Microsoft Dynamics' plans for its products' future are heavily focused on the cloud with some mobile and social aspects, specifically with its latest releases.
Kirill Tatarinov
This was one of the primary messages delivered during a keynote address by corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions marketing Wayne Morris and MBS president Kirill Tatarinov at the Convergence 2013 user and partner event in New Orleans.
Morris first highlighted the latest product related news, noting the acquisition of social monitoring analytics company NetBreeze; the release of a new version of its Marketing Pilot marketing automation product with plans to work with Dynamics CRM; a new set of apps that will mobilize aspects of Dynamics AX on most devices; and the planned release of Dynamics GP 2013 and NAV 2013 on the Microsoft Azure cloud, coming in June.
Tatarinov stressed that Dynamics products and business strategy was about "unification," which he said was important given the pace of change facing today's businesses.
"The world has changed in a very profound way. Today there are more connected mobile devices than there are people on the planet...We are looking at a changing world and our role in it," said Tatarinov."We are evolving to a devices and services company and the world of cloud and services is another very important part of our organization, cloud has become integral in everything we do."
The remainder of the keynote address focused on customer success stories with Dynamics products, which Tatarinov labeled as "dynamic businesses."
"We are proud to play the role as a unifier in your business and for every business to be a dynamic business," said Tatarinov. "A dynamic business is one that connects different functions around the organization, front office to back office, business and technology, CIO to CFO and CMO."
2 Comments
It matters to accounts who work for or work with companies/organizations running MS Dynamics products. And it matters to those companies and accountants who were waiting for a MS cloud solution.
When MS bought Great Plains, Navision, Solomon, Axapta in 2003 the started "Project Green" to unify and consolidate an ERP product and strategy. (Here is a good link giving the history of Project Green http://fscavo.blogspot.com/2007/03/microsofts-project-green-is-dead.html.)
Now it is 10 years later and MS is still touting a strategy of unification while at the same time they are commoditizing their on-premise products and pushing the VARS to sell more licenses of EACH of these separate products so they can meet shareholder demands.
To offer a true cloud option, an ERP system must be recoded from bottom up and that takes time and money. The fact that MS is now focused on making only certain apps available on the cloud, to me indicates they have decided to develop little apps to sell to develop a new revenue stream and have given up or are giving less focus on the hard work of rewriting a true cloud business system. Furthermore, apps developed here and there will make it even harder to code a unified system bringing them back together seamlessly.
At VBS we saw this coming and have chosen Intacct accounting software as a our cloud offering to our clients. Intacct was written from the start to run in the cloud. It is not an old on-premise solution that has been jury-rigged to work in a browser as some "cloud" business software we see out there.
Check the product out one of their free demo-webinars http://vbs411.com/Intacct-erp-software-demos-and-webinars
John Gabrys, Partner Visions Business Solutions http://www.vbs411.com/solutions
Posted by: jgabrys | March 21, 2013 10:46 AM
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How does this news from Microsoft affect the accountants who read Accounitng Technology?
Posted by: Freedom44 | March 20, 2013 12:53 PM
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