The Uprising of the Dynamics Marketplace

Louise Alderton, 02 April 2011

In my last few blog posts I have been reviewing and summarising questions posed to Microsoft Dynamic CRM General Manager, Brad Wilson from a recent interview conducted by Software Advice. So far these questions have covered trends in the CRM software market, price strategy, challenges for partners in the cloud era and choice of deployment model. This week’s question is around the progress of the new Dynamics Marketplace.

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“What is the progress so far of the Dynamics Marketplace?”

The Dynamics Marketplace is an area where we can aggregate two different kinds of things. The first is listings of Partner’s applications and services offerings. Microsoft has a very big portfolio of Partners who are developing extensions to CRM and ERP applications. It’s also a great way to help connect businesses in a more traditional catalogue type environment.

The second thing and new as of early 2011 is the marketplace can also host applications - built on CRM 2011 and built for CRM online. Partners can have their configurations and code directly hosted in our marketplace and customers are able to directly download those applications into trials and into production systems. So, the Dynamics Marketplace becomes a vehicle for not just finding IP whether services or applications but directly delivering that into the service.

In 2011 it’s no longer just discovery but actual direct engagement of third party IP and that’s really going to help us deliver value to our customers in a more frictionless way.

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“Is it too early to put in numbers behind uptake of solutions in that marketplace?”

We have got thousands of partners in the catalogue today. Where we are at now is the first 50 to 100 applications are coming on as far as direct downloadable applications and we are only several weeks into this right now. As we continue and as CRM 2011 is in the marketplace longer you will see more and more directly downloadable applications join the portfolio. And of course beyond that there are thousands more applications and services listings you can discover on this platform.

There is a strong need for this Dynamics Marketplace platform and for these applications to be delivered not just for industry but across geography. Microsoft Dynamics is in 40 markets. We’re in places like Greece, France and Germany and we are also dealing with different company sizes – small business to large enterprise.  It is important to be able to offer a large portfolio of applications so it can handle a small German construction company or they could handle a large wealth management opportunity in some place like Malaysia. As we progress you will see a lot of partner IP come into the marketplace to help us connect the right partner value add with the right customer segment, industry and company size.

* Image 1 from: http://www.wiserearth.org/forum/view/c5df01b99ebd7f1337b7ef03649a3fc2
** Image 2 from: http://dynamics.pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/applications/search?q=magnetism