New pricing and licensing for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Unified Operations apps planned for October 2019

Microsoft revealed to partners at Inspire 2019 that the Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (D365FO) application will be licensed as separate Finance and Supply Chain Management applications starting on October 1, 2019. The move is part of a new approach to licensing the Dynamics 365 enterprise applications – categorized under Customer Engagement and Unified Operations – with the flexibility to assign specific combinations of applications to various users.

The change will introduce new pricing on a per-app basis that still allows for bundling multiple applications from the existing portfolio. Pricing, which was also revealed, this week, will impact customer differently depending on their needs, but Microsoft is advising up to a ten percent price increase on some customers. (A pricing breakdown is included below)

"For about 95 percent of users, you would be looking at a ten percent or less impact. And when you net it out over all the users that a typical customer has, it is going to be a single digit impact," said Ken Tracy of Microsoft in a recorded Inspire presentation. (The recording appears to have been removed from the Inspire site. -Ed.)

Microsoft also revealed how the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement app licensing will change under the new approach.

The current "plan" offering known as Unified Operations will become four separate applications: Finance, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Talent, and Retail. Until now, Finance and SCM have been combined in the single application D365FO and in Dynamics AX before that. Here is the breakdown of where existing modules of D365FO, Talent, and Retail align with the new licensing.