Partners Become Central Players In Microsoft's Business Applications Push

Microsoft is putting more development and marketing muscle behind its Dynamics family of business applications, integrating their financial, supply chain and customer relationship management functionality with multiple client and server products, and using them to move into new areas such as role-based computing. Although it is a relative newcomer to the business applications market, Microsoft will become a potent force both because of its end-to-end ownership of the solutions stack and because it can drive sales through its comprehensive and increasingly effective partner program. However, Microsoft faces three significant challenges: integrating its now-separate technology and business-applications ecosystems; managing channel conflict as it moves deeper into the business applications market, including as an SaaS (software-as-a-service) provider; and retaining customers as it shifts customers from today's separate Dynamics offerings onto new ones built on a unified code base.