, we have requests from states to hold open beds for potential civilian cases,” she adds. “As community hospitals reach capacity and need to transition civilian patients to our system to free up more capacity, we have been able to meet those needs.”

In Florida, for example, the VA recently dispatched 15 clinical support teams to assist 82 long-term care facilities with an estimated 8,863 patients.

A Department of Veterans Affairs sign outside a building in Washington, D.C. — VA headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Kiyoshi Tanno, iStock/Getty Images Plus)

As of Nov. 5, the VA had provided more than 870,000 pieces of PPE, including gowns, gloves, masks and face shields. It also has supplied respirators to civilian medical facilities. And VA Medical Centers have admitted 345 non-veteran civilians for care.

Meanwhile, the VA also is working to help individual veterans and their families remain healthy and to provide them timely information.

“At the end of the day, it’s about enabling processes and allowing VA to provide benefits to veterans,” James Gfrerer, the VA’s assistant secretary for information and technology, and chief information officer (CIO), recently told MeriTalk. “I have the benefit of being a veteran myself … and really know what the challenges are.”

As part of that effort, the agency launched a public-facing coronavirus chatbot that offers a symptom checker and gives around-the-clock responses to questions like, “If I need to leave my house, how do I stay safe?”

The chatbot was built in less than a month by leveraging the Microsoft Healthcare Bot service on Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing service. The chatbot also answers queries about COVID-19 testing, stimulus payments and how to get a prescription refill.

These tools serve as a first-line safety valve for patients, providing them with a sense of security – a critical value to health providers, says Dr. Michael Uohara, who advises Microsoft’s federal health care initiatives.

A veteran undergoes an eye exam at a VA medical facility. (Courtesy of the VA)

“Early in the pandemic response, the provider community was challenged to uncover approaches that provided support and care, while keeping patients socially distanced,” says Uohara, who previously worked in general surgery and clinical research.

“The adoption of the coronavirus chatbot by the VA was one of the techniques that served this purpose. To that effect, the VA, and a few early adopters like the CDC (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), foreshadowed the use of these technologies. The Microsoft Healthcare Bot has now been embraced by dozens of large provider organizations, and there are now over 2,000 healthcare bots with tens of millions of users,” Uohara adds.

From an employee perspective, the most pivotal piece of all social-distancing efforts involves the ability to work from home. To help enable that shift within the department, the VA deployed Microsoft Teams and Windows Virtual Desktop.

Before the pandemic, on any given workday, about 60,000 VA employees performed their jobs remotely, according to Gfrerer.

During one spring weekend, the VA launched “the largest single-day deployment of Microsoft Teams,” bringing about 400,000 users onto the platform, Gfrerer has said.

The number of Teams users within the VA now exceeds 500,000 users, who hold video conferences, share documents and collaborate from the safety of their homes.

“When it comes to telework and our business model,” Gfrerer told the Federal News Network in September, “the theme is very similar to what you hear across (the) commercial sector and certainly around the rest of the federal government … it’s a new day, we’re not going back.”

Top photo: A veteran speaks with his doctors from home via a telemedicine call. (Photo by adamkaz/Getty Images)

Posted on October 29, 2020 by — Leave a comment

DHL shelving ‘out of stock,’ thanks to smart supply chains built in the cloud

Venter’s vision is to leverage DHL’s unique position to optimize customers’ supply chains, making them more resilient and, at the same time, more agile and flexible.

“The importance of access to real-time information was evident pre-crisis, but the pandemic exposed an even greater need for end-to-end visibility across the supply chain to enable fast response. A solid IT infrastructure and powerful tools to predict and analyze terabytes of data in real time is helping us make supply chains smarter,” says Venter.

The company’s ability to support its customers through this challenging period was because DHL Supply Chain invested significantly over the past few years in digital transformation, working in partnership with Microsoft and Blue Yonder on the strategic deployment of automation and digital solutions.

A safe working environment, high transparency and visibility along the whole supply chain, as well as a sophisticated technology infrastructure are what Venter believes sets DHL apart from its competitors. “Smart supply chains, fueled by data help us unlock higher service levels, optimize costs and enable predictive modelling – as well as faster response times. This is what it is all about,” he says.

Examples of such optimization include routing in DHL’s sizeable warehouses to pick and pack goods faster and more effectively, or the “more intelligent” allocation and the structured processing of millions of orders each day.

But it’s not just about coping with the expected, it’s about anticipating demand.

