Accelerating opportunities for ISVs with new programs and technology

Next week at Microsoft Inspire in Las Vegas, Microsoft will host our annual partner conference where our company wide vision will be shared, including Microsoft Business Applications. The Business Applications Total Addressable Market (TAM) is predicted to be at $125B by 2022, and 57 percent of this will be driven by ISVs. Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform are an important area of investment for the company, and represent a significant growth opportunity for partners in this market.

Partners are critical to this story, whether they’re ISVs building solutions on top of Dynamics 365, ISVs connecting their solutions with Dynamics 365, or systems integrators providing customization and integration for the customer’s environment. These partners bring deep industry expertise that helps customers solve important, industry-specific challenges, so we have been investing in technical and business solutions to help accelerate their growth.

Launching a new program and tech investments for Business Applications partners

In April we began to preview elements of this program and since then we’ve been listening to our partners on how best to help accelerate their business. Although their needs vary, overall, they are looking for two key things:

• New ways to reduce development time for a faster time to market, paired with new go-to-market support to increase business opportunities.
• Technology investments optimized for partners and designed to help them differentiate from their competitors.

With the program officially launching next week at Inspire, there are more details of the program that we would like to share.

Business Applications ISV Connect program

Our newly branded Business Applications ISV Connect program will help drive a healthy Dynamics 365 and PowerApps ecosystem by helping ISVs get to market faster, simplify publishing their solutions to both Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace, and promote their solutions with customers. Microsoft is moving beyond transactional partnerships to a world where partners are encouraged and incented to innovate on top of Microsoft products, adding value for customers and creating new solutions and revenue opportunities. This program is built on a revenue sharing model so we can reinvest in our ISVs with technical, marketing, and sales enablement benefits.

There will be a few areas of reinvestment. Every ISV in the program gets access to customer-approved tenants, technical enablement, marketing support, and more. Many ISVs would also like help in reaching customers and for those that choose to try and enter the premium tier of the program for their app(s), there is co-selling and co-marketing support. Co-selling provides ISVs with the ability to leverage the Microsoft sales force to magnify their reach with Microsoft’s customers globally.

 “There are less than six people in our company that are responsible for sales. This program opens up over a thousand sales people across 50 – 60 countries that will be motivated and inspired to sell our solution.” – Mike Ridgway, Chief Executive Officer at Flintfox

More details can be found on the partner program web page, and partners can begin signing up starting next week at Inspire. Partners benefit from a strong ecosystem and with this new program, Microsoft will ensure that only healthy apps are part of the ecosystem by requiring certification. Successful marketplaces provide customers with trusted applications and Microsoft will help ensure non-certified applications can’t be installed directly into customer tenants without deep, centrally driven security and performance reviews.

Technology investments for ISVs building on Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform

On the technology front, we’re delivering additional innovation for ISVs building on our platform, including pre-packaged elements like APIs, business logic, entities, and workflows for Dynamics 365 and PowerApps so ISVs can connect line of business apps to core business data without having to build new integration points.

At Inspire, we’ll be talking about our plans for Azure DevOps and GitHub integration and we’ll be launching a new solution called ISV Studio that provides a consolidated view into how ISV apps are performing across their customer tenants. Now in public preview, the ISV Studio will enable access to insights about key adoption metrics such as the number of tenants and install successes/failures, empowering ISVs to identify and act on bottlenecks slowing down adoption.

Continued investment in Dynamics 365 Industry Accelerators for ISVs

Data is at the core of business applications—yet many organizations can’t realize its full value because it’s locked up in silos or in an unusable model. To help ISVs quickly create applications that better meet the unique needs of different industries, last year at Inspire we introduced our first Dynamics 365 Industry Accelerator for Healthcare. Since then, we’ve continued to work with industry experts to provide pre-built dashboards, workflows, and sample data that align to the common industry scenarios,  including launching additional accelerators for higher education and nonprofits. These industry accelerators provide ISVs and more importantly their end customers with consistent entities and attributes relevant to their industry, making it easier to work with data across boundaries.

As part of our continued investment, we are making our latest industry accelerators, automotive and banking, generally available.

• Dynamics 365 Automotive Accelerator: The automotive sector has a customer journey that involves several parties resulting in many data silos. There is an additional complexity in that vehicles are always moving. With the automotive accelerator, we worked with Annata, Oxlo, and others to help ISV partners quickly develop customer experience management (e.g., marketing, lifetime engagement, etc.) solutions that can serve, for example, franchised dealer networks. It is open sourced on GitHub and available in AppSource for a test drive.
• Dynamics 365 Banking Accelerator: Customer expectations of banking services continue to increase, and the ability for a bank to look at a customer’s profile end-to-end is becoming more critical. Working with Veripark, Wealth Dynamix, Fiserv, and others, we have laid the groundwork for partners to quickly build financial services solutions that can interoperate, and banks are able to view their customer journeys. This first version of the banking accelerator includes data models and sample apps supporting both retail and commercial banking and is freely available in AppSource and GitHub.

We’re also announcing significant updates to the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator, a sector where the need for a common approach to data is acutely felt as organizations have historically been left with an assortment of technology originally designed for for-profit companies that doesn’t fit their needs. The latest set of capabilities, which are now in public preview, aim to cut costs and boost efficiencies for nonprofits through increased data transparency, streamlined implementation of solutions and increased operability across systems. This is adding to existing capabilities that help nonprofits with core processes such as program delivery, fundraising, and volunteer management.

Today, there are more than 60 dedicated Dynamics partners around the world creating purpose-built solutions for nonprofits and mapping their data structures to the Common Data Model for nonprofits, an unprecedented data standard that enables seamless integration between nonprofit data systems.

For example, ISV partner Wipfli is working with our Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator to create a volunteer management solution for Team Rubicon that they anticipate will enable them to mobilize three times the number of volunteers they were able to deploy to Houston to provide relief during Hurricane Harvey.

 “After the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator was released, our team went back and estimated a CRM replacement with customizations and integrations and estimated a 15 percent savings in implementation costs for the customer. The Nonprofit Accelerator allows us to accommodate implementation of these nonprofit-specific processes efficiently when serving these customers.” – Kevin E. Fraser, Microsoft Dynamics ERP Lead, Ernst & Young LLP

Learn more at Inspire 2019 in Las Vegas or online

Inspire 2019 is a great opportunity to connect with partners on how to work together to serve our mutual customers. James Philips, Alysa Taylor, myself, and our teams will be there to assist you with your questions. I have also included some relevant sessions for you to attend.

Visit the Inspire microsite, which will be updated with materials, photos, and Corenote replays, for more highlights from the event.

Of course, we’ll have more updates and customer stories in the weeks and months ahead. So, whether in Las Vegas next week, or online through streamed live sessions, we look forward to connecting with you and celebrating the vision, insight, and inspiration that is accelerating the digital transformation of our customers.

Steven Guggenheimer

Corporate Vice President - AI & ISV Engagement

As a Microsoft Corporate Vice President I spend my energy helping customers and partners on their adoption of Artificial Intelligence while also helping ISVs partner with Microsoft on developing a new generation of Line of Business SaaS offerings based on Microsoft’s Dynamics, Power Platform, Office and Azure cloud platforms. I have worked in the technology industry for more than 20 years and spent close to a decade leading Microsoft’s efforts to create a more vibrant ecosystem across both hardware and software as the leader of our OEM & DPE/DX teams accordingly, along with a variety of leadership roles across the Microsoft product portfolio.

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