At Microsoft Convergence, Dynamics comes in from the cold
- Summary:
- Were Microsoft Dynamics products sidelined at this year's Convergence 2015 in Atlanta, or was it more a case of finally coming in from the Fargo cold?
Halfway through a product demonstration before a packed audience in the 18,000-seat Philips Arena in Atlanta on Monday morning, Julia White, general manager of Office product management at Microsoft, paused for a moment to compose herself. She lifted her smartphone to her mouth and spoke in carefully measured tones:
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It seemed a risky move in the midst of a live demonstration. Would the phone's Cortana digital assistant recognize the command? In an instant, it repeated back the requested action and opened the opportunity in the CRM application. Cheers and applause rippled through the stadium.
This was the bravura moment in an accomplished demonstration that ranged across the forthcoming Office 16 release, the newly available Office Delve intelligent search tool, the new Skype for Business and the Spring 2015 release of Dynamics CRM with OneNote and Cortana integration. There was also predictive intelligence from Microsoft partner (and new investment) InsideSales.com.
The odd thing was that this was Convergence 2015, a show that in previous years had been dedicated to the Microsoft Business Solutions division and its Dynamics CRM and ERP products. This year, Microsoft has explicitly widened its scope to include innovations relevant to business from across the Microsoft product portfolio. But it was almost as though the newcomers had hijacked the entire show.
Even though White's demonstration followed a typical day-in-the-life of a salesperson, the role of Dynamics CRM — despite several new features in the latest release — was somewhat overshadowed. Her Cortana moment earned the biggest round of spontaneous applause, while the other two bursts of applause were for OneNote integration into the CRM product and an Office 2016 feature in which the process of attaching a file to an email can include a permissioned link to a OneDrive document instead of creating and sending a separate copy.
Meanwhile, the Dynamics suite of ERP products was completely sidelined, getting barely a mention. Nadella's opening keynote had led on Office Delve and PowerBI. When Kirill Tatarinov, EVP of Microsoft Business Solutions, brought customers on stage to tell their stories, the focus with all of them was on how they're using Azure capabilities to work with data.
Dynamics AX 7 under wraps
Perhaps it was a case of Microsoft keeping its powder dry for the launch of the next release of its flagship ERP product, Dynamics AX 7, which will come later in the year. This has a "completely reimagined" user interface based on HTML5 and will have the same look-and-feel as the forthcoming Office 16 release. The technology platform has also been overhauled so that AX 7 will run as a fully cloud-native product.
But despite (or perhaps in compensation for) all this change both at the user interface and deep down in the infrastructure, the core of the product emphasizes continuity rather than change, as Christian Pedersen, general manager of Dynamics Marketing told me:
This release has very strong ties from a data model and business logic perspective with the previous release, but it brings new innovation together in a business solutions context.
The thing you will see shining loud and clear is the user experience. To create a productivity environment that is more like Office.
We're going to keep the data model and the business logic the same between AX 2012 R3 and AX 7 to keep the upgrade simple.
Yes there are cosmetic changes but you also get a move to an HTML 5 based user experience. You'll have a user experience with a lot less clicks — a much more productive environment to work in.
Bewildering possibilities
Many attendees at Convergence this week seemed bewildered by all the new capabilities being unveiled. While they're used to having Microsoft market its latest initiatives at the show, few had expected to hear quite so much about Office, Windows 10, Azure, PowerBI and Skype. The possibilities being unveiled were almost overwhelming.
Of course, this all stems from the 'One Microsoft' strategy led by CEO Nadella and perhaps it's overdue. For a long time, Microsoft Business Solutions stood a little too far apart from the rest of the organization. At last, the vendor is presenting a coherent, integrated story to its business customers that spans its entire product line rather than being artificially siloed into one set of messages for Office and Sharepoint, another set for Azure and servers, and a separate set around Dynamics. The integrated whole is clearly more valuable to its customers than the sum of the segregated parts.
The move to cloud is also accelerating, which will help customers adopt these new technologies more easily. Around one third of ERP sales are now a cloud proposition, Tatarinov told me:
We're seeing growth in interest. Two years ago I would say, 12-15 percent of people showed any interest in cloud deployment of ERP. Last year it was about 25 percent, today it's about a third.
Those actually include different modes of deployment. Many of those deployments are in so-called private cloud or hosted cloud. It is provisioned from the cloud but at the end of the day it is pretty much the system that can be highly customized, it's just that it's delivered from the cloud.
That acceleration is based on the current release rather than any boost that AX 7 will bring, he added.
We've seen phenomenal traction in AX 2012 R3 being deployed on Azure. We have this tool that we introduced a year ago called Dynamics Lifecycle Services that enables you to roll out AX 2012 R3 on Azure in essentially one click. All the instances get allocated, it's cost-effective, it allows people to run initially development and test versions on Azure, and growth has been amazing.
That mode of deployment is really getting prevalent today, even before AX 7 comes out.
My take
For a long time, Microsoft Business Solutions often seemed the 'forgotten stepchild' of the Microsoft line-up, especially during the Ballmer years when investment was being plowed into consumer-facing offerings such as Xbox and Bing. It didn't help that it was headquartered in Fargo, in the chilly North Dakota plains, a legacy of its origins in the acquisition of Great Plains in 2001.
At Atlanta, MBS finally came in from the cold.
Disclosure: Microsoft funded my travel to attend Convergence.
Image credit: Julia White close-up by Microsoft, feature photo by @rwang0.