The phrase “consumerization of IT” could not be used enough by Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner and Dynamics president Kirill Tatarinov, as they claim this is the largest driving force behind their product directions over the foreseeable future, particularly the business applications in its Dynamics line.
The two addressed a crowd of over 10,000—a third of which were located in separate room with large viewing screens—at the Microsoft Dynamics Convergence 2012 user and partner event in Houston.
“Consumerization of IT is happening,” said Turner. “This means that technology is playing more of a role in peoples’ personal lives and it is spilling over into their professional lives. We have a strategy around this consumerization.”
Turner explained that the strategy primarily involved the cloud. “There are tens of millions of customers moving to the cloud, and we are proud of the investments we’ve made in the cloud,” he added. “The cloud story we have from private to public and hybrid represents the deepest, broadest, and most enterprise-ready products on the planet.”
Turner outlined the Dynamics product roadmap over the next year, which involves Dynamics GP and NAV moving to the cloud-based Windows Azure platform. NAV 2013, in particular, is expected to be released by September or October of this year. In addition, a new version of Dynamics AX will be delivered via Azure, though no specific dates were given.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, the only purely cloud-based product in the Dynamics line, will evolve over the next year as well, according to Tatarinov. He noted that CRM Online is now upgraded every six months. The first updates of the year will include a broad range of browser and device support, while the next tier of improvements will include more social media capabilities in customer care scenarios.
“The cloud right now is one of the most important opportunities of our business lives and it is a massive area of investment across Microsoft,” said Tatarinov. “Business solutions, as they relate to the cloud, are notoriously complex. Most people want to see mixed scenarios and mixed workloads. Some people want private [cloud], some want public, and some want on-premises. We will deliver cloud on your terms.”
