Microsoft Dynamics Asia Partner Summit: the future is cloud

Opening keynote: the future is now

Emily Fork, Partner Sales Director, Microsoft Dynamics Asia, gave the opening address and introduced a key and recurring theme for the conference. Microsoft is focussing on 3 key tenets for the future - cloud, mobile and business apps (Dynamics) - and the 3 leverage each other for business productivity.

That future is now! The number of New Zealand businesses moving to Microsoft cloud solutions has increased 174% in 2014 on 2013, with CRM Online growing 35% in the same period.

Transforming in the age of the customer

Adrian Johnstone, Vice President, Microsoft Dynamics Asia discussed the growth of Microsoft Dynamics NAV to 106,000 customers worldwide, partially driven by it being web and cloud enabled. By 2020, he said, ~50% of total IT spend will be cloud related, and by 2016 25% of external application implementation spend will be on mobility, cloud, analytics and social.

Johnstone spoke about the reasons customers choose the cloud, including innovation, agility, cost savings, business unit preference and for business advantage.

And he shared some interesting statistics that reveal something of the wider context of business change. Did you know that

• a person checks their phone on average 150 times a day?
• there are 6.8 + billion people on mobile?
• there are 400+ million tweets per day about products, services and brand?

To adapt to this transition and the new customer journey, and understand customers better, businesses need to embrace cloud, mobile and social media solutions.

What does this all mean?

Wayne Morris, Corporate Vice President, Marketing, Microsoft Business wrapped up the morning with some highlights from the recent Gartner survey, Why Customers Choose the Cloud.

• 74% want to use a hybrid model (on premise, hosted and cloud)
• Customers still need advice
• 63% customers expect to have a single major cloud provider
• 84% want an established partner relationship

To make the transition to the cloud, businesses need to learn about & use the cloud. They also need to define and develop differentiate their offer, and for sales and marketing it’s now all about continuous engagement, rather than a transactional approach.

The main thing we took from this first day of the conference is that Microsoft is now a cloud-first, mobile-first organisation, and can provide these technologies in one integrated platform, through:

• Business Apps - Dynamics NAV and CRM
• Productivity - Office365
• Platform – Azure
• Power BI - Analytics

As a Microsoft partner, Theta is already working across all these technologies.