Marketplace, Online Support and Remote Work: Via embraces the digital world supported by Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure

Digital commerce has long been not only a trend, but a reality for those working in retail. A good experience for consumers and allied sellers, as well as a robust structure to withstand spikes in access, typical of periods of the year such as Black Friday, are imperative for those seeking to thrive in this new retail context. At the heart of all that is data management modernization. 

Via is one of the largest retail organizations in the nation, managing companies such as Casas Bahia, Pontofrio, Extra.com and others. It has physical stores in more than 400 Brazilian cities and approximately 53,000 employees. In addition to brick-and-mortar stores, the company offers its products through e-commerce, and that online presence was recently strengthened following new company guidelines and modernizing through the alliance with Microsoft. 

With different implementations over time, the company found in Microsoft technologies a fuel for the distinction of its operation, as it obtains benefits generated by a broad environment of integrated tools which range from communication and collaboration between teams – a solution that reduced the damage from the closure of physical stores in the pandemic, maintaining the work of 20,000 sellers – even the structure of a robust marketplace, to generate a good experience for all parties involved. 

In addition, Via powered its infrastructure and has scalable, secure support and a single data repository with support and a suite of Microsoft Azure tools. 

The first step: improve collaboration and security through Microsoft 365 and Azure 

In 2018, the company sought to structure and enhance its areas of collaboration and communication and in this way provide technology to compose its internal processes. In this regard, it deployed Microsoft 365 – a business suite of applications with capabilities aimed at collaborative, simultaneous work and communication. But with employees in the office routine, the use of the tool and its features such as Microsoft Teams was not fully disseminated by the company. 

The next step was to bring Via's support to the cloud on Azure, generating agility and flexibility. Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform, with over 200 cloud products and services to build, run, and manage applications with user choice tools and structures. 

That same year, the expectation of sales growth, in addition to Black Friday's demand peak, generated the need for a more robust structure for its data center and found a response in Azure. The company maintained its structure on-premises and created an extension of its e-commerce and data center to direct traffic in the event of reaching 100% capacity, the so-called "trans-shipment." 

Expanding modernization to sellers: the marketplace in Dynamics 365 

Since 2019, Via has taken its digital transformation to the next level and migrated its marketplace to the Microsoft environment. "We opted for Dynamics 365, as our initial goal was to automate some processes, such as entering sellers into the marketplace and having a complete view of that day, as well as ensuring more touchpoints," said Edson de Oliveira Tavares, CTO of Via. 

The entry of sellers, or stores, into the platform was automated – a process that once took weeks was reduced to just seven hours – also creating a communication channel to organize orders, payments and even an action during the holiday seasons. “We were very successful and were able to accelerate sellers' entry into the platform. We achieved scalability and performance with the solution,” said Edson. 

Everything is supported by Azure Kubernetes Service, a container-based application management software which orchestrates container deployment and management at scale and enables the execution of modern, portable, microservices-based applications. With Dynamics 365 and Azure support, the company achieved record sales of 1.1 billion reales in one day and 2.2 billion reales during the Black Friday period (Thursday through Monday). 

In February 2020, with the entry of Microsoft partner AlfaPeople, Via went on to explore more features offered for Dynamics 365, streamlining sellers' attention and, as a result, gaining more agility in store entry. "We replaced a manual process with a portal that receives the information and launched Dynamics 365, allowing us to consult what stage each seller is at in the onboarding process, including if it's stopped. Those systems are onboarding by automation," explained Carina Baroni, functional consultant for Dynamics 365 at AlfaPeople. 

Remote Work and Online Support: transformation processes accelerated by the pandemic and enabled by Microsoft Teams, WVD and AKS 

In March 2020, amid the pandemic and social distancing policies, more than a thousand Via physical stores closed, as well as their offices, and all of the company's operations needed to be recalculated overnight. The company's first initiative was to create a solution called "Chama no Zap" (Call on Whats) where the sales team, supported by Azure, made online sales quickly and easily with a good conversion rate. 

Without delay, the company took a step further towards its digital transformation with tools to empower remote work and boost online sales so that its 20,000 sellers continued to market products even if they were remote, allowing them to receive their commission. To do this, tools such as Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), Microsoft Teams, and Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) were essential. 

WVD is a cloud-executed desktop and application digitization service that served as an alternative to a large and complex VPN structure, thus providing a secure architecture for Via. WVD is currently part of a process that spans between 500 and 600 employees. 

