Our team enters the fiscal year 2022 with excitement, intention, and confidence. In 2022, AIS turns 40. We’ve thrived through four decades of IT consulting and continue to achieve record growth numbers while keeping pace with technology advancements.

As we enter another year alongside our partners and teammates at Microsoft, we reflect on and take great pride in our accomplishments and the innovative, dedicated people that help drive them forward.

It is also the time of year we look ahead to what’s next and sharpen our strategy for the next fiscal year. But, even as new technologies and tactics emerge, for AIS, a few things remain constant:

  • Our Focus on Client Success: First and foremost is the success of the organizations we serve. The impact we have on our clients, their employees, and their customers is what keeps us motivated. This dedication to client success is core to the solutions we build and the problems we solve. Speed and scalability are consistent outcomes of our digital transformation strategies.
  • Our Investments in Microsoft: Microsoft technology is in our DNA. As a partner since 1994, we invest in Microsoft’s vision by training our people, working with product engineering, and developing intellectual property (IP) to meet the needs of customers.
  • Our People’s Passion: Our employees are passionate about cloud transformation. Passion is a key contributor to the company’s success and plays a crucial role in gathering input and analysis from a diverse set of disciplines. Just check out our blog to see the wide range of thought leadership from AIS employees.
  • Our Focus on Regulated Industry Expertise: AIS has led many Microsoft firsts in Government, Financial Services, and other regulated industries. We are focused on accelerating our clients’ journey to the cloud to meet mission needs and business goals by addressing roadblocks, such as security and compliance challenges, and leveraging automation and IP for speed and scale.

Looking Ahead

We are just as excited about what is on the horizon. Microsoft closed out the end of the fiscal year 2021 with several announcements, such as:

  • Increasing cross-platform synergy for apps and data (like Power BI and Azure Synapse)
  • Significant investments in business applications
  • Emphasis on security
  • Continued focus on industry and customer success

It’s an exciting time to be a Microsoft partner! The potential results of the collective Microsoft cloud ecosystem and technology and services partners that extend these capabilities are overwhelming.


Vishwas Lele AIS

“We strive to be the most trusted Microsoft partner for technically challenging, enterprise-level cloud adoption, app modernization, and data work.” said Vishwas Lele, EVP and CTO at AIS, Microsoft MVP, and Regional Director. “Our team continues to lead first of their kind design and build solutions on Azure, Power Platform, and M365 in regulated industries. We earned the 2020 Worldwide Partner of the Year Award. We’re seeing amazing convergence across the various solution areas and look forward to driving these new capabilities into the mission space for each of our clients.”


Our Methodology

Outcomes are at the center of our approach. Whether it’s delivering 100% uptime and better performance for a mission-critical defense application or using automation to reduce manual processes and advance a business outcome for a Fortune 500 client, we always work from the outcome first.

Delivering results-based solutions means having an arsenal of skillsets that allow technology to meet the needs of users. It takes all kinds of talent, and AIS provides a range of disciplines (e.g., .NET, SharePoint, Power Platform, Data, UX, Knowledge Management, Change Management, Web Dev, and more).

We believe in multiple “deployment” models for modern, scalable, and intelligent app and data projects. This includes composite applications leveraging Microsoft 365, Dynamics, and Power Platform, with Azure at the tip of the spear.

Fostering a community that cuts across diverse backgrounds, cultures, experiences, and skills is a significant core value at AIS.  The challenges of remote work won’t stop us from getting together, sharing best practices, and staying connected as a community! The growing demand for low code with both new and longtime SharePoint, Dynamics, and Azure customers is exciting to see. The early indicators of swift transformation these capabilities have on organizations are gaining attention from business leaders and promoting valuable thought and solution design diversity.

The AIS core values are rooted in education and knowledge share. We invest in our employee’s education with aisUniversity, boot camps, morning learning series, lunch and learns, self-directed educational materials, certification bonuses, and more. These learning opportunities allow individuals across projects and communities of interest access to new skills and approaches.

We put humans at the focal point of technology. Engagement from all corners of the business world is a sure indicator of what lies ahead with advancements in low code solutions. We’re helping business users, most of whom have no previous technical background, quickly embrace new technology and enable them to scale solutions so we can focus on solving their most challenging technology problems.

Our Investment in People and IP

AIS CDF

An investment in people, process, and tooling is an investment in the success of our employees and the organizations they support. Last year, we built the AIS Cloud Delivery Framework (CDF). The CDF provides opinionated guidance and resources which help our clients modernize in the cloud. The CDF combines our experience executing enterprise cloud projects with the techniques presented in Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF).

The CDF includes backlogs, deliverable samples, starter files, project experience write-ups, and much more. On top of this foundation, our teams continue to develop resources for business applications, cloud security/compliance, governance, data & AI, and many more.

