How Azure can encourage digital innovation

Gap inc. announced it has established a strategic partnership with Microsoft to drive its digital transformation strategies and continue to create new customer experiences across all brands, including Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic, Athleta, Hill City and Intermix.

 With Microsoft as its primary cloud provider, Gap is focused on technology innovation, speed and flexibility, using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 to deploy new business capabilities and work more efficiently across the organisation.

"As we grow our value and active business and accelerate online and mobile, the ability to scale our technology in a secure environment to accommodate this growth is critical," said Sally Gilligan, chief information officer, Gap Inc.

"The Microsoft Azure platform provides our teams with the ability to deliver innovative and personalised capabilities for our customers with speed supported by a strong depth of technology expertise from the Microsoft team."

Gap is working closely with Microsoft to migrate hundreds of applications to Azure, focusing on a seamless and personalised experience for customers as they shop across stores, online and mobile. Initially, the company is moving key inventory, stores and site capabilities to Azure for trusted, scalable and cost-effective computing.

These critical capabilities support a portfolio of brands and products available for purchase in more than 90 countries, through multiple channels including over 3,100 company-operated stores. Using the Microsoft Azure platform-as-a-service offerings, Gap is accelerating its time to market for new customer services, empowering customers with greater flexibility in where and how they want to shop.

The Microsoft Azure cloud supports the company's DevOps model through which engineers and product management teams rapidly develop, deploy and test new capabilities.

By building and centralising its data platform on Azure, Gap can apply advanced analytics and machine learning to gain a comprehensive understanding of customers across channels, and to deliver personalised merchandising, marketing and service for all brands in its portfolio.

The company is using Microsoft Power BI to empower more employees at Gap Inc. to visualise and act on information to create the best customer experience and drive the business.

Gap Inc. is also deploying Microsoft 365 solutions to provide its employees across its brands and functions around the world with more powerful ways to communicate, collaborate and share insights with one another.

Microsoft corporate VP Shelley Bransten says, "We are thrilled to partner with them to further modernise their customer and employee applications, turn data into dollars and build powerful new applications and services that drive digital transformation and put customers at the heart of their business."