Just back from Amsterdam.
Leaders of some of the best Dynamics Ax practices globally met in Amsterdam to share experiences and to hear from Microsoft leaders on the future direction of Dynamics 365:
– Chandru Shankar Manufacturing Industry Director for Microsoft Business Solutions EMEA,
– Sri Srinivasan, General Manager for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations in the Cloud and Enterprise – Group
– Mike Ehrenberg, Microsoft Technical Fellow.
One thing is clear – digital transformation is happening now.
Chandru opened with a well known quote from Jack Welch:
“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”
Let me add some more of Jack Welch’s insights on the same theme:
“Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.”
“Change before you have to.”
“If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.”
“If you are not confused, you don´t know what is going on.”
“When launching something new, you have to go for it—“playing not to lose” can never be an option.”
“as Google CEO Larry Page put it in his 2014 TED talk: “The main thing that has caused companies to fail, in my view, is that they missed the future.”
― Jack Welch
A telling statistic is that 86% of the1955 Fortune 500 have failed since its inception in 1955.
Source: http://www.briansolis.com/2013/02/no-business-is-too-big-to-fail-or-too-small-to-succeed-sobering-stats-on-business-failures/
A study from the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University estimates that 40 percent of today’s F500 companies on the S&P 500 will no longer exist in 10 years. Startups in the areas of information, transportation, communication, and utilities have the highest failure rates, while finance insurance and real estate tend to be more successful. But the grim reality, is that almost 50 percent of new businesses, independent of the industry, don’t make it to four years.
Microsoft itself has had to make rapid changes, and its partner network has had to run closely behind to keep up. The companies that come together in AxPACT are examples of those who are proven to able to leverage the new Dynamics 365 technology stack to effect digital transformation.
Looking back over our 25 year history we have seen the move from AS400 to the introduction of laptops, to smart phones, the internet, fax, email, mobile, RFID,GPS, social media, and the cloud. All these technologies were disruptive in their own way but they also created new business paradigms lean manufacturing, ecommerce.
With predictive analytics, Big data, IoT, and virtual reality, the future continues to offer new challenges and new opportunities and Microsoft continues to deliver us enhanced toolsets to drive digital transformation.
In the afternoon session Sri Srinavasan and Mike Ehrenberg answered direct questions from the partners about the current status and future direction of the Dynamics 365 story: Dynamics 365 with Edge computing hybrid/on premise, the role of the Apps store, the move from over-layered code to extensions and what that means for regular product upgrades, the rapid adoption rate this year of Dynamics 365 with over 500 projects under implementation, the Common Data Store and how it will support new features going forward .e.g for HR, and Power Bi reporting.
