eXtreme365: Microsoft Dynamics 365 vision draws ever closer to LinkedIn, Office 365, Azure Cognitive Services

Microsoft believes its overall cloud portfolio, from Azure computing resources up through analytics, Dynamics 365 business solutions, and add-on apps, provides differentiation over competitors.

Speaking at eXtreme365 2017 today, Microsoft Technical Fellow and Dynamics 365 CTO Mike Ehrenberg encouraged partners to shift their focus from selling a single Dynamics product to solutions that tie in the complete portfolio as needed. In his keynote address, he argued for Microsoft's commitment to improving the use of data and tools drawn from LinkedIn, Office 365, and Azure cognitive services to compose differentiated scenarios.

"We want [business solutions] to work together, but we want to make it easy to buy and implement just what you want and bring a [solution together] that aligns with the business areas," he said. Those solutions will not be your traditional ERP and CRM suites, he stressed, and much of the value could come from outside of Dynamics 365, including from productivity tools like those in Office 365, custom apps, or other third-party systems.

Ehrenberg focused the remainder of his delivery on Dynamics 365-focused scenarios that also relied on data, tools, and processes that drew on other systems. For example, the B2C scenario of a person shopping online for auto insurance. An insurance company could use Dynamics 365 for Sales and deploy a related AI-driven bot that is tuned to work within the context of the Sales app for customer, product, and process details. If a bot meets the web site visitor, it can answer general questions, collect information on the visitor's needs, provide product information based on standard product data stored in Dynamics 365, and authenticate the visitor as an existing customer (if ...