This deal hanging out there would explain Microsoft's weird absence from a good portion of Summit activities last week. I told a few people that it looked like Microsoft was phoning it in. Microsoft was 100% absent from GP land and judging by the slew of unimpressed other-product users I talked with Microsoft's primary contribution was cloud revenue proclamations.

I like this news. The entire purpose of Dynamics 365 for Microsoft was to increase Azure and cloud revenues (for the c-suite which came from that division). With SAP they can do this and they can quietly sell or break off the Dynamics business lines to companies (like SAP) who can do something with those large and somewhat still loyal user bases. Microsoft over the last couple of decades has shown real discomfort with the ERP sales and support models and having partners who are comfortable selling products running in the MS cloud would allow them the out they (and us customers) want.