ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome corporate vice president, Microsoft Business Solutions Marketing, Wayne Morris. (Applause.)
WAYNE MORRIS: Thank you. Welcome to Convergence 2014, to this community and this experience.
It’s great to be here at this unique moment in time where sales productivity, effective marketing, stellar customer care and dynamic operations all come together for your organizations through the power of unique business solutions from Microsoft. We’re going to spend much of the time this morning talking about this.
Welcome also to Barcelona. Actually, for many of you I should say, welcome back. It’s great to be back here together again in this wonderful city where we have so much to talk about and to learn together.
I’m very proud to say that since we were here last year, we’ve grown significantly. This year, we have more than 4,000 attendees. We traveled from 71 countries, all over the world, including the Middle East and Africa.
And as in the past, you come from many different roles in your organization, from IT managers and directors to CIOs, CFOs, CEOs, COOs, CMOs, and many more. In total, there are almost 70 different roles represented here today. Convergence is always such a great place to bring together business and technical leaders.
I want to take a moment to thank our marquee customers, some of whom you’re going to hear from today.
I’d also like to give a special welcome to all of you who are participating in our Executive Experience Program.
Convergence really is a great opportunity to share experiences and learnings and outcomes with other organizations from across the globe.
I’d also like to thank our sponsors. These companies help ensure the success of Convergence. And so I’d ask you to join me in showing our appreciation for them. (Applause.) We’re also very excited about the momentum we have in this particular area. We have more than twice the number of sponsors this year as we had last year.
I’d encourage you to take the time to explore the Convergence Experience Center. There are so many different offerings there that you can learn about and get hands-on with. And take the time to visit all of our sponsors and exhibitors.
Of course, enjoy this amazing city over the next few days so that you get the maximum value out of the experience. Barcelona is such an amazing place. It has so much history and culture. And at the same time, it really gives us a good look as to how the future is shaping up.
Let me illustrate that with this short video.
(Video segment.)
WAYNE MORRIS: The La Masia first of all is just one example how Barcelona is transforming itself to be a digital smart city, leveraging the Microsoft cloud to better serve and connect with their citizens.
These human connections that technology can help facilitate are an important aspect of a strong community.
And at Microsoft we’re passionate about community, about helping and giving back. We’re going to hear about an organization that plays a vital role at the local and national levels here in Spain to support and strengthen and enrich the community. The Spanish Association Against Cancer helps to fight this terrible disease, educate the community, and support cancer patients and those closest to them.
To learn a little more, please join me in welcoming Miguel Angel Abeledo, the director of Information Systems for the AECC. (Applause.)
Miguel, thank you so much for being here with us today. Could you please just take a little time to describe your organization?
MIGUEL ANGEL ABELEDO: I’m glad to be here today.
[Through interpreter]
The Spanish Association Against Cancer is an NGO and has a presence throughout the Spanish territory. We have 52 delegations throughout Spain, with more than 650 employees, and 15,000 volunteers, and 200,000 associates.
We have here the prevention side. We also have the assistance side. We help the people. And finally, we also have the research.
We are in Spain the most important NGO funded in investigation against cancer. We are funding more than 150 projects, with more than 28 million funds.
Only in 2013 we helped more than 400,000 people, families to fight against cancer.
WAYNE MORRIS: Excellent. So maybe you could tell us how does technology help your organization complete its mission.
MIGUEL ANGEL ABELEDO [through interpreter]: The Association Against Cancer works with Dynamics CRM in a more holistic way. CRM helps us to put the beneficiary in the middle and the core in order them to find out the needs. So we can provide, provide service, all the services throughout Spain.
For example, with this system we could find out that there was an increase of 54 percent of need throughout Spain. That means that we have a 52 percent increase of need with these families which don’t have any resources in order to fight cancer. So this helps us to deliver the answers for all the needs of these people.
But with CRM we don’t only deliver the assistance. But it also helps us to get the funding of private institutions and public institutions, or to have a management, fully holistic management of our 200,000 associates. So we can get to know our associates and we can also design the campaigns.
