New age enterprises in the retail, e-commerce, BFSI and manufacturing sectors in India are choosing Dynamics 365, the cloud 
based enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) combine from Microsoft. Companies are choosing Dynamics 365 to help them in their digital transformation journeys. Dynamics 365 was unveiled globally in October this year and is now being delivered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) from local datacenters. It is a cloud based suite of applications that integrates CRM and ERP capabilities to provide the full power of advanced data analytics, machine learning and intelligence to high growth, new age companies in India.
Peter Gartenberg, General Manager, Enterprise Business, Microsoft India said, “With Dynamics 365 we now bring the combined power of CRM and ERP on a secure and flexible local cloud platform. Our retail, BFSI and manufacturing customers now don’t need to invest in expensive and time consuming deployments to start their digital transformation. Backed by decades of research and investment, we have built Dynamics 365 to deliver the most advanced analytics and machine learning intelligence capabilities to our customers in India.”
With the app-based subscription model customers will only pay for the app they need, licensed to a particular user. By using these new plans, customers get one holistic subscription to have all the information at their fingertips, and they could save four to five times the cost of traditional CRM providers. Customers will have the option to choose which of the apps they adopt so they can scale on demand.
Currently, organisations from across multiple industry sectors are using Dynamics CRM. These include Max Healthcare, Yes Bank, Reliance Life Insurance Company, SOTC, VLCC, Cloudnine Group of Hospitals, Annik, Mastek and many more. In the retail sector, Microsoft Dynamics is used by 55 Retail and DMS customers serving 74 retail brands, empowering 14,000 outlets, enabling 25,000 users in India.
Businesses that embrace digital transformation generate an average of $100 million (or 8% points) more operating income each year than those who do not. There is a new speed of business that companies must adapt to, along with the rapidly evolving customer engagement mechanisms. There is a critical need to innovate in real-time, and all of this, with finite resources at their disposal. In such a scenario, Dynamics 365 offers a cost-effective, agile and easy-to-implement solution that enables personalization and greater productivity, allows real-time innovation, delivers deeper insights, and adapts to business needs.
According to Forrester, in the age of the customer, customer experience is the only source of competitive differentiation.* But the discourse on customer experience often overstates the importance of the front end, and understates the importance of core business applications, such as CRM and ERP. Customer experience – above all – needs a flexible, agile, and thoroughly modernized core applications infrastructure. Forrester believes the contemporary business application must focus on SaaS, user experience, flexibility through model-driven development, embedded analytics, and easy, pre-built integration. IT needs to rise above the siloes of software product categories, and think in terms of roles.**
*Navigate The Future Of CRM in 2016, Forrester Research, Inc., February 3, 2016
** Create A Business Application Road Map For The Digital Age, Forrester Research, Inc., June 10, 2016
