Five years after debuting Office 365, Microsoft has announced Dynamics 365, the combination of its sales and resource planning software in one suite. Dynamics 365 brings together a group of Microsoft' cloud apps for businesses in areas including marketing, operations, sales and service in one place. The move is the latest in a series of announcements made to revitalize Microsoft's enterprise and cloud offerings since Nadella took over as chief executive in February 2014.
"We've always had entries in these categories, but it's really important and exciting to bring them together for a business perspective," says Takeshi Numoto, a vice president in Microsoft's cloud and enterprise group. "In order to drive impact, businesses need to be able to modify and innovate on a range of products, not just in silos."
Customers will have access to Microsoft's business intelligence and Cortana software within the apps, the company says, meaning that sales reps can receive predictions on cross-selling opportunities automatically, or field agents receive a warning of devices expected to fail. Microsoft is banking on that opportunity exploding in the next several years as the 'Internet of Things' allows companies to increasingly take business actions off the input of millions of sensors in their line of work, from street lights to trucks. Companies are already pulling in "slices" of that data, Microsoft argues, but only get a complete picture when they're integrating it with all aspects of their business such as financial planning and sales.
The company also announced a new app marketplace on Wednesday called AppSource, which offers more than 200 software-as-a-service applications from partners. Microsoft demoed one such partner, the Citizen Services app from AvePoint, which demonstrated how a town can map the route of a parade against its street lights and potholes to predict where breakdowns might occur and preemptively repair at-risk spots.
Dynamics 365 should make Microsoft's offerings less confusing to customers, says Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst at Nucleus Research who was pre-briefed on the product. "This is another example of [CEO] Satya [Nadella]'s influence on Microsoft and the company's sharper focus on bringing the combined power of the Microsoft portfolio to bear," she says.
The new suite is also a shot across the bow of Salesforce, the customer relationship management (CRM) leader that sometimes plays partner and sometimes rival to Microsoft. Dynamics 365's most important capability is to combine CRM data with enterprise resource planning (ERP) data within a company's infrastructure. Businesses typically are using Salesforce, or to a lesser extent competitors such as
Dynamics 365 continues Nadella's mission as CEO to build Microsoft into a cloud platform, Microsoft's executives say, while refocusing businesses it had already offered into a more focused strategy. "The challenge has been how to get all the functionality to work together," says Numoto. "The pace of innovation from Satya has given us the freedom to do this."
