Are Microsoft Dynamics SMB partners ready for life in the SaaS era?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is coming on April 2, 2018 and it will be Microsoft's first serious SaaS contender aimed at the SMB market. Until now, Dynamics VARs and ISVs had the luxury of ignoring that pesky $40-a-user experiment from Vedbæk and Redmond called Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Business Edition. You went about selling Dynamics NAV or GP (maybe even SL - I hear it's still around), avoiding subscription sales unless the customer insisted upon it.

But as the reality of Business Central approaches, you have to contemplate some important questions. Is your business vision SaaS-ready and prepared for a subscription and cloud dominated world? If it isn't, are you willing to re-align your vision? And if you don't, what are the consequences?

In a follow-up article, I will discuss related concerns, such as: Should you start selling Dynamics 365 Business Central, or continue to sell only NAV / GP / SL? If you do, how do you decide when to sell which product?

If you are a business owner or an executive at a VAR (or an ISV), I hope you have already started thinking about how your business will fare in a post-Perpetual licensing world, and are actively having discussions in your boardrooms around ways to remain viable and profitable. It's not too late to start now, but if you wait any longer, you risk becoming the metaphorical boiling frog.

Perpetual licensing has helped many a technology services business survive and thrive, alleviating short term cash flow issues until receivables are collected and vendor payments come due. And for decades, margins on perpetual licensing have shaped how salespeople have been ...