Microsoft has announced a new vertical cloud, Microsoft Cloud for Retail, aiming to be an end-to-end retail solution.

Microsoft Azure has been gaining ground in the cloud market, with a recent report showing it one of the biggest winners during the current digital transformation. Microsoft Azure is increasingly seen as a viable alternative to AWS, especially among retailers who are leery of relying on a cloud offering from their biggest rival.

Microsoft is capitalizing on this by offering a vertical cloud solution tailored to the specific needs of the retail market.

The unmatched performance of Microsoft Azure allows our customers to intelligently manage secure workloads across multiple sites and domains, scale those workloads to process millions of requests per second, and improve the logistics to manage each order. Azure Data and AI services help retailers respond to market forces, improve decision-making, and put customers first by breaking down their data silos to manage, merge, shape, and analyze the data and, as a result, uncover actionable insights.

With Azure, retailers get the best of at-scale cloud, data, and AI workloads including industry data models that enable data management, governance, and domain excellence in one cloud platform from a provider that does not compete with them. As a result, retailers can build better digital feedback loops—the connections between their customers, their people, their stores, their data, and the insights at the heart of each—on a platform from a trusted partner.

Microsoft’s announcement does not include pricing. The company is confident, however, that its latest vertical cloud will help the retail industry deal with the challenges and opportunities it is currently facing.