Thursday, December 19, 2019
The Cloud Is Coming…Has Arrived
Most of you are familiar with the fable about the boy who cried wolf. The boy cried several times and tricked the people in his town to come and defend their flock of sheep against a wolf that was not there. When the wolf finally did arrive, and he cried out, nobody came to his rescue.
For me, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Cloud offerings have been a bit like that the past few years. We have had many different announcements around Microsoft Dynamics 365, but it always seemed like something was missing for it to be successful.
Not anymore… (in saying this, I hope that you are not in the group, that thought that the Cloud would never arrive).
In 2019, we started projects to upgrade Dynamics AX customers to Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management (formerly known as Finance and Operations). As well, we migrated or upgraded 14 Dynamics NAV projects to Dynamics 365 Business Central. As we have seen over the past year, the trend for this is accelerating.
Microsoft also removed the access to develop in C/AL, the on-premises based development tool that has been the cornerstone of Dynamics NAV, since 1995. Now customizations have to be built in the cloud-friendly way, as Extensions to the core application and in AL, based on Visual Studio.
1ClickFactory released our C/AL to Extension Analyzer in 2019, a tool that saves Partners days of analysis work when they want to move customers from a Dynamics NAV customized application to Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Microsoft also reached 500 apps on AppSource, this illustrates momentum for getting solutions on to the Cloud today.
What Will 2020 Bring?
My prediction, and I have no crystal ball, is that the Dynamics business will have one of its best years ever in 2020. The Finance and Supply Chain Management business has been quite stable for some years now; I am sure that we will see a lot of new customers moving to this leading ERP platform, that unlocks all the investments Microsoft has made in the cloud (e.g. PowerBI, PowerApps and artificial intelligence) over the past 5 years.
If you have current Dynamics AX customers, and it’s unclear as to how you can move them forward - try our BestPath Assessment to understand the scope of any Dynamics AX migration to the Cloud.
Furthermore, I think that Microsoft will enhance its migration offering to Microsoft Business Central, making it easier and faster to move NAV customers, if not, 1ClickFactory will, guaranteed. There is an enormous business opportunity here to help customers migrate and to unlock this potential. My view has always been that Partners need dedicated personnel that work with customers to move forward - increasing knowledge and speed of that process. If you don’t have people in your organization that can work on this, then maybe 2020 will be the year to hire them.
I would like to thank all our wonderful 1ClickFactory Partners for a great 2019. It was our 10 year anniversary, a big thanks to those that celebrated with us at Directions EMEA or Microsoft Inspire. 2019 has also marked the most successful year for 1ClickFactory ever. We could not have done it without you. Thank you.
Happy holidays and best wishes for 2020!
Søren Fink-Jensen
CEO, 1ClickFactory