In a 2015 blog post, I wrote about the announcement by Satya Nadella about his intention and strategic plan to move the company to “One Microsoft.” Since then, Microsoft has been taking a series of steps to leverage their entire solution stack to deliver maximum benefits for its ERP users. On November 1, Microsoft made Dynamics 365 commercially available. To me, this may well be the keystone to Nadella’s stated goal.
The robust Dynamics 365 platform offers ERP and CRM services in one place, with apps to manage sales, operations, financials, field service, customer service, project service automation and marketing. It integrates natively with Office 365, Outlook, One Drive, Excel and Power BI, and runs on Azure in the cloud. Customers get the option to choose between packaged apps or standalone applications, and between full or light use of apps, depending on the needs of the company.
So, what’s new about that? Microsoft actually has had all the pieces to make a complete solution stack for some time. It had a range of products in its portfolio including Dynamics ERP and CRM products, the Microsoft Office suite, the digital intelligence and analytics tool like Power BI, and the underlying data infrastructure and data management tools like Azure, SQL server, etc.
All these solid technology tools were great on their own, but required the help of outside partners or substantial in-house IT resources to put them together. Today, that model no longer meets the expectations of the cloud services world. In particular, most small to mid-market companies are looking for solutions that offer immediate value, out-of-the box. This is the big differentiator for Dynamics 365 – instant accessibility to the Microsoft solution stack.
Tensoft’s partnership with Microsoft has always been about providing turnkey solutions to our customers, driven by Tensoft’s industry-specific product offerings for technology companies, and supported by the Microsoft stack. Being a Microsoft customer as well as customer, we’ve been looking forward for the release of Dynamics 365, and are glad that the wait is finally over!