Data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) are essential technology investments for DHL, as it goes beyond “just putting a bunch of robots in a warehouse,” as Venter explains. “It’s about really making supply chains intelligent and smart.”

A DHL warehouse in Beringe, the Netherlands. — A forklift driver, one of DHL’s “everyday heroes,” at a warehouse in Beringe, the Netherlands.

The company’s worldwide scale and access to information across regions helped it earlier on in the pandemic: “Our global footprint gave us early supply warning signals from Asia, which meant we could take quick action in Europe”.

Predictive modelling is enabling the company to better manage demand and anticipate potential disruption to keep customers’ businesses moving, and crucially, keep them competitive.

Are we ready for the next challenge? Venter considers the next big challenge for international supply chains will be the global distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine, which some experts have described as the supply chain challenge of the century.

“This may sound superlative, but I can’t recall having seen any operation of that scale,” he says. “We are preparing for that, and we stand by to execute as soon as we will be assigned to do so.”

As DHL prepares for this, Venter highlights the importance of collaboration to leverage digitalization successfully and scale globally, “data is a sensitive topic and its fundamental to build your digital capabilities through a secure platform, with a partner you can trust. It’s business critical,” Venter says.

”Smart supply chains will not only save businesses and keep industries afloat – but in the truest sense of the word, smart supply chains will save lives.”

Top photo: A DHL employee uses “vision picking,” a form of augmented reality, at a DHL warehouse in Beringe, the Netherlands. (Photos courtesy of DHL)

Posted on October 22, 2020 by — Leave a comment

Wayve’s self-driving solution seeks to protect people and the planet

Let’s momentarily exit 2020 and pay an imaginary visit to 2029.

(If only we could, right? Anyway, back to our mental trek.)

Picture the world’s cities by the end of this decade: Streets, intersections and roundabouts are a safer, cleaner, quieter and vastly more organized stream of connected, self-driving electric vehicles. Block by block, their shared “driving brain” learns from roadway experiences to make traffic deaths tragedies of our messy past.

Rush hour jams? No chance. Horns? No need. Road rage? No more.

That’s how Alex Kendall sees our urban future. Kendall is the co-founder and CEO of Wayve, a London-based startup that’s building an artificial intelligence (AI) solution that will enable autonomous vehicles to operate not in a single city but in any urban environment, securely moving people and goods.

His vision blends cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities with heavy doses of human equity and healthy air to deliver a new transportation model that will be sustainable, affordable and accessible to people in all cities. He calls it: “Riding the Wayve.”

“One of our values is to leave positive tracks,” Kendall says, “so we exclusively work on electric vehicles.”

A Wayve vehicle drives down the street in London, collecting data via an array of cameras and sensors. — A Wayve vehicle drives down a London street, collecting data via an array of cameras and sensors.

To scale their solution, the three-year-old company is leveraging both Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft for Startups: Autonomous Driving program, which provides benefits like free Azure credits and access to Microsoft engineers and program managers to support the development of these complex workloads on the cloud.

Transform recently chatted with Kendall via Microsoft Teams to hear about our commutes of tomorrow.

TRANSFORM: Autonomous driving means different things to different people. What does it mean to you?

KENDALL: It means the start of a new era, creating artificial intelligence that we trust to move people and goods throughout our cities without requiring supervision by humans. We’re talking about a world of autonomous mobility services that disrupts private car ownership, that makes it more sustainable for people to move around cities and, ultimately, that reduces road deaths to zero.

TRANSFORM: Wayve aims to be the first company to launch its self-driving technology in 100 cities, not just one city. Tell me about that goal.

KENDALL: Across the self-driving industry today, many teams are trying to make it work in one place, just trying to get something out there as quickly as they can. This comes at the expense of what we call “generalization”: How quickly can the system go from working in one place to many places?

When humans learn to drive, they go from understanding how to drive in one city to quickly learning how to drive in other cities. In that same way, scaling our technology to other cities should just be a matter of adding a small amount of experience to adapt to each new place.

TRANSFORM: Where are some of those 100 projected cities?

KENDALL: We’re headquartered in London. That will be our first city. Beyond the UK, we are most excited about targeting a few cities in Europe as next expansion points. Next countries include the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

TRANSFORM: You mentioned how humans learn to drive. What does that mean?

KENDALL: Humans are interesting because they use many means of learning to learn how to drive. The dominant one is unsupervised learning. That is how humans watch and view the world.

Every time you’re sitting in a car or observing cars driving, you’re building an internal mental model about how things behave, how things move, how things interact. When you actually get in a car, it’s this internal model that makes it efficient for you to learn how to drive.

