IMGCAP(1)]Sometimes where you're going is more important than where you've been. Accountants and consultants are realizing this for their clients and figuring how to capitalize, but in my case rather than looking at the week that was, I'm eyeing next week's major user and partner confab that is Microsoft Convergence 2013.
This isn't to say the past week has been uneventful; in fact we had the entire state of
Other than that we really have Microsoft Dynamics-centric product news and, of course the upcoming mega-con. Of the aforementioned product news, seems to be a good week to integrate with Microsoft Dynamics products, could it be -- timing wise -- because Convergence 2013 is about to happen? Could be. As such, we have
In the same week, sales tax product competitors CCH and Avalara each have new products that integrate with Dynamics ERP. For CCH, their
So as I've mentioned, I am headed off to New Orleans and Convergence 2013 in particular next week and while it's going to be packed with product specific hype and deep dives into the latest features, I'm expecting the bigger news to revolve around the cloud, and more cloud (and maybe a bit of mobile).
Ever since Steve Ballmer boldly proclaimed in 2011 that Microsoft as a whole was "all in" with the cloud, we've been seeing peeks at how their Dynamics line is exactly accomplishing this task. The plan here, for the most part, is to host their Dynamics ERP products on their own Azure Cloud and that every major release will receive this treatment. The debate here is ongoing, in that what kind of cloud do users really want or do they really care as long as you call it cloud and they can access some or all of their data without having to sit at their desks or log into their servers to do it.
The fact is, for the most part the SMB-focused accounting and ERP vendors with a history of on premises systems -- like Microsoft Dynamics -- have not developed or bought much in the way of cloud-native products. This isn't to say they won't, but it doesn't appear to be on their immediate product roadmaps and the plan is to bring customers to the cloud, or their version of the cloud, gradually. Mobile, on the other hand, seems to be a race. Vendors can't seem to "mobilize" features or products fast enough and eventually this, in my opinion is how the majority of users are going to want to access their data anyway so, next week, let's see what Microsoft has to say.