Did someone mention Cloud? Only about a million times (before lunch). “Cloud” is the buzzword du jour for hosted solutions or Software as a Service (Saas) – as well as Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) (no, I’m not joking).
Cloud is Microsoft’s big thing and Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) kicked things off with vigour and seemed pretty keen on Cloud (note Cloud, not the cloud or a cloud). He had a microphone, but he needn’t of used it – there were only 13,000 of us in the room and he was plenty loud enough.
Microsoft – and Concentrix - already offer cloud options for Microsoft CRM, (we call it hosted Microsoft CRM), as well as Exchange and SharePoint. One VERY exciting thing is that the next release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV will be “cloud ready”, as well as integrating out-of-the-box with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and doing something so clever with the web-based streaming of the client software that I still can’t quite explain it (you don’t need to have NAV installed on your computer to use it - go figure...).
It sounds like Microsoft is close to getting the whole cloud thing right. They admit they’ve made mistakes and have learned a lot about hosting from offerings such as Windows Live, Hotmail and Bing (they are still learning about how to search for things). The way they are building their data centres is quite sci-fi and one for another day.
As British people, we are very familiar with cloud and should be well placed to leverage the business opportunities it offers as the proposition matures. The whole IaaS and PaaS, as well as much of the SaaS (are you still with me?) will be delivered through Microsoft Azure and Azure Appliance. This is set to revolutionise on-premise / data centre deployments as it allows the customer to host the servers, software and data locally while receiving it as a service and paying for it all on a subscription basis. That even sounds cool to me.
Elsewhere on the hardware front, it was interesting to learn more about Windows Intune, which our hardware / infrastructure management guys (and customers!) will be very interested in. For the BI (business intelligence) fans, Microsoft’s forthcoming data marketplace – codename “Dallas" - will enable people to buy and sell data and make it available through the OData standard API. We saw a good demo of Dallas hooking into one of our favourite BI tools – Tableau software. PerformancePoint is also now part of SharePoint (2011), which is a pretty good BI tool too.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM v5 has been officially named Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. We're getting our hands on it soon, so contact Concentrix if you want to find out how it can benefit your business or organisation or if you just want to come in and have a look at it.
Kev and I were present at the first ever public demonstration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and were suitably impressed. It looks more like, or rather just like Office; The personalised contextual Dashboards look spot on; out-of-the-box SharePoint (MOSS) integration is overdue but here!; loads of marginal but serious improvements are also wrapped up in it. Overall, from an end consumer point of view it looks like the functionality will be much more usable - I think it's going to blow people away! When asked to summarise, in layman’s terms, his thoughts on the new version, Kev (Concentrix Senior Microsoft Dynamics CRM Application Specialist / guru / geek) said “...wow”.
We also stopped by the UK Partner Lounge, which doesn’t scrub up very well compared to some of the other countries’ lounges. It has some badges and a James Bond theme – complete with 007 cardboard cut-out, Union flag and cocktails shakers (and Kev – not a permanent fixture) as below:
I spent the afternoon immersing myself in ERP strategy and will take lots of thoughts back to our Microsoft Dynamics NAV team; met with a potential new supplier for a software demo; joined in a CRM focus group with some other partners; went for a run to the White House (smaller than it looks on TV, but with a very nice garden).
Tomorrow there is going to be much, much more on the new version of Dynamics CRM as well as more networking and a party on a roof (well, someone has to go to these things).
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