TRANSFORM: How will Wayve’s machine learning system mimic the human process?

KENDALL: Just like humans, our system learns most efficiently using many sources, including unsupervised learning, imitation learning and reinforcement learning.

First, we learn to drive (autonomously) by copying expert humans. We record the driving data from their vehicles. Based on the data, we learn to copy their expert driving. This is called imitation learning.

From that, we build a self-driving system and deploy it on the roads with safety drivers. (These are people who sit behind the steering wheel during testing and, if needed, immediately take control.) Every time the system makes a mistake, and the safety driver intervenes, we learn from that feedback. This is called reinforcement learning.

Finally, we use computer simulation to learn from the situations that are too dangerous or too rare to experience in the real world. Through these three steps, we build a safe and robust autonomous driver.

The dash board of a car holds a Surface laptop to the left of the steering wheel. — Wayve equips its fleet with Microsoft Surface devices.

TRANSFORM: Who are the expert drivers that you mentioned, and how do you record their driving data?

KENDALL: We deploy our self-driving platform with data-collection devices across large scale-commercial fleets.

We provide these vehicles with data-collection computers – fully integrated, self-driving, sensing suites – and small computers with a 4G connection. Integrated with Azure cloud and IoT services, this allows us to understand this data and send back interesting examples to the cloud, ultimately for our system to learn from. At scale, this will provide us access to millions of images per second.

TRANSFORM: In your computer simulations, are you estimating the accident rates?

KENDALL: We’ve built a scalable (simulation) system to extract insights from every part of the drive. We classify these into scenarios and look at the metrics for each one, whether that’s driving through traffic lights or going through a roundabout in the rain.

It gives us a good view on what we are and aren’t good at – and where we should focus our resources and our learning.

Within each of these scenarios, we can accurately estimate human-level performances and what we need to beat. For example, humans can pass through roundabout intersections without an accident causing injury 99.999 percent of the time. We want to be able to surpass this.

TRANSFORM: What has the Microsoft for Startups: Autonomous Driving program meant for your company and achieving your vision?

KENDALL: In the early days, we were building an autonomous car in our garage, driving it around the block and testing it.

We had nothing to show and everything to prove. Despite that, Microsoft was excited about what we were building. This early engagement was critical. More than the financial credit support, the engineering support around the backend and the quick turnaround to our requests and questions allowed us to get that speed of iteration we needed.

Because we had this speed of iteration, we were able to quickly graduate from a house and build a headquarters and an organization that ultimately decided to build our infrastructure at scale in Azure.

Computer vision shows a car driving down a city street. — Wayve’s technology models the real world with computer vision.

TRANSFORM: When your technology is fully deployed, how will this look in the real world?

KENDALL: We envision a world where we have large fleets of connected vehicles, all sharing experiences to improve and train a driving brain that ultimately learns from its mistakes and learns to adapt to society’s needs at a rapid pace.

TRANSFORM: And this self-driving network will be available to all who want to use it?

KENDALL: Yes, for people who are disabled, self-driving is a technology that should massively increase their mobility options. It should reduce the stigma and the cost (of today’s accessible transportation options).

Also, I don’t want to see self-driving only deployed in affluent areas with expensive infrastructure. I want to see self-driving address urban societies throughout the world. This requires a more intelligent autonomous driving system which is able to understand the world around it. This is only possible with machine learning.

TRANSFORM: When might this become part of everyday life?

KENDALL: Over the next few years, Wayve will get to a point where we have the safety case in place, where we’ll invite members of the public to experience riding the Wayve. They will do this, first, with a safety driver supervising the ride, then as an autonomous service.

By the end of this decade, I think riding the Wayve will be dominant within the multimodal transportation options we use in cities throughout the world. It will just be a matter of time before it is as prevalent as today’s ride-hailing services.

Top photo: Alex Kendall. (All photos courtesy of Wayve.)

Posted on October 12, 2020 by — Leave a comment

How a scattered Indian nation kept its songs alive when it couldn’t sing face-to-face

Away from her governance work, Eastwood also has led or participated in many of the virtual cultural sessions. Next to a tabletop in her Anacortes home, she set up a ring light stand, affixed her smart phone to that stand and activated the Teams app, sharing an overhead view of her hands as they created cattail mats and woolen headbands.

Samish citizens who participated in her sessions were shipped boxes of materials (such as dried cattail leaves) to use as they followed Eastwood’s step-by-step instructions from their homes.