So, and Dynamics is easy to handle. So for us it’s easy to approach our associates. And also our associates know Dynamics and so it’s easy to cooperate.
And each Euro saved we can invest into prevention, into assistance and also research.
WAYNE MORRIS: So thank you so much, Miguel, for sharing your story today, and thank you for the great work that you and your organization does to fight cancer and to support the community. Microsoft is honored to be your partner.
MIGUEL ANGEL ABELEDO: Thank you, Wayne. I want to thank Microsoft the opportunity to participate in the event, and especially for your collaboration over the years. I know you are aware of the benefits that you provide to the Spanish society and the needy people in Spain. Thank you very much.
WAYNE MORRIS: Thank you. (Applause.)
Now, you can do your part for AECC as well. As you know, we like to get your feedback. And to encourage that, for every evaluation form that you complete, Microsoft will donate 3 euros to this great organization. And we’ll also donate a further 3 euros to Caritas Spain, an organization that fights hunger, homelessness and poverty. So please give us your feedback and give back to this wonderful community.
Now let’s turn our attention to another rapidly growing community. This is the emerging workforce that we have within our businesses across the world. This new workforce is truly digital, and they understand the importance of cloud services. They bring fresh ideas and innovation at the same time they’re driving an imperative to change.
We’re embracing this community of young people through the Microsoft Dynamics Academic Alliance. This is a partnership between our customers, institutions of higher learning, and Microsoft. Across Europe, Middle East, and Africa there are 1,166 schools participating in the alliance, with 233,000 students.
With us today is a customer who truly exemplifies how this alliance can help both business and students. Please join me in welcoming Christian Vancea, the head of ERP and CSM Implementation for Lyoness Group out of Austria. (Applause.)
Good morning, Christian. Can you briefly give us a little bit of your description, your background?
CHRISTIAN VANCEA: Yes, of course, I would love to do that.
You know, I’m graduated from FH Joanneum University of Applied Sciences, located in Graz, Austria. And because of the Microsoft Academic Alliance Program they’re involved in, I had a chance to get hands-on experience on Dynamics NAV already in the classroom. And this actually added a lot of value to me and to my education. And, in fact, that was not a problem for me to get employed as a junior ERP consultant afterwards.
So I’ve been hired at Lyoness, and Lyoness is an international shopping community, just to give you an idea, and they also provide customer loyalty programs for small and medium enterprises.
And within my first year at Lyoness I did several implementations all over Europe together with my senior. And after one year and a half, my senior asked me, “Do you want to go to Hong Kong doing the implementation for our subsidiaries all over Asia-Pacific?” And I said, of course, I will accept the challenge.
So I’ve been relocated one year to Hong Kong, and I really had a great time, to be honest. It was amazing.
After I came back from Hong Kong, they offered me the position of head of supply chain implementation, and now we’re a team of eight people. I have four people in Europe, two people in Hong Kong, and one in Miami, altogether eight people.
WAYNE MORRIS: Excellent. So the NAV experience you had as a student actually helped you to get that role? And now as I understand it, you’ve reconnected with your school and your professor around the Academic Alliance. Can you tell us some more?
CHRISTIAN VANCEA: Yes, exactly. So after I came back from Hong Kong, I got in touch with Mr. Singer, my former professor, at FH Joanneum, and we actually talked about what can we do to increase the hands-on experience of our students.
And we launched several projects. We have, for example, internships and we do several student projects, and we do also offer topics for bachelor and master thesis.
WAYNE MORRIS: OK, so now you’re in a position to hire students like you once were.
CHRISTIAN VANCEA: Exactly. We actually hired already one, because we really saw the benefit of students having already hands-on experience within the classroom.
WAYNE MORRIS: Excellent. And how does NAV benefit your particular organization the way you use it in your company?
