Upward Expectations Of Microsoft Dynamics Customers

Microsoft is relatively unique amongst ERP providers in that they rely heavily on partners for sales and marketing. In fact, they are the most mature company that does so. Resellers of Microsoft Dynamics regularly find themselves "in the trenches," meeting customer demands and structuring their businesses to best reflect those ever-changing needs. The truth is many VARs do not like to call themselves "VARs" at all. To them, being a VAR means that they simply sell the Microsoft product as a third-party. In reality, many of these companies are consultancies first and foremost, offering Microsoft Dynamics solutions because they are able to address their customers' concerns better than other solutions.

That being said, it is impossible to extricate the Dynamics focus from these VARs, particularly due to the ubiquitous and varied nature of Microsoft products. Further, directives from Microsoft affect these businesses both directly and indirectly. The Master VAR program, which enables smaller Dynamics partners to latch on to larger ones, serves as an example of a directive from on high. In addition, Microsoft can influence customers to purchase one flavor of Dynamics over another through their current expenditure of marketing and R&D dollars. Andrew Snook, President of FastPath Solutions, a provider of audit, compliance and security solutions for Dynamics, has noted a push for Dynamics AX based on such activity.

"The AX-side has grown faster than we expected," said Snook. "We've had more than a few people engage us in request-for-proposals against SAP and Oracle. We've seen more people take AX into consideration. We're busy because of the effort Microsoft is putting into the growth of AX, so it's been great for us."

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