At Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference WPC, in mid-July in Wahshington over 9,000 partners from around the world in the U.S. capital moved, Cloud was the dominant theme.
addition to the Microsoft offerings by some e-mail, Web conferencing and instant messaging, offered for some time under the name BPOS need to make the partners in the Dynamics environment gradually familiar with the cloud and possibly underlying business models .
Microsoft's first step into the cloud in the area of \u200b\u200bbusiness application is CRM Online. For two years, Microsoft itself is a provider of on-demand solution, and comes into direct contact with customers. This offer is in September in a beta version, with the new version of CRM, 2011, for Germany, and shortly thereafter be available in Switzerland.
lose the view of the Microsoft Partner not much service revenue when the solution is operated at Microsoft. According to internal analysis of the expense is for the installation of the server etc for 2-3 days with a further service of around 45 days for a reference project. Calculated over the year to win a partner or about 5% of its capacity for new projects.
What is missing from, the margins from software sales. Microsoft disclaims usually one-year contracts with the on-demand customers and for the mediation shall be the partner in the first year 18% of annual turnover, with contract extensions are still 6%. To give the parties at the beginning of a motivation, Microsoft increased the first margin to 40%.
so convincing Microsoft's offering in the CRM area, there will be similar in the ERP area in the first three to four years can. Only then NAV will be technologically ready to be operated as a multi-tenant version. Until that time, Microsoft only to the variant "partner-hosted" to refer to.
Discussions at the partner conference, the ERP partners were also performed according controversial. On one side are partners such as SaaS Plaza, offering virtually the entire Dynamics platform as software-as-a-service solution and are dedicated entirely to the cloud. On the other hand, there are more traditional partners, who must reinvent themselves and not give up their traditional business of selling licenses wollen und können.
Auch Microsoft schien für die ERP-Partner keine eindeutige Antwort parat zu haben, nur den Hinweis, es sei nicht ratsam, sein Geschäftsmodell allzu radikal zu ändern.
Point-of-View
Zu nebelig ist momentan das Geschäftsmodell im Bereich Dynamics. Wenn Partner als Neueinsteiger in den Bereich CRM gehen, ist das Cloud-Angebot von Microsoft gerade im ersten Jahr sehr attraktiv. Aber insbesondere ERP-Implementierungen sind eine sehr langfristige Beziehung zwischen Kunde, Partner und Anbieter. Über oftmals zehn Jahre werden Systeme angepasst und auf den aktuellen Stand gebracht. Dieser Zweig fällt zukünftig weg - und bis dato hat Microsoft noch kein überzeugendes Angebot bereitet, den Partnern to take the fear of lost business. Providers are in a relatively comfortable situation if they have Microsoft as in the case of a sufficiently large cash reserve.
partners are challenged to move their forces from the traditional business of the implementation of a process-driven consulting and industry expertise while strengthening building. Indeed, through the knowledge of the industry they have a chance to open up another source of money: small apps that are on Microsoft's own market place sold, the Dynamics products supplement intelligently and provide a globally developable turnover. Apple has demonstrated it.
