Directions North America 2022: Microsoft launches Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Release Wave 1, touting new cloud growth stats

Microsoft launched the newest collection of Dynamics 365 Business Central's updates and enhancements on April 1, including general availability of a Power Platform connector, country expansion, and Teams integration enhancements.

The latest product updates will go to a new record high number of Business Central cloud customers, but Microsoft has stopped sharing the customer count with the outside world for proprietary reasons, Microsoft GM Mike Morton told the Directions North America 2022 audience today. But taking away that metric means the company now sees the growth in Business Central as a meaningful corporate data point, he said.

Microsoft's Mike Morton at Directions NA 2022 | Source: Twitter

Business Central online customer growth is over 60 percent year over year, Morton said, and user counts are growing even faster as existing customers add BC users and larger organizations choose the product. If he could share the actual customer stats, he said, partners would see that the product's customer count is "awesome" and shows "amazing growth". He did not discuss how BC cloud growth breaks down between new customers and those migrating from Microsoft's older on-premises Dynamics ERPs.

The growth in the cloud customer base means that virtually any new BC prospect can now find customers with a similar profile in terms of industry, size, geography, or other angles, Morton said. 

"Regardless of your industry, regardless of your location, regardless of the complexity of what you're doing, there's probably another company out there running on Business Central in the cloud. It's not just ready for primetime, it is primetime," Morton told partners in the Directions audience.

Other Business Central stats Microsoft shared included:

• The number of partners selling Business Central has grown from 1,400 in 2019 to over 3,800 today
• There are now over 2,200 add-on solutions for Business Central in Microsoft AppSource, up from 450 in 2019. Business Central now has the highest number of solutions in AppSource for any Microsoft product, he added.

Microsoft also used the event kickoff to emphasize progress on their partnership announced in October 2021 between Business Central and e-commerce vendor Shopify, which now includes a pre-built integration with Shopify administration and interfaces within BC.