Five reasons we’re celebrating Dynamics 365 this year

As 2017 comes to a close, it’s a great time to reflect on the past several months. This year has been tremendously exciting and rewarding for all of us on the Dynamics 365 team. Together with our partners, we’ve achieved a lot and have much to be proud of – most importantly, working together to empower our customers to achieve more. With that in mind, I wanted to share a list of five reasons we’re celebrating Dynamics 365 and the work we’ve done this year.

These are great indicators of the investment we continue to make in delivering modern, unified, intelligent and adaptable business applications. We continue to be energized as we look toward the new year, with more innovation to deliver, and more impact for businesses that are increasingly relying on Dynamics 365 to continue their journey to the cloud and to begin digitally transforming their organizations.

1. Delivering a new modular approach for business applications, starting with Talent.

While we continue to offer a complete line of business solutions, like Dynamics 365 for Talent – which includes core Human Capital Management (HCM) capabilities a company needs, we realize some customers need more targeted solutions.

Last month, at our Business forward event in Chicago, we announced the General Availability of our first two modular apps — Dynamics 365 for Talent: Attract, and Dynamics 365 for Talent: Onboard.

These modular SaaS apps are easy to implement, designed to let business users transform a single process, like how you engage job candidates or onboard new employees. These apps let you get up and running quickly, take advantage of your existing data, connect to your existing systems, deliver insights from LinkedIn, and connect to Office 365 and Dynamics 365 to delivering meaningful results, in minutes.

These new apps are available now and are just the start of our plans to help you transform your business, one discrete, high-value business process at a time. Take a look at a new demonstration video to see this new modular approach in action, or check out the Dynamics 365 for Talent page for more details.

2. Helping businesses leverage their data and deliver more personalized experiences with strong partners.

This year, we’ve been pleased to continue delivering progress on our strategic partnership with Adobe. Our joint efforts are helping enterprises transform their customer experiences, and drive more efficient business processes. Last month, we announced with Adobe that Dynamics 365 is now integrated with Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe’s industry leading content management solution in Adobe Marketing Cloud. Now available to our joint customers, this integration helps organizations optimize enterprise sales and lead management. For more information about our partnership with Adobe and the range of joint solutions we offer, please visit our new Dynamics 365 solutions page.

This year we were also happy to introduce a partnership with Dun & Bradstreet and deliver integrations that make it easy for our joint customers to benefit from data surfaced directly into Dynamics 365, streamlining their processes and improving productivity. Integration of the industry-standard business data from Dun & Bradstreet helps our shared customers qualify sales leads and stay synchronized with Dun & Bradstreet’s global business database of over 265 million business records. Additional details about this partnership can be found in our joint announcement.

3. Transforming sales organizations with Microsoft Relationship Sales solution.

Dynamics 365 for Sales is already helping salespeople get more done with powerful integrations with Office 365. To enhance the productivity of sales organizations even further, earlier this year we announced plans to develop new integrations with LinkedIn Sales Navigator that help salespeople deliver better outcomes using Dynamics 365 for Sales and insights from LinkedIn’s 500 million professionals.

And by introducing a single offer that brings together LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365 for Sales at about half the cost of competitive solutions in the market, the Microsoft Relationship Sales solution makes it easier for customers to take advantage of these integrations.

We’re already seeing customers like Park Place Technologies announce their plans to adopt Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365 to increase the effectiveness of their salespeople and give them the ability to improve their pipeline. For more information about how your organization can unify social and sales data to identify the right leads and connect with them through personalized engagement, visit our solution page here.

4. Witnessing continued customer success with Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365 is helping more organizations than ever before – in fact, more than 60 percent of the Fortune 500 industrial companies. In the past year we’ve welcomed to that growing family of customers organizations from a range of industries including HP, Inc., AccuWeather, Ecolab, Helsana, the Renault Sports Formula One Team and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Most recently, United Technologies Corporation (UTC), announced plans to leverage Dynamics 365 to empower service technicians and sales teams in its Otis Elevator business, giving them a unified view of the customer relationship and real-time elevator health data to enable predictive maintenance, dynamic field dispatching and a more seamless customer experience.

Even our hometown football team, the Seattle Seahawks, are using Dynamics 365 to reinvent ways they connect with their fans and deliver improved experiences. You can read more in a blog post we published recently, highlighting how the team uses Microsoft business applications manage the team’s vast season ticketholder database, nurture fan loyalty and provide a game day experience the NFL ranked No. 1 in 2016.

5. Pursuing continued product innovation and meeting evolving business needs across our Dynamics 365 business applications.

As we’ve said before, our goal is to empower lines of business with purpose-built applications that allow any organization to start based on organizational needs and scale on demand, adding additional solutions over time. In service of that goal, we are continually updating and improving our solutions to meet customer needs now and anticipate innovation our customers will require in the future.

Earlier this month, we announced general availability of Dynamics NAV 2018, introducing significant new capabilities, as well as deeper interoperability across the Microsoft ecosystem, including Office 365.

Today we’re happy to announce availability of Dynamics 365 fall service updates, delivering continued value across our applications with new mobile experiences, enhanced analytics, and IoT and process automation.

For a comprehensive view of all the updates that are coming available this month, check out today’s blog focused on the latest in Finance and Operations.

As we reflect on the year, we are proud to continue to earn the trust of our customers, helping them to innovate, realize new opportunities and reimagine how they do business. On behalf of all of us on the Dynamics 365 team, I want to extend our wishes for a happy holiday season. We look forward to working with you on more great things to come in 2018.