Gravity Rolls Out Cloud-Based Financial Solution Built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Looking to fill the gap between small business applications like QuickBooks and midmarket business applications like Microsoft Dynamics GP, Gravity Software has rolled out Gravity 2015, an online business management application built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

John Silvani founded Gravity Software in 2013, but he has been part of the Microsoft partner channel for nearly 20 years - since before Microsoft owned Dynamics GP.

"We were a reseller of Great Plains, so I've been in the reseller community for a long time," he says. "Most recently (in 2012), I sold [my company] First Tech Direct to Columbus. We were an Inner Circle reseller of Dynamics GP, AX, CRM and SL."

A couple years before the sale Silvani had been spending a lot of time in meetings with Microsoft execs and other resellers trying to figure out how to reach the medium-size businesses that just couldn't handle the expense and the complexity of Dynamics GP.

"As resellers, we tried to give Microsoft some ideas," he says. "The end result was that they actually restructured the price of GP but what they couldn't do was reduce the complexity of implementing GP."

So in the course of selling First Tech Direct, and with the needs of the middle market on his mind, Silvani decided to create a product to fit that space between QuickBooks and Dynamics GP.

"And we looked at the platform, and we said probably the best platform would be the CRM platform because growing companies are probably going to want some level of CRM," Silvani says. "So we thought ‘let's build a solution on ...