By Nick Parker
As President of the Industry & Partner Sales (IPS) organization, Nick Parker leads Microsoft’s multi-billion-dollar global sales business spanning industry, partner and enterprise commercial teams.
At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We're doing this by leading a cloud-first transformation that democratizes access to the tools and data our customers need to make an impact.
This cloud-first transformation has never been more apparent than now, and it would not be possible without our partners.
Our partners are the foundation for our global scale and impact. Microsoft works with companies from across the globe that leverage Azure, including Azure AI, to be a force multiplier in the solutions our technology can provide to organizations.
We invest in these companies because we know we are at our best when technology is the servant of our joint customers' business.
We invest in these companies because we know we are at our best when technology is the servant of our joint customers' business. Our partners are innovating for the future by applying the power of Azure to help customers solve their most pressing business challenges and seize their biggest opportunities.
Icertis has done an excellent job exemplifying this, resulting in them receiving the 2022 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award for the U.S.
Icertis is a pioneer in the contract intelligence space. Contracts are the foundation of commerce – they define a company's relationships with its suppliers, customers, employees, and partners. Contract intelligence goes beyond contract management and ensures the intent of these relationships is correctly captured in the contract, then fully realized in practice.
The Azure-native Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform transforms contract information into structured, connected, and on-demand data. It's amazing what happens when systems get smarter because they are enriched with contract data and business relationships are supercharged because their full value is realized.
Icertis has done an excellent job exemplifying this, resulting in them receiving the 2022 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award for the U.S.
Contract intelligence impacts an entire enterprise. Cited research indicates that in a typical company, 25% of the workforce interacts with contracts across every department, per World Commerce & Contracting. By uniquely integrating across the Microsoft Cloud—including Office 365, Teams, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform—Icertis puts contract data directly into the tools our customers use every day. There is no other CLM provider that enables customers to achieve more transformation and value from their investments in Microsoft technologies.
The Icertis integration for Microsoft Teams is particularly powerful. Contracting is a team sport, and the Icertis Experience for Teams allows customers to leverage the fastest-growing communications platform in the world to collaborate on these critical documents. This is the differentiated value that Teams and Icertis offer.
ICI Customer Success
Our joint customer, HERE Technologies, used Icertis AI technology to digitize and analyze 70,000 legacy sales contracts rapidly. Before Icertis, this contract data was inaccessible; after Icertis, sales teams had a valuable pool of data to help identify opportunities in their portfolio.
"We now have a single source of truth," says Simon Anolick, director of legal counsel at HERE. "This allows different functions to locate those documents and work with them in an efficient way. This helps revenue generation—we're not losing opportunities."
HERE was able to complete this project 4 months ahead of schedule, thanks to the precision of Icertis' use of Azure AI. Additional examples include:
- Best Buy improving rebate turnaround time by 70%
- Accenture unlocking commercial insights across 90,000 customer contracts in just 9 months
- Daimler reducing supplier contracting time from 6 weeks to 1 week
Microsoft has seen the time it takes to create a contract reduced by half since deploying Icertis within its operations.
Taking Transformation Further
Icertis recently released AI Studio, which utilizes Azure AI models to analyze large sets of documents and generate contract intelligence for real-time insights and decision-making. AI Studio allows business users to connect contract data with systems across the enterprise to uncover growth opportunities and identify potential risk.
"Digital transformation requires that executives, managers, and frontline employees work together to rethink how every aspect of the business should operate."
Icertis has already seen customers leverage AI Studio to quickly understand the impact of supply-chain disruptions, sanctions, inflation, and other fast-moving scenarios so they can stay out in front—all without requiring support from IT or data scientists.
In a recent article for Harvard Business Review, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote, "Digital transformation requires that executives, managers, and frontline employees work together to rethink how every aspect of the business should operate."
Contracts are a foundational aspect of business. And thanks to Icertis and Azure, every company—any industry, anywhere in the world–has the tools they need to transform them.
To learn more about Icertis' enduring partnership with Microsoft, please visit our Microsoft partner page.
About the Author
As President of the Industry & Partner Sales (IPS) organization, Nick Parker leads Microsoft’s multi-billion-dollar global sales business spanning industry, partner and enterprise commercial teams. The combination of global Industry Teams, the Strategic Partnerships Team (SPT), the Enterprise Commercial Operations team, Global Partner Solutions (GPS), and IPS Strategy & Operations, adds increased dimension to Microsoft's sales capabilities. With Microsoft's unique and differentiated cloud technology, IPS drives business growth through creating new industry market opportunity, increased sales and consumption with industry solutions, strategic deal origination and acceleration, structured enterprise engagement and partner ecosystem success.