Ian Sands, whose official title is director of industry strategy at Microsoft, first read about Umpqua Bank in an architecture magazine. With a background in Microsoft research and the Microsoft Consulting Group, he has created a team that takes leading edge technology and shows how it might be used in real world settings such as finance, retail, manufacturing and health care. His communication role works two ways – he brings back to research the problems that technology users face and provides a reality check for developers who can become enamored of technology that only geeks would ever appreciate.

“We have to understand the industry and not just try to sell everything we have in our toolkit,” he explained. “We are focused on looking across the R&D initiatives at Microsoft and helping to articulate the value of those initiatives to our industry customers. We have discovered that we can be much more successful showcasing Microsoft's long-range technologies in an industry-relevant context than with broad horizontal stories alone."

To get the attention of the vertical markets, Sands’ group conducts extensive research. In finance, that involved visits to firms around the world to learn what they were doing and understand their requirements several years out. Then the team figures out how to show an industry, such as finance, where the newest, and the still-developing Microsoft technology could play a useful role.

“One of the most successful ways we have found to articulate is to build demonstrations and prototypes,” said Sands.

Umpqua is an innovator in service delivery, space design, and customer service – even sending staff to the Ritz Carlton concierge school for lessons on great service.

In the retail banking video that was produced at an Umpqua location, Sands shows some technologies that are ready now, and others that should be available in the next five to seven years.

Location awareness and presence awareness could simplify life for users. Mobile mapping could let a customer getting off a plane in a strange city find the nearest ATM. Interactive displays are attracting a lot of interest from banks which want to understand how media will change their environment. Interactive displays could stream information to a customer’s handheld device so he could take information of interest home with him for further analysis. Controlling messages across a regional or national network of banks will present its own challenges but has the potential to cut down the costs of paper-based marketing materials that have to be produced in large quantities and pulped when a campaign ends.

Digital pen technology, which Microsoft is working on with partners, would let a bank give a customer an application on a clipboard and a digital pen that would transmit the information into a computer without any rekeying.

“Every bank we talk to is looking at that,” said Sands. “It will come down to our ability to deliver the software to take it from a kludgy product to real mainstream.”