CHRISTIAN VANCEA: Well, therefore you need to understand that Lyoness is a very young, dynamic and fast-growing company. So it’s very important to us having a solid ERP system and having fast and solid business process implementation. And Dynamics NAV provides us the flexibility we need.
WAYNE MORRIS: Excellent.
Well, look, I’d like to thank you for being with us today, for sharing your story, for your business, and also your continued connection with the Academic Alliance. It really is inspiring that we can show how today’s students can become tomorrow’s business leaders.
CHRISTIAN VANCEA: Thank you very much for the invitation.
WAYNE MORRIS: Thanks very much.
CHRISTIAN VANCEA: Thanks a lot. (Applause.)
WAYNE MORRIS: And thanks to all of you for making this community here at Convergence so vital, meaningful and valuable. I hope that you enjoy the next few days. I look forward to meeting many of you, and have a great conference. Thank you. (Applause.)
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome executive vice president, Microsoft Business Solutions, Kirill Tatarinov. (Applause.)
KIRILL TATARINOV: Good morning, everybody. What an amazing time, what an amazing event. It’s such a great pleasure and honor to be here with you this morning.
Sorry for bringing this weather with us from Seattle. It seems like we can’t leave home without it.
As Wayne mentioned, over 4,000 people are here live, and tens of thousands more watching this online live or in recorded. Thank you and welcome.
The largest part of the audience are existing Microsoft Dynamics customers. And to you I want to say thank you for your trust, thank you for your loyalty, thank you for your business. I hope the next couple of days will serve as a reassurance of the choice you made moving on with Microsoft Dynamics, and I hope you’re going to learn even more on how to put Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft Business Solutions to an amazing use in your organization.
There’s also over 700 prospective customers here in the room, and I hope this event serves as the learning momentum for you to understand how committed we are to businesses worldwide, and how much we can serve your needs and the needs of your organization. And I hope to welcome you back at Convergence 2015 as Microsoft Dynamics customers.
And, of course, to all of the partners and team members in the room, thank you for doing amazing work, supporting our customers and driving this business forward.
We live in an amazing world, amazing world of technology advancements. It seems like all the trends that we spoke only a year ago now prominently entered our professional and personal lives, trends like mobility, cloud, big data analytics, social communications. I cannot imagine our lives without those mega trends.
It seems that the worlds of virtual and physical are converging in front of our very eyes. Mobility is much broader than just mobile communications. There are tens of billions of connected sensor-enabled devices that populate the world of broad Internet with the mass of data and information that we can put to real use in our business scenarios. And today, you will see some examples of how that big data and how Internet of Things is coming to life.
Internet has truly moved from being just a connector of people to connector of people and business transactions to connector of everything. We truly live in the world of Internet of Everything where everything is connected and everything is living.
Obviously, those technological advances rapidly change and transform the way we work. The Gartner Group estimates that next year more than 30 percent of global workforce will be completely mobile. Those people will not have desks, they will work with their phones and smart devices every day.
And, of course, organizations are responding. It is estimated that over 85 percent of organizations will implement policies that would enable people bringing their device to work and use the same devices for personal life and professional life. This converged usage scenario is very important to our innovation and truly shapes the way we build and transform the technology.
So here today at Convergence in Barcelona we’re going to show you how Microsoft is responding to those trends in the world and how Microsoft ushers those changes into your organization and really help you, help you embrace it and help you take full advantage of this amazing world of technology innovation all around us.
We’ll share with you why we build what we build and how it can help you. Let’s take a look.
(Video segment.)
KIRILL TATARINOV: And we certainly value yours. Cortana is Microsoft’s personal assistant that is currently available in the United States and UK, and coming to a broad range of European countries in the next few months.
And, of course, we will put Cortana to work for business. It will be personal assistant and business assistant, and you’re actually going to see some demonstrations on how that technology is becoming available with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015.
Our worldview is mobile-first, cloud-first. Clearly, computing becomes ubiquitous with all of the sensors and mobile devices available in the world as end points. And cloud enables the mobility and mobility populates the cloud. This is truly the case when you have two firsts, as rare as that may be.
