Marketplace, online service, and remote work: Via embraces digital, powered by Dynamics 365, Azure, and comprehensive Microsoft architecture

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

In 2018, the company sought to structure and leverage its spheres of collaboration and communication and, thus, bring technology to compose its internal processes. Therefore, it implemented Microsoft 365 – a suite of applications for companies with features aimed at collaborative, simultaneous work and communication. However, with employees in office routines, the use of the tool and its functionalities, such as Microsoft Teams, was not fully disseminated throughout the company. 

The next step was to get Azure to take Via's support to the cloud, generating agility and flexibility. Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform, with more than 200 cloud products and services to create, run, and manage applications with tools and frameworks of the user's choice.

In the same year, the expectation of growth in sales, added to the peak demand of Black Friday, generated the need for a more robust structure for its data center and found an answer in Azure. The company maintained its on-premises structure and created an extension of its e-commerce and data center to drive traffic in the event it reaches 100% capacity, the so-called "overflow." 

Expanding modernization to sellers: the marketplace in Dynamics 365 

As of 2019, Via has taken another step in its digital transformation and migrated its marketplace to the Microsoft environment. "We've 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 this journey, as well as guaranteeing more points of contact," said Edson de Oliveira Tavares, CTO at Via.

The entry of sellers, or retailers, into the platform was automated – a process that took weeks has been reduced to just seven hours – and a communication channel was also being created to organize orders, payments, and even action during festive seasons. "We were very successful and were able to accelerate the entry of sellers into the platform. We achieved scalability and performance with the solution," points out Edson. 

All of this is supported by Azure Kubernetes Service, container-based application management software that 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 set a record sales of 1.1 billion reais in a day and 2.2 billion reais in the Black Friday period – Thursday through Monday.

In February 2020, with the entry of partner Microsoft, AlfaPeople, Via began to explore more features offered for Dynamics 365, streamlining the service of sellers and, as a result, gaining more agility in the entry of retailers. "We replaced a manual process with a portal that receives the information and sends it to Dynamics 365, allowing you to see at what stage each seller is in the onboarding process, including whether it has stopped. These systems automate onboarding," explains Carina Baroni, Dynamics 365 functional consultant at Alfapeople. 

Remote work and online service: pandemic-accelerated transformation processes enabled by Microsoft Teams, WVD and AKS 

In March 2020, amid the pandemic and social distancing policies, more than 1,000 Via physical stores were closed, as were its offices, and the entire company's operation needed to be recalculated overnight. The company's first initiative was to create a solution called "Call on Zap", in which the sales team, supported by Azure, made online sales quickly and simply, with a good conversion rate.

Without delay, the company took another step towards its digital transformation, with tools to leverage remote work and drive online selling, so its 20,000 salespeople continued to market products even remotely, and could earn their commission. To this end, tools such as Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), Microsoft Teams, and Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) were essential.

WVD is an application and desktop digitization service running in the cloud that has served as an alternative to a large and complex VPN structure (Virtual Private Network) thus also providing a secure architecture for Via. Currently, WVD is part of a process that covers between 500 and 600 employees.

Another 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 adopted once and for all by company employees, with support from Microsoft. 

"These were intense weeks when Microsoft helped us prepare the Teams framework and when we also focused on layers of security," he points out.

Finally, the technological infrastructure for this entire process needed to be reinforced, and the support for such a fast implementation and such a large volume is the Azure Kubernetes Service. "The AKS proved to be a robust structure and was a great lever of deliveries," comments Filipe. This process was built before Black Friday 2020, when the company relied on Microsoft support to ensure a stable operation during the pandemic.

Security in every part of the transformation process 

To bring security to the process, 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 the entry of users, who need to provide an extra identity verification to access accounts and applications.

In addition, Microsoft Sentinel, a service that uses large-scale intelligence to detect and respond to security threats, has also been deployed. Filipe celebrates the security of the solution. "When we look at the layers of security, this has really helped us a lot in managing equipment remotely. It was a big advance in the timeline here," he points out.

In conclusion, Azure Security Center, in conjunction with Microsoft Defender, enabled a comprehensive security posture of workloads in the Microsoft Cloud, including the various containers and servers. Security Score was another major player that supported the monitoring and dynamic analysis of the level of maturity of controls applied across the Azure environment. 

Data at the heart of modernization: Via improves your data management

Also in 2020, with the operation supported by Azure, Via directed efforts to improve its data management. Thus, it incorporated Azure Databricks into its operation, an environment that facilitates the creation, training, management and implementation of machine learning and deep learning models at scale; Azure Data Factory, a fully managed serverless data integration service for ingesting, preparing, and transforming all data at scale; and Azure Synapse, functionality 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 from a legacy environment to the Azure Cloud platform, using its components to leverage business opportunities," says Bruno Sposito, Via's Technology Director. 

Power BI also integrates the solution for data visualization. Bruno points out that the company gained agility with the solution. "It's a differentiator to have a Microsoft managed service at the Azure layer, we don't need an infrastructure and support effort from our team," he says. Adoption took place in June 2020, and the solution served as the basis for the real-time monitoring reports on Black Friday sales of the same year. 

Another crucial point of this management is the development of enterprise applications, DevOps. This is done by Github Enterprise, which has modernized and streamlined the delivery of enterprise applications. "This agility in solving problems is very important for the dynamism that retail 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 this entire structure in place, Via recorded about R$3 billion in sales, an increase of 37% over the same period in the previous year. In e-commerce, sales grew 99% compared to 2019.

Filipe Jaske welcomes the experience: "Making Black Friday 2020, with our entire e-commerce supported by cloud, was the big step this year. Our systems had no problems 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 says.

Filipe celebrates the WVD solution, as it maintained the company's sales, and the sales team continued to earn its commission even with remote work. Microsoft 365 is also viewed positively as something that has enhanced company communication, including the integration of chat, calendar, team, and everything the service offers. Finally, the marketplace gained more volume, the team that takes care of the storekeepers' entrance uses Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing, while the service team uses Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Omnichannel. 

"We've sold a lot without any incidents. The platform supported the operation very well, all supported by Azure. This movement of microservices, 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. 

Because both Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 are supported by Azure, the company benefits from the full potential of the Microsoft platform, and the data that comes from all of these processes are centralized and visualized in the company's Power BI, which is still powered by Azure Cognitive Services at the application layer, which brings intelligence to the process and anticipates the propensity of seller conversion.

Bruno assesses that the experience brought agility, performance and robustness to the operation. "It is quite 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 the legacy environments we had and Via's operation of several years are being rebuilt in the Azure environment with Microsoft's support and agility," he concludes.

As of September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will become a single product called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.