WPC 2012: Microsoft Starts Frontal Attack on Enterprise Segment

[Editor's note: This article is a preview to TerDege's upcoming WPC 2012 Business Report.  Click here for a copy of the 2011 report.]

Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference 2012 is history. Last week over 16,000 people from 156 countries traveled to Toronto for Microsoft's most important annual conference - an all time high for attendance, with about 3,000 Dynamics-related partners. The most important message this year was Microsoft's decision to start a frontal attack with Dynamics on the enterprise segment. The second interesting trend was the choice to further change partner compensation models. 

Microsoft made its entrance in the business application area in between 2000 and 2002. The launch of Microsoft CRM was followed by acquisitions of US-based Great Plains, shortly followed by Danish Navision Software. The expected fast uptake of these offerings in Microsoft's sales channels did not play out as expected. More precisely, ten years after the acquisitions both companies are still not completely integrated in the Microsoft organization! As a result, the Dynamics ERP products have still not realized their full potential. The Enterprise Product Group (EPG) showed hardly any interest in accepting commitments for CRM and ERP sales in the early years, in part because in those early years the products didn't have the power and bandwidth corporate customers were looking for.

Dynamics AX in EA

Enterprise Agreements (EA) are the moneymakers within Microsoft. It's difficult to find a corporate organization that doesn't have an EA. Strange enough, however, these EA's covered every single Microsoft product except the Dynamics ERP solutions. At WPC 2012 Microsoft unveiled its plans to add Dynamics AX to its EA contracts, finally opening the door to the boardrooms of companies worldwide that suffer each and every day ...