Over the past 12 months the Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Azure teams have been on a rapid release cadence of their respective software. It has meant that the space occupied by some Microsoft ISV partners is now being infringed. This has thrown up many questions as to the future of these Microsoft partners. And it’s not just happening in the Microsoft CRM world – just think about the Surface line of products and Microsoft’s traditional hardware partners.
| CRM ISV | Microsoft |
| Resco/CWR | CRM MoCa |
| ClickDimensions | Microsoft Dynamics Marketing |
| Akvelon Global Search | CRM Multi-Entity Search |
| TKDialogs | CRM Dialogs & Guided Business Processes |
| Scribe | Azure Data Factory Service |
| Zap Business Intelligence | Power BI |
| North52 | CRM Rollups, Calculations and Business Rules |
Who survives and who dies really depends on how much depth there is within an add-on and how much thought leadership the ISV can bring to that business area. When Microsoft brings out a new feature or product that competes with an ISV you might think the game is over but it’s not as simple as you might think.
Just take a look at ClickDimensions. It’s very easy to arrive at the conclusion that Microsoft Dynamics Marketing will blow them out of the water. But far from it they have a feature rich product that is deeper than MDM in certain areas, is native to Dynamics CRM and I believe their ace in the hole is the quality of the training content they provide. It literally gives potential customers a proven plan of attack that they can tweak and deploy quickly.
We at North52 are drawing up our plans of attack as well by launching the first set of 50 xRM Samples which gives step by step guidance on how to solve real world CRM business requirements with North52 BPA.
You could be forgiven for thinking that large companies like Microsoft always hold the advantage but one significant advantage that ISVs have over Microsoft is their flexibility to add little but significant features. As a recent example we had a partner implementing CRM for a customer and they needed us to enhance one of our functions called CountCharacters. As you can guess it takes a string and counts the number of characters in that string. However, to meet the customer’s business requirement, our partner needed some extra functionality to count the number of times that a certain character appeared in a string. This made sense to add to the product so we provided the partner with a new release including this functionality in less than two weeks. We now have a fantastic relationship with that partner and they totally trust us to deliver for them and their customers.
We believe the depth of our product Business Process Activities (BPA) along with its strong roadmap will continue to delight customers and consultants for many years to come. If you would like to know more or have any questions please drop us an email at info@north52.com
About North52
North52 is a leader in the creation of software products for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. As a Microsoft partner, North52 has an impressive and rapidly growing list of customers benefiting from its products. Headquartered in Cork, Ireland , North52’s core values of the right Technology, the right People and the right Partnerships ensures delivery of great products for their customers.
For more information, visit www.north52.com or contact info@north52.com