Friday, June 19, 2015

Does this mean MS is looking to unload Dynamics?

Well, now this is interesting.

As veteran Microsoft tea-leaf readers like Mary Jo Foley help the world to understand Satya Nadella's recently-announced reorg, Diginomica's Phil Wainewright indulges in a bit of speculation:

The other possible outcome is to put the Dynamics sales and partner organizations up for sale. This alternative strategy would allow Microsoft to focus on its core platform and product engineering strategy without the conflict of having a sales team intent on winning business away from its growing army of third-party partner vendors. Some or all of the ERP products would doubtless be part of that transaction, while Microsoft would likely prefer to retain the CRM product because of the tight integration that’s possible to its Office properties. But the ultimate decision may depend on who the buyer will be.... I think it’s more likely that Microsoft would look to sell off some or all of its legacy ERP portfolio to a ‘friendly’ competitor — one that’s committed to the Microsoft stack. 

He mentions Sage and Unit4, a PE-backed European vendor, as possibilities.

(Lest your humble blogger be accused of selectively parsing the speculation, Wainewright also suggests MS may look to acquire other vendors, rather than divest.  But I think the part I've quoted above makes more sense, and seems plausible given Nadella's recent actions and public statements.  We'll see...)

It's also worth noting that Frank Scavo, noted ERP analyst at Strativa, draws the opposite conclusion.

1 comment:

  1. Quietly over the last 3 years or so Microsoft's Online properties have been dogfooding a new U-SQL platform to supersede the .NET 4.5.x SQL server ISV stack (likely called .NET 5.0). I don't see the core Dynamics properties written in proprietary X++ and Dexterity being candidates worthy of dogfooding on the new stack. Sage and Unit4 -- good calls.

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