That worldview completely reshaped the way Microsoft builds technology and the way Microsoft innovates. The days of building for desktop and porting for mobility are long gone. We build and innovate for mobile devices, embracing all of the form factors natively, from the smallest one to the largest screen.
We’re building for the cloud. We’re building for scale, we’re building for performance, we’re building to security. This is now part of DNA. This has been core to Microsoft’s transformation.
We are a productivity and platform company, enabling people at work, at home, in their personal life and in their professional lives to save time, be more productive, and really take the most advantage of all of the technologies available to their use.
Of course, providing cloud operating system, providing cloud platform at scale is an important ingredient enabling us to bring digital work and digital life experiences to the world at large.
And, of course, delivering great advancements in user experience, delivering advances in first-party and third-party devices is the delivery vehicle of those experiences are very important and very central and a true part of our core.
Our recent unveiling of Windows 10 operating system is just one example and one step in this very important journey of our core and continuing to drive innovation and user experience, experience that is familiar to a billion people worldwide.
There’s no work without business productivity, and when we think about business productivity and how we make people at work be most productive, we really think of union of platform, platform that is helping IT people to be most productive, to individual productivity and team productivity with tools that help everybody in organizations to get the most common, the most simple tasks done at a very fast pace, to business process, automating business process, making business process connected, making business process united.
We really think of that union together, and that is unique approach that Microsoft has taken. We’ve seen many of our competitors try to parse the enterprise, divide and conquer the enterprise. That is not the Microsoft approach. Our approach is in the union. Our approach is to help IT people connect with the businesspeople. Our approach is to help businesspeople understand the needs of IT and what IT can enable them to do through technology.
We often find ourselves in a position of bridging IT and business, and we’re really proud to play this role for you, our customers, and bring our partners in this dialogue.
We enable business productivity through Microsoft cloud for business. This is why we build it and this is why we continue to evolve it. Yet again, this is truly unique approach that we have taken where we provide complete cloud experience, from infrastructure as a service to a broad range of platform services, to productivity and to business processes. This is really the case where Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics come together to deliver complete Microsoft cloud for business.
Let’s take a look at some individual elements and how we provide and deliver innovation in Microsoft cloud for business.
Of course, it starts with the platform. Over the last decade, Microsoft invested billions of dollars in building our global footprint of the data centers. I must tell you those data centers are engineering marvels. Today, we have 19 data centers that provide complete global coverage. They’re secure, they’re robust, they’re high performing, they’re enterprise grade. We’re truly proud with what we’ve accomplished there.
Of course, infrastructure is just the beginning, and providing raw computing and raw storage at scale with high performance security and data privacy is just one element. And as part of our Azure platform we’re delivering a broad range of services, smart services that enable Internet of Things, that enable machine learning, that enable amazing business analytics at scale with all the right access, with all the right protections, and all the right security. We enable IT professionals, yet we build platform that enables us to drive productivity and business services.
Takeshi Numoto will be here after this speech sharing more about our innovation in cloud and enterprise part of Microsoft, so you will have a chance to hear. Of course, if you are interested in that particular aspect of what we drive, you will have a chance to hear in more detail on our innovation and recent major announcements that we have made in that area.
Office is the most popular productivity tool on earth. Over a billion people start and end their day in one of the Office tools. Office is there to help you create content, to help you manage content, to help you share content, to help you connect, communicate and collaborate with your team members.
We’re proud of continuous innovation in Office, of being the most familiar and the most productive tool for business. It is absolutely unmatched in its scale.
Several years ago, we started the move of traditional Office technologies into the cloud. We introduced Office 365. Over the course of the last five years, Office 365 became the most popular, fastest-growing product from Microsoft. Millions of people use it today. And we’re very excited about the transformation of Office 365 and what it helps our people to do now in the cloud.
