Microsoft has revealed how it plans to price and license its upcoming Dynamics 365 cloud software.
The cloud-based version of Dynamics, which was revealed in July, is designed to offer Microsoft a competitive way into the cloud CRM and ERP spaces.
Microsoft intends to bundle CRM and ERP together as one “holistic subscription” for customers to “have all the information at their fingertips”, according to a blog post by Microsoft’s corporate VP of cloud and enterprise, Takeshi Numoto.
Bundles will take the form of an Enterprise edition for large organisations and a Business edition for SMBs, with varying deals on per app/per user subscriptions.
“With the app-based subscription you pay for the app you need, licensed to a particular user,” wrote Numoto.
“With our new plan-based approach you can create roles that have access to all the apps and functions employees in that role need to perform their jobs.
“For instance, customer service representatives would be more productive with access to data and capabilities from the field service, customer service and sales apps.”
Numoto goes on to explain how with traditional app-based subscriptions such an advantage would “require three separate subscriptions for each customer service representative”.
But customers using Microsoft’s bundling schemes can “get one holistic subscription to have all the information at their fingertips, and could save four to five times the cost of traditional CRM providers”.
It may be obvious or it may not that this last part is a crack at Salesforce, which has recently attempted to have Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn blocked for monopoly reasons.
Dynamics 365 looks to be of genuine use for customers already running Power BI, Office 365, Azure and even Cortana.
A common data model across Office 365 and Dynamics 365 means that customers theoretically won’t have to leave the Outlook ecosystem to keep tabs on everything and take advantage of all the features.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 launches on 1 November.
Author: Peter Gothard
