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The company has unveiled cloud offerings for the financial, manufacturing and nonprofit verticals.

Microsoft is continuing its push to deliver vertical cloud solutions for specific industry sectors. This week the company announced three more of these “industry clouds” for financial services, manufacturing and nonprofit. These industry-specific cloud offerings now join Microsoft’s previously announced vertical cloud packages for healthcare and retail.

The new clouds combine common data models, workflows and application programming interfaces (APIs) with industry-specific components and standards. They integrate with other Microsoft platforms such as Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform tools. They aim to connect front-end productivity tasks to backend data management, according to Microsoft.

A targeted response to the changes imposed by COVID

Alysa Taylor, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Business Applications & Global Industry, introduced the new offerings. In a blog post this week, she explained the reasons behind the new launches.

“Over the past year, we have experienced dramatic disruption around the world,” she writes. “Companies in every industry have turned to digital technologies for the resilience and agility necessary to survive. The urgency for entire industries to transform at scale has never been greater.”

Taylor goes on to explain how Microsoft is responding to the challenges of the pandemic. “We have accelerated our efforts to support and co-innovate with customers and partners — both now and long term,” she writes, “with industry-specific cloud offerings that can provide a launchpad for further innovations.”

Industry-specific, targeted solutions

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services brings together Microsoft solutions, unique templates, API’s and additional industry-specific standards, according to Taylor. These combine with with multi-layered security and compliance coverage to deliver differentiated customer experiences, improve employee collaboration and productivity, manage risk and modernize core systems.

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing delivers capabilities that support the core processes and requirements of the industry, says Taylor. The end-to-end manufacturing solutions connect people, assets, workflows and business processes, helping organizations become more resilient.

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit delivers cloud capabilities to the most common nonprofit scenarios such as constituent engagement, program design and delivery, volunteer management and fundraising, according to Taylor. These scenarios all brought together by the nonprofit common data model, she says.

The new cloud solutions will be available at the end of June.