Of course, our approach to the cloud is public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud, and everything that we do embraces that approach, embraces that philosophy that we need to give people the technology, the functionality, the scenarios, and people and organizations can choose the mode of deployment that uniquely fits their needs, fits with their environment, fits with their regulatory regime. And that’s precisely the commitment from the Office team.
Yet again, massive innovation, massive set of announcements. Innovation became continuous in all that we do in the cloud, and Office 365 is a prime example of that continuous innovation for the cloud.
And now to the business process, to business apps. This is where Microsoft Dynamics comes in. This is where Microsoft Dynamics now is a true integral part of Microsoft’s core, delivering business process automation, delivering business productivity to enrich and extend experiences that come from Microsoft Azure and Office 365.
Yet again, massive innovation. Innovation became continuous across those teams that deliver Microsoft Dynamics to you. The days of five-year release cycles are long gone. This is continuous stream of new scenarios and new functionality that is coming to you.
Next month, you will receive Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015. Yet again in the spirit of enabling both private, hybrid and public cloud, you will have an option of doing both and doing it in combined fashion.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015, the product that was introduced just last month, is available in Office 365, on Azure platform, and at the same time, still available in the traditional deployment mode in the private cloud.
Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 coming to GP customers in December.
And, of course, Microsoft Dynamics AX with an update coming up in early December, and the next phase of innovation in Microsoft Dynamics AX moving into the cloud, truly position the portfolio of Microsoft Dynamics solutions that many of you here use and love, truly positions this portfolio of products and solutions at the core of what Microsoft does.
But, of course, the power is in the union. This is truly and honestly the case where the whole is much bigger than the sum of the parts.
Microsoft is the only company that has the breadth of cloud infrastructure and cloud platform. Microsoft is the only company that can bring you productivity of Office 365 extending that platform. And Microsoft is the only company that can help you automate your business processes as an extension of productivity and Azure platform.
We’re truly excited, we’re at a truly unique point in time where we as the company transformed to help the world of business in a very unique way through the union of those tremendous technologies and tremendous innovations.
Make no mistake, there’s no other company on earth that has completeness in the cloud that Microsoft has today, and this is just the beginning. The future is even brighter.
When we look at the broad range of business processes that need to be automated, when we have conversations with CEOs on their priorities, when we look at the world of business and when we see what’s the most important, without a doubt delivering amazing customer experiences is what’s at the forefront, what is at the top of mind of every CEO and every business and every organization that we touch and we see. And, of course, it is reconfirmed time and time again by many different analysts who speak to those customers with very, very large quantity.
When we think about delivering amazing customer experiences it is essentially the frontline of every business. Approximately 30 percent of people in business are engaged in active selling one way or another. So helping people be the most productive in selling process is certainly the top priority for everybody.
It is amazing to me that in this day and age very few organizations have actually implemented robust front office automation, and this is very dangerous in today’s environment, in today’s environment where customers often know and often made the purchasing decision even before they contact the prospective seller. It is very dangerous not to have the robust, buttoned-down front office automation in the environment where customers just walk away, competitor is one click and a few milliseconds away if the poor service is being delivered.
And, of course, this is really the environment where customers don’t have a problem paying more for superior services. And it’s our job to enable you to deliver the superior service. We view it as our duty and responsibility to help you connect with your customers in the most unique way. It is our job to help you nurture, delight, embrace your customer needs, connect and communicate with those customers when they need it, deliver the right marketing messages, connect your marketing people with your salespeople, unite your front office with your back office, enable you to support and communicate with those customers in the customer care scenario by either providing self-service or directly engaging with those customers from the knowledgeable call center agent that has full information right in front of their eyes.
But back to solution for sales productivity, which in our view is the most critical element of helping you delight and connect with your customers.
Only last month, we introduced Microsoft solution for sales productivity, and this is a prime example on how we look at innovation going forward. We look at this combined, integrated innovation where we embrace the entirety of Microsoft cloud for business, and put it to work to solve very specific scenarios, very specific needs of people in business.
