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Insight case study

Insight puts client outcomes first with analytics and AI solutions on Microsoft Azure

Businesses want to utilize the cloud but often don’t know how

The business benefits of the cloud, advanced analytics, and AI are clear, but many organizations don’t know how to deploy them in their own environment.

Finding a partner in Insight

Insight’s deep expertise with Microsoft Azure enables them to help customers unlock new, powerful capabilities and insights in their own businesses.

Accelerated growth for customers

Insight has helped businesses in diverse industries accelerate their digital transformations with Microsoft Azure, reaching new customers and bolstering growth.

Insight provides cutting-edge technology solutions to organizations of all sizes, pairing its deep expertise with end-to-end capabilities to help businesses run smarter. In the top one percent of all Microsoft partners globally, Insight has earned 18 Microsoft competencies reflecting its best-in-class capabilities, top-notch expertise, and commitment to excellence.

Through strategic acquisitions, Insight has expanded its resources and capabilities to support clients' digital transformation initiatives. The company has itself transformed in the last five years, moving from a legacy channel partner to aligning with clients' larger outcomes by leading with innovative solutions.

Today, the company is uniquely positioned and can practically do it all—build cohesive solutions that pull together everything a client needs to rapidly realize value for their technology investment and grow their business. A case in point: with the goal of making digital transformation accessible to more clients, Insight has invested in creating a reusable framework for quickly deploying analytics and AI-enabled IoT solutions. The Connected Platform integrates cloud and edge technology across Insight's broad partner network. It can be deployed quickly and securely to leverage Insight's cloud-managed services for ongoing support.

During the COVID-19 public health crisis, Insight is using its Connected Platform to deploy intelligent Detection and Prevention solutions for guarding against the virus and back-to-work initiatives.

An early leader in analytics and AI

Insight has a strong heritage of innovation and achievement in the field of data and has evolved its offerings from early support for SQL databases to SQL-as-a-service in the cloud, and now to analytics and AI. As the 2018 Microsoft Worldwide AI Partner of the Year, Insight is firmly established as a leader in the field with an extensive analytics and AI portfolio.

Whether deploying a large data mart, using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics to manage huge datasets, building machine learning models, or adding predictive capabilities to an existing application, Insight is seeing analytics and AI come to dominate the enterprise space and is equipped to meet all of its clients' needs. "We’re all about integrating the capabilities of advanced analytics and AI technologies into the human experience," said Matt Jackson, VP of Services for Digital Innovation at Insight.

Committed to customer-centricity

Insight has earned a reputation for helping clients across numerous industries achieve remarkable business outcomes. Examples of high-profile—and highly successful—engagements in the Finance and Healthcare sectors include:

A large American bank, known for disrupting and outpacing the legacy brokerage industry with phone- and web-based trading, came to Insight for tools to reach the next generation of investors. The firm developed a strategy and solution, leveraging Microsoft Azure Bot Framework with analytics and AI, to engage Millennial and Gen-Z prospects on social media platforms with investing advice and the ability to set up accounts and make trades. The initiative had a tremendous impact on the bank's growth and earned Insight the Microsoft Partner of the Year award.

At the time that a large American healthcare system engaged Insight, it was an eight-hospital network seeking to achieve the holy grail of healthcare: Improve patient outcomes while simultaneously controlling costs. To reconcile these seemingly conflicting goals, Insight developed a predictive solution that analyzes multiple data streams of information on patient length of stay to optimize the scheduling of healthcare professionals across the network. Deploying some 1,000 Surface tablets to facilitate patient intake on the new system, the healthcare provider reduced costs by USD30 million in the first 18 months, improved both patient care and employee satisfaction, and went on to acquire 24 additional hospitals—all of which now rely on the Insight solution built on Microsoft Azure analytics and AI services.

Microsoft Azure is the only option in the enterprise

Early in its pivot to the cloud, Insight saw that Microsoft, through innovation and investment in best-of-breed tools, was going to be the industry leader, especially in the enterprise space. Insight's foundational relationship of more than 25 years with Microsoft and its commitment to putting clients first made the decision to choose Microsoft Azure for its signature solutions an easy and obvious one.

Insight believes that building modern solutions leveraging the Microsoft analytics and AI stack is solidly in the best interest of its clients. The company frequently collaborates closely with the Microsoft field to focus on client outcomes in envisioning sessions to determine how to achieve the client's business goals.

A client, for example, may be seeking to improve customer satisfaction or loyalty, or to deploy a new enterprise solution to support a remote workforce—particularly relevant in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Insight drives both the strategic and technology direction of these cloud-native solutions as well as execution and managed services.

"Together, Microsoft and Insight bring differentiated technology and delivery capabilities to empower customers with future-ready solutions, powered by analytics and AI,” said Simran Sachar, Analytics and AI Director, Microsoft. “With our deeper cloud, data, and AI partnership with Insight, we help customers realize superior outcomes with a faster path to success."

“Together, Microsoft and Insight bring differentiated technology and delivery capabilities to empower customers with future-ready solutions, powered by analytics and AI. With our deeper cloud, data, and AI partnership with Insight, we help customers realize superior outcomes with a faster path to success."

—Simran Sachar, Analytics and AI Director, Microsoft

Simplifying the path to success

Insight is finding that, increasingly, organizations are recognizing how challenging data projects can be. The firm is working to simplify the path to success for its clients. A large piece of this is a discovery process centered on understanding what the client needs to succeed and build a better business.

"Many technologies right now are being pointed at simplifying the technological profile," said Ken Seier, Chief Architect for Data and AI at Insight. "When we look at the major cloud vendors—and in the enterprise space, Microsoft is the only option for us—we see combinations of big data tools, relational tools, and AI tools being brought together under a single header to allow a single set of developers, or a single set of super users, to really get access to data at scale, the computational power required to analyze it, and then to present it back to a user: the full life cycle.”

Seier went on to explain, “We see that everywhere in the business—this simplification, or rationalization, of what used to be a complex ecosystem down to a very small set of tools. Companies that rely on these tools are going to find themselves in the pole position as they begin their digital journeys with these technologies."

Insight is building end-to-end solutions on the Microsoft Azure stack combining big data, relational, and AI tools to allow developers and clients to get access to data at scale with the computational power required to analyze the data and then deliver it to the end-user. Cloud technologies are maturing, and more organizations are interested in applying analytics and AI to solve their business problems. There is also, however, a growing expectation of higher quality and lower risk.

Insight will continue to invest in industry-specific solutions, harnessing the best practices and IP the firm has developed on Microsoft Azure in both the production environment and for reactive managed services. 'Insight's evolving investment in Microsoft analytics and AI will allow the firm to impact more organizations by making these advanced technologies scalable, repeatable, and supportable—Insight's top priority to meet its 'clients' business needs.

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