When e-commerce and online retail first appeared, many people—including some experts—speculated that it signaled the beginning of the end of brick-and-mortar retailers. For a moment, there was near agreement that physical stores were a thing of the past, but this was a misconception.

As with other overblown predictions, the so-called end of retail stores didn’t happen. Instead, the industry was taken over by a new breed of tech-savvy retailers that harnessed the power of digital transformation and analytics to create unified, alluring experiences for today’s consumers. Retailers are still adapting to this new, digitally driven business model, but most are already reaping the benefits that the new digital ecosystem offers.

In this article, you’ll learn about the challenges that retailers can face in analyzing their business performance, and what they can do to improve on their data-driven initiatives.

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The cloud has profoundly transformed the way organizations operate by simplifying delivery, scale, and management to drive innovation. Cloud technology also greatly empowers development teams by allowing them to shorten development cycles and re-envision the nature of business operations.

No technology is without its unique challenges, though. Security and IT teams sometimes struggle with the adoption of a cloud-native approach because of the friction it can generate with existing applications, some of which lack the requirements for scalable cloud integration capabilities.

Read this article to learn about the three main characteristics that network detection and response (NDR) solutions must have to ensure scalable, frictionless security and native integration with industry-leading solutions such as Microsoft Azure.

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With recent changes in the tax industry, H&R Block made plans to stay ahead, providing seamless multichannel experiences and unifying its disparate data sources to better serve its customers. By moving its various workloads to Microsoft SQL Server 2017 and Microsoft Azure and using Azure data services, the tax provider has been able to enhance service delivery, scale to meet its peaks in demand, and accelerate innovation. Watch this video for the story.

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HP Inc. handles 600 million technical support contacts each year and they want to make each one a satisfying experience for the customer. They built a virtual agent using the Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI solution for customer service to streamline the process. This video explains how.