Representing the QBS partner community.

Being a Microsoft (Dynamics) SMB partner in todays’ market is all about “cloudification”. You need to understand the threats and opportunities these changes will bring to your business, to the IP you’ve built and even how it may impact the relevance your business will have towards partnering with Microsoft.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is the latest Microsoft SaaS product launched into the Dynamics 365 platform and it’s quickly becoming one of the fastest growing products in the platform. But the real focus for partners should not only be selling ERP/Business Central with its’ features and functions. What you should be doing is look at the power of the entire Dynamics 365 cloud platform and what this could mean to your customers “digital innovation” journey. Being proficient in assisting your customers on that journey will not only give you a strong USP against the competition but will also provide you with a strong long term vision and value story to bring to the market. It will help position you as a thought leader when customers look for advise on how to migrate their legacy software to cloud solutions.

Here we go again – off to Vegas!

Microsoft Inspire 2019 – the annual Microsoft partner event – will be held in Las Vegas, 14^th – 18^th July for the second time in the Inspire/WPC history. It will host more than 100.000 people as Microsoft combined two events (Ready and Inspire). The theme of the year is “Together, we achieve more” emphasizing and celebrating the strength of the partner eco system.

QBS group will send a delegation of 6 people and we will do our utmost to cover all the latest news around the Dynamics 365 business applications and bring back to the QBS community the insights we get on how this might impact the day-to-day business of a Dynamics partner.

Here are the main themes at the conference which we will be sure to cover – and the accompanying questions and concerns that we will be looking for answers to.

• Adoption of Power Platform

Power Platform combines the robust power of PowerApps, PowerBI, and Microsoft Flow into one powerful business application platform – providing quick and easy app building and data insights. Each component of the Microsoft Power Platform is built on the Common Data Service for Apps.

We will be investigating and understanding the impact of the Microsoft development in this area and what this will mean from a partners perspective – how can it help you “disrupt” things?

• Business Central Investments, partner Incentives FY20 and MPN

Which new incentives and market pushes will Microsoft share with partners in coming year. What behavior is Microsoft encouraging and supporting within the partner community and market? MPN changes have just been announced around the retiring of the internal use rights (IUR) which will be effective July 1, 2020.

We will be following these topics closely as the partner investments necessary in a changing world are high and each extra dollar you can make will help re-cover some of the investments done.

• PowerApps Portal licensing

In general, a no-code platform enables a non-developer to create apps. PowerApps focuses on data-driven apps and is best suited for business applications that integrate with existing data. As to whether PowerApps is a “good” platform, you would have to consider product reviews vis-a-vis its competitors.

This will be one of the “big reveals” during Inspire, and it’s going to be a very different approach to allow for the exposure of CDS data to non-licensed users. What impact will this have to the market, partners and customer attractiveness?

• ISV’s themes within the SMB partner space

With the appointment of Steve Guggenheimer we may conclude that Microsoft is taking ISV’s more seriously and not only “on PowerPoint” but also proofing the urge and need for more ISV focus in their eco system with this appointment.

What are the changes we might expect, and which focus areas will we see around the ISV motion? How will SMB and ISV’s drive the evolution of Dynamics 365 and the Power platform? How will the alignment look with the Azure AppSource efforts, which coordination might we expect from other Microsoft GTM motions and what are the new best practices?

• The Microsoft Strategy for FY20 and key focus areas that Microsoft

The core keynotes of the Microsoft executives will give us insights around the strategy of the coming 12 months and what the biggest key drivers will be for the Microsoft sales field. Keeping the Dynamics partners in mind we will try and perspectivize this into how Microsoft partners can tap into the biggest SMB market opportunity by leveraging technology along with trustworthy platforms and companies.

• Commerce platform

Microsoft is moving Azure, Customer Engagement and Power Platform transactions onto a modernized, simplified new commerce platform that should reduce administrative work for partners.

The goal is “simplifying that whole process” and enabling customers to make buying choices more based on partner services rather than on which console is easiest to use

We will be trying to understand the roadmap around Business Central, AppSource and the impact this will have to the partner channel.

Summarizing: the QBS group team will be in Las Vegas and if you would like to meet let me know via the Inspire scheduler! If you’re not going then we encourage you to join our post-Inspire webinar “Hot News from Inspire 2019”  on July 22 and we will also be sharing with QBS partners an Executive Summary of the event.