Podcast Transcript: Measuring the performance of Dynamics 365 service providers

The following transcript is taken from our recent podcast episode with Abhishek Mundra of Everest Group about their latest findings on service providers in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 channel.

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JASON GUMPERT  00:02

Welcome to the MSDW Podcast. I'm Jason Gumpert, Editor at MSDynamicsWorld.com. On this episode, I'm speaking with Abhishek Mundra. He is a Practice Director at Everest Group in their enterprise services practice. He tracks enterprise tech vendors, the broader tech software market, and provides advisory services. He's also the lead author on a new Dynamics 365 Services Assessment using Everest Group's PEAK Matrix. The findings of that assessment caught my attention because they offer an outside view of how Microsoft partners are delivering Dynamics 365 solutions both in terms of how some of them compare and how the Microsoft channel compares to its competitors to an extent. Abhishek's viewpoint is also interesting to me because it is separate from Microsoft or from any one service provider. So, it's a nice outside viewpoint for me, and hopefully for you, too. We discussed some of the key themes of the report, including the impact of industry specialization and customer satisfaction metrics, as well as guidance for customers on how to develop strategies for investing in a solution and for selecting a partner. All right. Well, Abhishek Mundra, thank you so much for joining me today. Welcome to the podcast.

ABHISHEK MUNDRA  01:12

Thank you, Jason, for inviting me.

JASON GUMPERT  01:13

I'm really interested to learn more about your work some of the findings of your recent report. So, I thought we could just get into it. Maybe we could just start by having you give a bit of an introduction, the role you have, the organization you're with, and the work that you do.

ABHISHEK MUNDRA  01:29

So hi, I'm Abhishek. I'm a Practice Director with Everest Group. I'm aligned to the enterprise platform services practice. In my present role, I track the enterprise platforms market, across the tech vendors, as well as the service providers. We have [inaudible 01:49] publishing agenda, where we track specific elements of the product market. Apart from that, I also advise clients, large IT service providers, tech vendors around their go-to market strategy and pricing strategy.

JASON GUMPERT  02:04

It's great to have you here. And what really led me to ask you to join us was obviously the most recent report that you published and authored on the Dynamics 365 Enterprise Services space and some of the findings in that and some of the themes in that. So, I'm really looking forward to getting some of your views there. Maybe we could just start by you giving an overview of the report itself, what it is, what it isn't, perhaps, who consumes it, maybe a bit of the history if you've published multiple rounds of it.

ABHISHEK MUNDRA  02:33

Basically, it's important that we are talking about that it's a PEAK Matrix assessment for the services market in Microsoft Dynamics 365. PEAK Matrix is a proprietary assessment framework that we have at Everest Group. We do around about those 260-270 PEAK assessments and different services and take vendor markets throughout the year across I was in this these processes. So, if you were to think of this PEAK Matrix, it's basically a 2+2 matrix with the X axis talking about the innovation and investments that are being made by the service providers in the tech vendor. On the Y axis, you have the kind of market traction that some of these participants are gaining in the market. And the final result of it is essentially a relative ranking of different participants in there that are operating in this particular ecosystem. So, that's a brief about this. And we have done this for Dynamics 365. Earlier this year, we did a same thing for S/4HANA services. And before that, we have done it for ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday ecosystems as well.

JASON GUMPERT  03:44

So, I assume the ideal audience for a report like this would be a CIO or someone that was looking to make a major investment in services around one of these types of solutions. They're trying to evaluate their consulting, relationship options. And this gives them your views on how you analyze and quantify some of the factors around some of these of the largest, I would say, GSIs.

ABHISHEK MUNDRA  04:10