Microsoft will soon start paying higher rewards to its fast-growing cloud-services resellers as it positioned Dynamics to wrest control of the lucrative financial software-as-a-service market from NetSuite and Salesforce.
And it will use its desktop dominance to drive hard into the small to mid-size markets where it struggled to gain traction against entrenched rivals, said Microsoft vice president for business solutions Michael Park.
He said Microsoft had 300,000 customers on its Dynamics enterprise resource planning software and by last January had 50,000 on a trial of its CRM cloud service.
In last year's CRN Fast50, half of the fastest-growing resellers on the list sold cloud, hosting or internet services and of the total number, two-fifths made most of their revenue from services.
Microsoft hoped to steal business from German business-software giant SAP that Park said was guilty of pouring “electronic concrete” into businesses around the world.
“The value for customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning is in delivering simplicity for end users,” Park said.
Park said that despite the shift to commodity cloud services profitability would increase for many of Microsoft’s partners.
Although he would not say specifically when the changes will come into effect, Park indicated that the transtion would occur over the next few months.
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