Directions EMEA 2019 Day 1: Microsoft partners weigh Dynamics 365 Business Central progress against concerns

More than four thousand companies are now running Dynamics 365 Business Central, Microsoft revealed to partners at Directions EMEA 2019 today. The company launched the annual event with positive growth metrics for the SaaS SMB ERP solution and reviewed product updates from 2019 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.

Leaders from the business applications group also made the case for partners to redouble their commitment to Business Central as the successor to Dynamics NAV.

"This business is now material to Microsoft," said Microsoft general manager Toby Bowers as he kicked off the opening keynote. "The fact of the matter is that Dynamics is a multi-billion dollar cloud run-rate business growing 45 percent year over year…We're pushing up into the enterprise, but the wheelhouse of this business continues to be the SMB space where we continue to see incredible growth of over one hundred percent in CSP."  

The number Business Central resellers in EMEA has grown by more than fifty percent in the last year, according to Bowers. Worldwide, the total number of Business Central partners is now above 1,400. Revenue per partner is growing at 200 percent year-on-year overall and at 400 percent in EMEA, and the number of customers per deployment has doubled, he said.

Other metrics shared by Bowers included: