Microsoft Expands Dynamics 365 Prior to November Launch Date and Opens AppSource to SIs

In early July, just one week ahead of Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2016, held in Toronto, the company introduced Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource. Today, the vendor recommitted to a general release date of November 1^st for Dynamics 365 and provided a deeper dive into the product’s capabilities. Microsoft also boasted about partner opportunity and uptake on AppSource, a business marketplace or one-stop shop for customers to find applications and partner developers, and the broadening of the AppSource ecosystem to include system integrator (SI) partners.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 combines CRM and ERP cloud solutions into what Microsoft calls the next generation of intelligent business applications with purpose built-in apps. The intelligence builds on advanced analytics and machine learning and includes functionality such as: sentiment and intent analysis, preemptive service, relationship insights, lead and opportunity scoring, product recommendations and up-sell/cross-sell.

The latest built-in intelligence capability for Dynamics 365 was also announced today. Called Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights, it’s an analytics app that connects and analyzes data from Microsoft — and other widely used CRM, ERP, web, social and IoT sources — and applies intelligence to it to give users a 360-degree customer view. It also provides automatic suggestions to improve engagement, according to a blog post by Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president, Microsoft Cloud + Enterprise.{ad}

The SaaS solution was designed to work across business functions such as sales, customer service, operations, financials, field service, project service automation, marketing and customer insights. The robust Dyamics 365 also taps the capabilities in Power BI, Office 365, Microsoft Azure and Cortana Intelligence.

Two flavors of Dynamics 365 — Enterprise and Business Editions — are available to organizations of every size that can also take advantage of a subscription model that’s per app/per user-based.

Since being announced in July, the AppSource marketplace has expanded to about 250 apps, with more in the works, according to Microsoft. The business marketplace features apps for industry verticals and apps that extend business functionality. It marquees ISV partner developers and, as of today, SIs.

“Today we are furthering our commitment to help customers reduce the time and complexity of implementing line of business (LoB) SaaS apps by extending the AppSource ecosystem to include the expertise and services of SI partners,” Ron Huddleston, corporate vice president of enterprise partner ecosystem at Microsoft noted today in a blog post.