Modern technologies have gone a long way to level the playing field for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). And as we’ve seen at the Worldwide Partner Conference this week, Microsoft’s partner ecosystem continues to invest in ways to give partner SMBs a competitive edge. Some partners have discovered a way to make that edge even sharper by building Microsoft Dynamics solutions hosted in the cloud.
“Today, the Microsoft Dynamics platform can provide the flexibility and power to serve a multitude of business needs,” says Neil Holloway, corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions Sales and Operations. “Add to that Windows Azure and cloud services, and you’ve got big business computing muscle increasingly making it possible for smaller companies to have the same computing muscle as their larger competitors.”
In a feature story on Microsoft News Center, the Microsoft Dynamics group spotlights two SMB partner companies whose businesses have experienced significant growth by creating solutions that use the Dynamics platform on Windows Azure.
Hosting Microsoft Dynamics NAV on Windows Azure enabled Danish consultant and Microsoft partner Abakion to shorten their sales cycles from months to days. Likewise, deployment time went from a month to as little as an hour, and because it’s cloud-based, their customers are experiencing huge drops in operational costs and a much faster return on investment.
That means growth. Abakion’s founder and CEO Kenneth Kryger Gram anticipates their holistic solutions for SMBs will increase revenue by 25 percent.
Another partner, The Netherlands’ Abecon Informatiesystemen, works with SMB customers ranging from five employees to 500 and has helped many of them implement Microsoft Dynamics solutions using Windows Azure and other Web-based tools, including Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365.
Abecon solutions consultant Niels van Golden said Microsoft’s commitment to both the SMB market and the partners that serve it is helping to fuel a thriving new industry. Focusing on Microsoft Dynamics, Abecon has grown 20 percent annually over the past three years.
If they’re not careful, they just might outgrow their “SMB” moniker. Read more about these SMB partners on Microsoft News Center.
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Deborah Pisano
Microsoft News Center Staff