Conversations about Business Applications: Momentum and progress

Over the past several weeks, I’ve had an opportunity to spend quality time with several customers, partners, and industry analysts. It’s been incredibly insightful to learn more about their experiences and perspectives on our business and to share with them my optimism and excitement about Microsoft Business Applications.

On the recent Microsoft Q2 earnings webcast, Satya referenced Dynamics 365 as one of the engines driving growth for the company, as evidenced by Dynamics 365 year-over-year revenue growth of close to 70 percent. We’re seeing evidence of our modern and modular business process apps are resonating with customers looking to transform their businesses. Customers like United Technologies and Columbia Sportswear have chosen the Microsoft Cloud, Dynamics 365 and Azure, to help acceleration their own digital transformation efforts.

Strong partnerships continue to play an important role in our success and the breadth of offerings we make available for businesses. The integrations with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365 for Sales into a single offer available at about half the cost of competitive solutions is a win for companies looking to improve their sales pipelines and the effectiveness of the sales teams. Park Place Technologies is one such customer. And the breadth of work we’ve done with Adobe in the past year has helped companies looking to be more efficient in their business processes and transform customer experiences. Our overall partner ecosystem is growing; over the past year there has been almost a 50 percent growth in partners selling Dynamics 365. We have also shown our ongoing commitment to ISVs and partners with the launch of ISV cloud embed program, our new readiness learning portal and co-sell program.

Last week we hosted a number of leading industry analysts here at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA. This two day event provided an opportunity to engage and gather feedback from a group of deeply knowledgeable technology experts. Ray Wang, Principal Analyst, Founder, and Chairman of Silicon Valley based Constellation Research, Inc summarized the theme of the conversation well in his note, “The Bottom Line: Microsoft Business Applications Is A Significant Player In Digital Transformation”.

Our commitment to innovation remains unwavering and customer needs are the center of everything we do. Our engineering teams are working hard to deliver the next wave of feature updates and solutions for customers that will help them accelerate business transformation, regardless of customer size and business complexity. I’m looking forward to sharing more about what’s ahead with customers and partners at our upcoming Microsoft Business Forward event, March 21 in Amsterdam.