These innovations would not be possible without the support of the AIS Cloud Acceleration Hub (HUB). The HUB is a dedicated team of AIS consultants organized to help our project teams deliver successful cloud solutions. The HUB team consolidates knowledge and experience to provide rapid research and guidance services for AIS delivery teams at no additional cost to our customers.

Critical to the AIS growth plan is our culture. We’ve added an essential role to our leadership team, VP of Culture and Employee Experience. We are proactively hiring and developing skills around emerging areas of our business (e.g., data intelligence, business applications, RPA, user experience, and knowledge management). We’re heading into the next fiscal year with a vibrant (and growing) team, and we couldn’t be more excited about what comes next.

WE'RE GROWING! WON'T YOU JOIN US?
Check out our career openings at ais.com/careers and apply today.

Partnering with AIS

Microsoft Gold Partner

AIS prides itself on being one of the few Microsoft partners that consistently delivers challenging, enterprise-level work across all Microsoft cloud platforms (Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics, and Power Platform). We support the entire Microsoft cloud ecosystem.  We deliver foundational landing zones, security & governance, complex app development and modernization, and large-scale data and AI projects.

With AIS, you get consultants who offer the best possible solution. These consultants will advance your highest priority goals and objectives.

We bring 13+ years of enterprise experience on Azure, global leadership in Power Platform, and unmatched cloud adoption, security, and governance experience in highly regulated industries.

Along with this experience, our customers also get the full backing of Microsoft. Through our 26+ year partnership, AIS and Microsoft have established close relationships across product engineering, account teams, and executive leadership. This partnership offers our joint customers access to all the resources they need for digital transformation.

DRIVE YOUR MISSION FORWARD! PARTNER WITH AIS.
Work with a team of Microsoft technology leaders to enable your teams and partner with AIS today.

Satya Nadella introduces Azure Government Cloud General Availability

photo (7)Today, AIS participated in the Microsoft One Government Cloud event and Expo introducing the General Availability (GA) of Azure Government Cloud at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC.  Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, participated in a fireside chat and shared his vision for the industry and discussed how government organizations can thrive in the mobile-first, cloud-first world.

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At AIS, our Account Teams work with our clients every day to produce IT solutions that solve business problems. We work closely with our CTO organization to ensure that we are researching the latest technology and services in a manner that is applicable to our clients and prospective clients.

We recently applied this to a business problem that required an organization to quickly — and with no notice — stand up a website to collect hundreds, or potentially millions, of submissions from the general public.  Our use case focused on law enforcement and the sorts of emergency response situations we’ve seen all too often in the news, such as the Boston Marathon bombing.  When local, state or federal authorities respond to criminal acts, they seek to quickly collect vast amounts of input from the public.  This input can be in the form of tips, photos, videos or any untold number of observations.  Agencies need the capability to surge their IT tools and applications to collect the data, store it, and run analysis tools against the collected content to harvest information. Read More…

Throughout my schooling (two degrees in IT) and career, I’ve been taught both formally and through on-the-job coaching to always let the business problem drive the solution. Let the business strategy drive the budget. Never allow technology factors and constraints to interfere with requirements gathering. While this somewhat myopic vision can be a valuable exercise, it’s my opinion that these practices have a negative effect on Federal agencies that need to make effective use of tighter budgets.

Technology products and services have come a long way in offering compelling utility without drastic customization. At AIS, nearly all the solutions we build for our clients are based on building blocks provided by product or service companies. This approach drastically reduces the costs, risks, and time often associated to custom application development. You can find countless examples on our website of how AIS uses products (such as SharePoint and Dynamics CRM) to create custom applications for our clients.  Our developers use the products’ robust web services and object models to reduce code complexity.  Rather than developing custom implementations of commonly required features, we simply utilize the products’ existing capabilities and program our solution to call a series of actions to complete a business process.

Put succinctly, if we allow requirements elicitation to occur in a technology vacuum that does not take into account what the building blocks offer, the result is often overcomplicated and overpriced implementations. Read More…

SharePoint adoption is widespread in most organizations today, and a very common use case for SharePoint is as the core technology for an intranet. There are many features of SharePoint 2010 that make it an excellent choice for an intranet, including web content management, workflow, publishing and search. SharePoint offers a secure, scalable technology that empowers content owners to create, approve and publish pages in an easy-to-use, Microsoft Office-like user interface. With SharePoint, you get a great looking, high-functioning intranet that’s secure and easy to use. (In Jakob Nielsen’s “10 Best Intranets of 2013”, he notes 70% of the awardees are using SharePoint.)

With the release of SharePoint 2013, however, there are several new features that are worth noting if you’re thinking of upgrading your intranet from a previous version of SharePoint, or migrating from another product. If your organization is considering a redesign or a technology update of their intranet, SharePoint’s newest release is more compelling than ever as the platform of choice.

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