Microsoft Lures Dynamics NAV Partners To Cloud With New Multi-Tenant Azure Platform, Pricing

Microsoft has grown its customer base to just under 120,000 customers in 2015, Dynamics SMB general manager Paul White told the audience at the NAV Directions North America event this week.

But staying on track for continued growth through the 2019 goal of over 200,000 customers will require greater focus, Microsoft believes. The NAV team wants partners to focus on attracting businesses with 10 to 99 employees, where its research indicates there will be the greatest investment in new cloud-based ERP, productivity, CRM, and financial systems.

"The NAV business is stronger than ever," White said in a keynote address. "SMB has always been important to Microsoft and it is becoming more so."

Microsoft wants more of its partners to begin reaching for the SaaS ERP opportunity by making it easier to deploy repeatable cloud-based solutions. They introduced attendees to a new Azure-based system built by Microsoft for hosting and managing multi-tenant NAV-based solutions, the Dynamics NAV Management Portal.

The NAV Management Portal is Microsoft's way of providing its partners with a way to sell simplified, multitenant, Azure-based NAV solutions. The platform, which is itself a Dynamics NAV-based system, allows partners to deploy their own IP on top of NAV 2016 and sell it as a subscription service. Unlike a DIY approach on Azure in which a partner might manually provision a set of servers and monitor each component themselves, the Management Portal automates provisioning and offers support and a 99.9% financially backed service level agreement (SLA) for the system as a whole, not individual components.

The approach is not without its tradeoffs. Partners must be willing to forgo certain elements of a traditional NAV solution architecture. There is no direct access to Azure SQL or the virtual machines running NAV, and the platform does  not support installing ...