Other tribal members have followed her lead. At her home in Seattle, Baker has virtually taught fellow citizens how to use strips of cedar bark to weave a decorative heart and a fish.

And from his place in Anacortes, Wooten has led several remote singing classes, covering “The Bone Game Song” plus Samish flag songs, farewell songs and paddle songs.

A Samish drum rests against a man's left hip as he places a drum stick on the surface. — Tom Wooten plays his traditional Samish drum.

“The songs go way back – before radios and record players,” Wooten says with a smile. “Tribal citizens are hungry to know the past. To move forward, you have to know where you’ve been.

“That platform allows us to reach folks who definitely wouldn’t have been able to come, not just because of COVID, but because our membership is scattered all over the world,” he adds.

Distance is something Samish people have dealt with for generations.

The first bits of archeological evidence linked to the Samish tribe – serrated bison bones and stone butchering tools –are 14,400 years old, carbon dating showed. They were found on Orcas Island, the largest of the San Juan Islands of the Pacific Northwest.

The head and beak of a heron perched in a tree stand out against the orange sun in the sky. — A heron perched above the shoreline in Anacortes.

Since the last Ice Age, the region has served as the traditional Samish homeland. When white settlers arrived there in the late 1800s, they began destroying a large Samish community house. In the ensuing decades, those settlers drove out scores of Samish people, creating a regional diaspora.

During World War II, some of the Samish people who had remained in Anacortes found better-paying work in the airline industry or in shipyards far away, causing the tribe to further separate.

“What made Samish people unique,” Eastwood says, “was we had to dig in and find out how to survive by following opportunities elsewhere but also stay connected with our scattered families.

“Part of our present-day story is based on the fact that the tribe hadn’t ever been given its own reservation,” she adds.

A Samish totem pole stands outside against a smoky sky. — A Samish story pole stands against the sky and trees in Anacortes.

That far-flung citizenry even earned the Samish a legal nickname – one that Eastwood loves.

In 1994, the U.S. Department of Interior conducted a hearing on federal recognition of the Samish as an Indian tribe. Administrative Law Judge David Torbett conducted the hearing.

At that time – the early days of the internet – tribal leaders already were tech adopters, using cell phones, personal email, and faxes to pull together a dispersed people.

Torbett, who ruled in favor of Samish recognition, recognized their technical savvy. In his opinion, he dubbed the Samish the “Cyber Tribe.”

“It gives me chills, even today,” Eastwood says. “Literally, it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”

A woman beads while sitting at a table in front of a laptop. — Leslie Eastwood learns traditional beading via Teams.

That same digital familiarity remains intact. The tribe has a thriving website, Facebook, and Instagram pages. Most citizens are comfortable using smart phones and apps, Eastwood says.

Their tech acumen also led Samish leaders to select a communication platform that ensured only tribal citizens could participate in the virtual sessions – particularly when it came to safeguarding the nation’s business information, Wooten says.

The Samish nation is a member of the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), which seeks to improve the overall cybersecurity posture of the nation’s state, local, tribal and territorial governments. The MS-ISAC is part of the nonprofit Center for Internet Security (CIS).

“With the internet the way it is today, we were looking for something that had security,” Wooten says.

“It’s been a benefit for folks to interact and know what’s going on. They’re more informed and our participation has gone up during the pandemic,” he adds. “We’re going to continue to utilize Teams well beyond COVID-19. It has saved us time and money and allowed the government to keep working.”

Next to a two-story building, a sign reads — Samish Indian Nation headquarters in Anacortes.

The recommendation to choose Teams over other platforms came from JR Walters, the Samish nation’s IT director. The selection, Walters says, was rooted in frequent headlines about IT breaches and the tribe’s implementation of CIS security controls, a set of cybersecurity best practices.

But it was one early, virtual meeting that Walters never will forget, he says. It took place around the time that the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March. Samish leaders began holding daily Teams calls to discuss the nation’s situational awareness.

After several of those meetings, participants began to get a better feel for Teams functions, including custom and blurred backgrounds.

One morning, a Samish leader entered the remote meeting with a new background: The bridge of the “Enterprise,” the spaceship from the TV series “Star Trek.”

“It added relief to a situation that was feeling super stressful,” Walters says. “At the time, we didn’t know what was happening. Schools were closing. We were talking about what we were going to do as a government.

“Then someone just changes their background, and it brings a little joy,” he adds. “It lightened the mood and it made things better.”

Top photo: Tom Wooten, chairman of the Samish Indian Nation, stands along the shoreline in Anacortes, Washington.

All photos by Dan DeLong.

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