In this case, we’re solving the needs of people in sales. We’re combining the power of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Office 365, and Microsoft Power BI, and we bring it together in a complete ready-to-go solution that provides rapid time to value, that provides amazing user experience, and at the end of the day makes your salespeople the most productive people on earth.
So with that, I would like to invite Eric Boocock on stage to join me and show you the solution for sales productivity in action. Eric? (Applause.)
ERIC BOOCOCK: Thank you, Kirill.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Welcome.
ERIC BOOCOCK: Hello, Convergence. Great to be here.
So I’m going to walk through a demonstration scenario that focuses on three experiences, a sales manager, a sales representative and a customer. So as I start here, I’m going to start in Power BI as a sales manager.
So as a sales manager, Power BI gives me a role-tailored dashboard that aggregates my various line of business applications so I can see what’s going on across my business, across sales and marketing, give me a view of what I need to manage my business. So what I see here right off the bat is, one of my sales reps, Mark Harrington, is trending a bit low on his forecast. We want to help use this data in Power BI to get Mark over his threshold here so that he is achieving his goal.
KIRILL TATARINOV: So this is Power BI dashboard running on Azure?
ERIC BOOCOCK: That’s correct. It’s aggregating CRM and marketing data, bringing it all together.
So I’m going to come in and I’m going to simply ask some questions of my data so I can gain some insights to help coach Mark to achieve his goal. So the first thing I’m going to look for is all closed opportunities by campaign. So it’s looking at my marketing data, looking at my sales data, and pulling up some information. The first thing to call out is blank, that’s actually not a bad thing. That means our sellers are out beating the street, identifying some deals and closing some deals on their own. For the next couple of values you see here, the Customer Attention Nurture campaign is driving the most effective closes of opportunities.
So I want to now look at Mark’s opportunities and see where there may be some synergies. I’m going to look at all open opportunities for Mark Harrington, and we’ll just sort by the source campaign. What I see right here is for the Customer Attention campaign, he has a $510,000 deal that’s sitting in the closed stage, 90 percent probability, clearly the deal we want to focus on. So I’m going to share this insight with Mark so that he can take this data and work on this deal.
So as I transition to my seller, there’s a couple of things that I need to do as a seller. So as Mark Harrington, the sales representative now, I’ve taken this feedback and I’ve set up the meeting with my customer. So like most sales representatives, I’m constantly on the move. So what you’ll see here is I have this wearable device that gives me notifications of things like text messages, emails, but most importantly here I just got a notification.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Time to leave.
ERIC BOOCOCK: Time to leave. We’ve got to make this meeting.
KIRILL TATARINOV: We’ve got to make it work.
ERIC BOOCOCK: We’ve got to make it work. So now as I transition over to my phone, you’ll see my personal assistant here on my phone has automatically told me that with traffic it’s time to get going. So I’m going to now take this information, get to my meeting, meet this customer, and that’s fantastic.
Let’s fast-forward a little bit. Meeting with the customer went great. But I’ve got an important follow-up item that I want to catch up with when I get back to the office. So right here within my phone I can ask my phone to do some things for me.
KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s back to Cortana.
ERIC BOOCOCK: That is. CRM remind me to add upgrade to Paul Alcorn (ph).
CORTANA: Creating task.
ERIC BOOCOCK: So by simply speaking to my phone I can capture a follow-up action in Microsoft Dynamics CRM that allows me to capture some data on the move and get back to the office.
KIRILL TATARINOV: So that’s Cortana personal assistant becoming business assistant.
ERIC BOOCOCK: That is. Now, imagine that, on the fly I get to my meeting, meeting went great. I’m back here at the office. So now as a sales representative back here in the office, I’m in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. So what you’ll see from my opportunity, again, I’m sitting in that closed stage and I have a couple of things I need to complete the proposal. But the first thing you’ll notice here is at the top there is that activity, remind me to add the upgrade for Paul Alcorn. Let’s go add that.
