Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Edition – New Product Direction
David Buggy
in About Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Technical, Uncategorized
Last week Microsoft announced that the Dynamics 365 Business Edition would not be released (not with the name “Business Edition”) In a post on 9/22 Microsoft’s Alysa Taylor laid out the plans for Dynamics 365.
To “further simplify” Dynamics 365 offerings and “increase ease of selection” Microsoft will offer a single collection of Dynamics 365 applications for customers of “all sizes and complexity”. The applications will span Marketing, Sales, Service, Finance and Operations as well as Talent. This will enable customers to adopt the areas of the product as needed by their business. The Business and Enterprise names will be dropped to create one product suite that can be adopted by a small or very large organization.
There will be “additional price point(s) with different level(s) of functionality”, the first area of the suite to get this will be Sales in Spring 2018. Microsoft also plans to offer a new end-to-end business management cloud solution – an expansion of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations adding the full capabilities of Navision (NAV). It will be delivered in two offerings – cloud model with a pay per user/month or via the ISV application platform which enables ISV’s (those who develop add-ons) to enbed the technology into their offerings.
Microsoft also stated that they will continue to offer on-premise versions of Dynamics NAV, GP and SL. Dynamics NAV 2018 and GP 2018 will become available later this calendar year.
Our take on this new direction
Simplifying the licensing and pricing is a good thing. Having two offerings (Business and Enterprise) coupled with application licensing, plan licensing got very complicated. Having one product with options to license the functionality a business needs is a good model. When there was Professional, Basic and Essential licensing, businesses were over-buying functionality. The Professional license included all builtin product functionality (Sales, Service Marketing) however the average business only uses 20% of the functionality in an enterprise application. This new model solves the issue of overbuying functionality. I do also like the option to get it all for those businesses that want an end-to-end solution.
So all-in-all we feel like this is a good strategy and one that should have been set from the beginning of Dynamics 365. It is much better to address this now than to have had to change directions after a release of Business Edition.
For now you can license the Dynamics 365 product at significantly discounted prices, for more information CLICK HERE
About the Author: David Buggy is a veteran of the CRM industry with 18 years of experience helping businesses transform by leveraging Customer Relationship Management technology. He has over 14 years experience with Microsoft CRM and has helped hundreds of businesses plan, implement and support CRM initiatives. David spent 20 years as VP/Partner for a leading Microsoft CRM partner where he founded the Microsoft CRM practice. In 2017 he founded Strava Technology Group, a firm that is focused on helping businesses achieve success with Microsoft CRM and Dynamics 365. To reach David connect with him on LinkedIn. To learn more about Strava Technology Group visit www.stravatechgroup.com