The other process directly affected in this context was internal collaboration between employees, enabled for remote work with Microsoft 365 resources, especially Microsoft Teams, a solution used by approximately 12,000 people daily. According to Filipe Jaske, Director of Infrastructure, Operations and Cyber Security, the company already had Microsoft Teams available, but only in this context was it fully adopted by the company's employees, supported by Microsoft. "It was a series of intense weeks in which Microsoft helped us prepare the Teams structure, and we also maintained our focus on security layers," he said. 

Finally, the technology infrastructure for that entire process needed to be reinforced and offer support for such a rapid deployment, and such a large volume is from Azure Kubernetes Service. "AKS proved to be a robust structure and was a big driver of deliveries," Filipe said. That process was built before Black Friday 2020, when the company had Microsoft support to ensure stable operation during the pandemic. 

Safety in all parts of the transformation process 

To provide process security, Via used Intune for device management, a service that integrates the security portion of Microsoft 365, as well as MFA (multi-factor authentication), which adds a layer of protection to users' entry who need to provide extra identity verification to access accounts and applications. 

In addition, Azure Sentinel, an Azure service that uses large-scale intelligence to detect and respond to security threats, was also deployed. Filipe celebrates the security of the solution. "When we looked at security layers, that had actually helped us a lot in managing equipment remotely. It was a big step forward in the timeline here," he said. 

To top it off, Azure Security Center, in conjunction with Azure Defender, enabled broad security posture of Microsoft cloud workloads, including the different containers and servers. Secure Score was another major player supporting the monitoring and dynamic analysis of the maturity level of controls applied across the Azure environment. 

Data at the center of modernization: Via improves its data management 

Even in 2020, with the operation supported by Azure, Via led efforts to improve its data management. It thus incorporated Azure Databricks into its operation, an environment that facilitates the creation, training, management and deployment of Machine Learning and deep learning models at scale. It also incorporated Azure Data Factory, a fully managed serverless data integration service for ingesting, preparing, and transforming all data at scale, as well as Azure Synapse, a feature that offers a significant upgrade in the ability to process large volumes of unstructured data at once. "We put a lot of effort into carrying out this strategy of modernizing the entire legacy data platform, accelerating new project cases and migrating our environment that was in a legacy environment to the Azure cloud platform, using its components to drive business opportunities," said Bruno Sposito, Chief Technology Officer at Via. 

Power BI also integrates with the solution for data visualization. Bruno highlighted that the company gained agility with the solution. "It's a differentiating factor to have a service managed by Microsoft at the Azure layer. We do not need an infrastructure and support effort from our team," he stated. Adoption occurred in June 2020 and the solution served as the basis for real-time tracking reports of Black Friday sales for the same year. 

Another crucial point of that management is the development of enterprise applications, DevOps. It's done by GitHub Enterprise, which modernized and streamlined the delivery of company applications. "That agility in problem solving is very important to the agility the retail industry needs. Working with the Azure platform was crucial to our strategy of accelerating deliveries and modernizing technology," he celebrates. 

Black Friday 2020: in a remote world, Via reaps the fruits of digitization

On Black Friday 2020, with all that structure in operation, Via recorded approximately $3 billion in sales, an increase of 37% compared to the same period last year. In e-commerce, growth was 99% in sales also compared to 2019. 

Filipe Jaske, considers the experience to be very good: "With Black Friday 2020, with our all-cloud-supported e-commerce was the big step that year. Our systems did not present complications because we were prepared, a result that is part of our work with Microsoft, which also supported us in the development and training of our technology teams through the exchange of experiences and knowledge," he stated. 

Filipe celebrates the WVD solution, maintaining the company's sales and the sales team continued to earn their commission with remote work. Microsoft 365 also looks positive, as something that drove company communication, including integration of chat, calendar, equipment, and everything the service offers. Finally, the marketplace became more robust: the team that handles store entrances uses Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing, while the support team uses Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Omnichannel. 

"We sell a lot without any incidents. The platform supported the operation very well, all with Azure's support. This movement of microservices, the use of cloud in security layers in addition to elasticity, culminated in Black Friday 2020, which was extraordinary and was only possible due to the capacity and structure developed," concluded Filipe.

As Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 are supported with Azure, the company benefits from the full potential of the Microsoft platform and the data resulting from all these processes is centralized and visualized in the company's Power BI, which is enhanced by Azure Cognitive Services at the application layer, providing intelligence to the process and anticipating the conversion propensity of sellers. 

Bruno assesses that the experience provided agility, performance and robustness to the operation. "It is very illustrative to think that in two years we will have completely migrated our entire data operation to the cloud. Much of what was built didn't exist, but all of the legacy environments we had and the multi-year operation of Via are being rebuilt into the Azure environment in an agile manner and supported by Microsoft," he said.