Microsoft Cloud delivers for Dubai-based startup

Dubai-based startup Digiteam, a sales digitisation and gamification mobile solution, had never worked on a cloud deployment before.

Digiteam’s clients are primarily in the financial services industry, where regulations require data remains in the country, and therefore on-premise.

But a new client required Digiteam to avail its solution over a safe, compliant, and local public cloud platform. After weighing available options, only Microsoft Cloud came close to fulfilling these requirements.

Digiteam is a mobile-first application that helps increase sales by streamlining the sales process and helping sales teams. It helps them register all their activities, which are visible to their managers in real-time, and allows them to track and guide them while eliminating the need for spreadsheets, explains Mirhan Mandour, managing director, Digiteam.

Gamification adds a level of competition and engagement for the teams that enables them to increase their productivity. “We have seen clients increase their sales from 10 and up to 30 per cent,” says Mandour.

With Microsoft, Digiteam found a cloud ecosystem with in-built tools to help startups succeed. “We believe that startups bring in a very unique solution to our partner ecosystem,” says Kanta Mirchandani, territory channel lead, Microsoft, UAE.

“We have provisioned and graduated 10,000 startups today and extended $800m of cloud credit under our ‘Microsoft for Startups’ program,” she adds.

End-to-end support
Microsoft delivers a multi-stage approach and an engagement model with startups. “We offer startups an end-to-end journey, which starts with technical support that helps them build their solution, we help them market their solution on our marketplace, and then we also help them co-sell,” explains Mirchandani.

“We love to see startups succeed,” Mirchandani adds.

The Microsoft team quickly realized Digiteam offered a unique solution that had great potential in the market. “We worked with them and offered technical guidance on how they could build their solution on top of a scalable Cloud Platform such as ours,” explains Mirchandani.

In 2019, Microsoft opened its first Middle East cloud data centres in Dubai and Abu Dhabi to cater to an expanding client base in the region. The two data centre locations offer Microsoft’s Azure, Office 365 and Dynamic 365.

“These data centres help us address local data residency and data latency requirements that a lot of local customers have been asking for,” says Mirchandani.

Microsoft Cloud has been a game-changer for Digiteam. “The agility and support that we got from the Microsoft team were amazing. We now aim to lead with cloud deployments. Microsoft is more than just a technology vendor to us; they’re a partner that is helping us reach out to our clients helping us scale and meet the mutual requirements,” says Mandour.