What was revealed by Microsoft at Directions EMEA 2022?

At the recent Directions EMEA 2022 event held in Hamburg, it was revealed that SMB is the fastest growing segment of Microsoft’s Business Applications with Business Central continuing to top the charts in terms of growth year on year. As well as this, Microsoft GM, Toby Bowers also stated that the SMB ERP’s customer base had grown by over 60% in the last year. 

During the event many of the presenters suggested that Microsoft partners should be looking to promote Business Central’s success in the market. This is because the platform has been meeting its targets despite the customer base increasing. Furthermore, they provided some statistics to back up this point: 

• It was revealed that 99.84% of session minutes provided by the service were inside the target requirements. 
• It was revealed that database resources were running within their target requirement in 99.96% of cases. 

As well as this, it was revealed by the Group Project Manager, Dmitry Chadayev that thanks to the hard of work of the Business Central service teams it had reduced the rate of growth of customer support calls to under the rate of monthly active user growth. 

Understanding the way that SMBs operate with the mantra ‘do more with less’ 

Although happy with the overall performance of Microsoft, Bowers was keen to reiterate to the audiences that Microsoft was fully aware of the challenges faced by Microsoft partners in light of rising inflation as well as the continued aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, he encouraged partners to make use of the whole host of new promotional offers that have been recently launched to help them. 

He went on to add "Do more with less doesn't mean working harder or faster, it means leveraging technology to amplify your impact and achieve your business outcomes faster”. 

Some of the promotional offers that Microsoft will be offering includes a 40% discount on the price of Business Central add-on environments as well as this adding new Business Central users will see prices reduced by 20%. 

As well as this, it was announced to partners that the ‘do more with less’ was around goals like delivering more streamlined Business Central implementations, providing tools to bring down the costs of implementations in addition to targeting high value capabilities like automation particularly when replacing outdated systems. 

It was also stated that businesses are more likely to spend on operational improvements to modernise their ERP systems during turbulent economic times.  This point is backed up by the fact that Microsoft’s recent research has suggested that the technology spend in the SMB market will be over $1.2 trillion in 2022 with strong services utilisation expected throughout 2023. 

Lastly, Microsoft suggested that Microsoft partners should look for opportunities with SMB customers where Microsoft is predicting significant growth in interest areas such as digital security, customer engagement as well as maximising efficiency. 

Next Steps? 

If you are a business that is looking to upgrade your ERP solution to something more scalable such as Microsoft’s Business Central Cloud-based ERP solution then please call our team of ERP experts today to discuss how we can help you out. You may also wish to check out our Quick Start packages for ERP. 

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