By quickly clicking here on suggestions, I see all possible opportunities, things like cross-sell, accessories and up-sell that I can add to this particular product. So I add that item, update the amount. And like that my opportunities automatically updated based on this amount. I’ve made the change.
So now I can come into documents, and I can see all my sales content for this particular deal, my sales proposal, my contracts, and even that updated sales proposal that I needed to get this customer. So in order to help sales reps close deals quickly, my company implemented DocuSign. So DocuSign helps me take contracts, simply add digital signatures, and send them to my customers so they can easily accept those signatures and send them back to me.
So what you’ll see here, by simply opening up my contract, I can drag in a signature as easy as that and hit send.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Just like that.
ERIC BOOCOCK: Just like that. Boom.
KIRILL TATARINOV: And that’s a partnership with DocuSign and integration that was built by both teams now enable us in such an integrated, convenient fashion.
ERIC BOOCOCK: Exactly. Here in SharePoint but driving sales productivity, I’ve now sent this out to my customer. My customer receives that. So I’m showing you how a sales productivity solution from Microsoft enables a sales manager and a sales representative to truly drive sales productivity.
What about the customer? Let’s show how we made this easy for our customer to close this deal out.
KIRILL TATARINOV: You’re talking about the proposal that you sent?
ERIC BOOCOCK: That is, the one I just sent right there. So I’m back here on my phone.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Now you’re playing the customer role?
ERIC BOOCOCK: That is correct.
So on my phone I see I have an email. My customer opens up that email, they get this email that says please sign this document with DocuSign. I can click view documents. That’s very easy. I have to accept to be able to provide a digital signature, tap to sign. Let’s rotate the device, and if you wouldn’t mind doing me the honors here.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Absolutely.
ERIC BOOCOCK: And just like that we’ve closed, we’ve won this deal. Now that’s sales productivity.
Thanks, Convergence.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Outstanding, Eric. Thank you so much.
(Applause.)
Well, I certainly wish every deal was as easy for your sales people as it was for Eric here. If you did not have a chance to give Dynamics CRM consideration, now is the time. If you have not automated your front office, if you have not automated your sales people, now is the time to do it and now is the time to do it with Dynamics CRM 2015 coming to market next month. There are thousands of organizations like yours that are becoming more successful, more productive through the use of Dynamics CRM, customers large and small.
And it gives me a real pleasure to bring on stage our first guest, an organization called Ingram Micro. They’re a Microsoft customer, Microsoft partner, serving the needs of thousands of companies worldwide by delivering technology to them. And I want to invite Nimesh Dave and Apay Obang on stage to join me.
APAY OBANG-OYWAY: Kirill.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Welcome.
APAY OBANG-OYWAY: Thank you.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Nice to see you.
NIMESH DAVE: It seems like your chair is a little bit low.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Absolutely.
NIMESH DAVE: Isn’t it incredible when you come in in the morning, the first thing you realize is how under-tall you are compared to everybody else?
KIRILL TATARINOV: Hey, this is how I start my every day.
NIMESH DAVE: The good thing is we can compensate with that brainpower that we have.
KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s why I like working with you so much, Nimesh.
NIMESH DAVE: Under-tall people, we’re going to rule the world eventually.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Very good. So cloud, your focus is on the cloud, as the title applies. Tell us a little bit about Ingram Micro and the cloud. What’s the view? What’s the vision? What are you guys focused on?
NIMESH DAVE: So Ingram Micro is the world’s largest wholesale technology distributor. We provide approximately 42 billion dollars worth of technology solutions around the world through partners. We serve customers in 170 countries. We have in-country operations in 40 of them. We have 4 business units. We have a business unit called cloud, that’s the one I’m going to talk about a little bit. We have one called technology solutions. We have a mobility arm, and we have a supply chain services, quite interesting, fairly well aligned to some things that Microsoft is doing.
We’ve been a partner with Microsoft for 25 years and we basically provide about $2 billion of Microsoft to the channel every single year.
KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s fantastic. Thank you for your partnership and thank you for your business. Now, not long ago you made a very interesting switch. You took down Salesforce.com and you are in the process of deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM. How is that going?
NIMESH DAVE: It’s going fantastic. I think it’s a great product. I think we didn’t only decide to implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM, but we also decided to implement marketing at the same time. And the reasons to do that is that one of the things is we’re growing our cloud business, our cloud practice worldwide, and I would encourage everybody to look at this. You need to serve customers differently. You need to create a level of intimacy and understand their needs, because I think you were saying before the world that we’re going to is about services, and customers have a choice, and they have a choice of where to go to. So again, we were looking for a solution that was integrating all of our assets, whether it was Lync, it was Azure, it was the SharePoint, it was the O365, into something that was highly simple for our organization to consume, with confidence and ease. We call it a really great tool, right. And a really great tool is one that you don’t need instructions for. The great thing that we’ve seen is that our user adoption rates, our first group that went was live and operational in 66 days and it took about 2-1/2 hours of user induction. So it’s going fantastic. We’re really happy.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Well, I’m quite pleased and quite excited.
Now, Apay, you’re on the front lines?
APAY OBANG-OYWAY: Absolutely.
KIRILL TATARINOV: And I guess for most guys like you on the front lines actually selling CRM tools traditionally have been tools of oppression.
APAY OBANG-OYWAY: Absolutely, no not in this case. I think one of the great learnings and challenges we have to deal with in the market is really the fast pace of change and the fast pace of demand that’s coming from our partners. So at the moment what we’re really needing to see is an ability to engage dynamically with our partners. So now what we are seeing is much richer and deeper connections across all our offices and operations. Our operations cut right across many functions, from sales, marketing, and operations.
With the challenge of operating within multiple geographies, as well, within countries such as the UK, France, and Germany, we need to really achieve greater access to information. Now today with Dynamics CRM we’re certainly seeing much richer connections across all these offices and operations, because with a single pane of view all customer correspondence are there available to all teams. Immediately we can quickly respond to customer needs and customer demands and all our associates can now respond in a very dynamic fashion, and in an intimate fashion with our partners with confidence and ease.
KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s fantastic. That’s great news. So a tool of productivity versus a tool of oppression one might say.
APAY OBANG-OYWAY: Absolutely.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Excellent.
Nimesh, what’s next for Ingram? What sort of continuation of the journey, cloud, sales productivity, marketing, sort of customer engagement?
NIMESH DAVE: So I think the next thing is that we started with our transformation in one area. That’s helping companies embrace the cloud and what we call the promise of technology. And what I would encourage people in this room to do is to take a look at cloud as an incredible opportunity. It’s an opportunity for everybody in this room to create more value for their customers. It’s an opportunity for you to help your customers become more productive. And it’s an opportunity for you guys to help your customers excel. And it was really funny just before I came out here, I typically don’t wear makeup in the morning. It’s kind of strange. And the one thing I’ll tell you, I was talking to the lady back there, Theresa, and she’s a really nice makeup artist, and she said, well, what can you do for me? I said can you make me beautiful? And she goes I don’t work miracles on Tuesdays.
I think what you’re seeing from what Microsoft is doing in their transformation and what they’re leading in cloud is you’re seeing a company that actually understands how to make things like that happen. So I encourage you guys to work with your partners, work with companies like us, and Microsoft, to lift your businesses to the cloud.
KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s great. Unfortunately, we don’t do miracles, either, but we bring the reality to businesses worldwide through technology.
Nimesh, pleasure.
Apay, thank you for being with us.
(Applause.)
Terrific example of technology put to an amazing use, empowering people on the front lines to be productive, and changing the type of engagement that Ingram Micro can now drive for their customers.
At Microsoft our job is to serve customers of all sizes and all geographies, large, small, medium size. Of course, our base, our legacy, our foundation with Microsoft Dynamics is in delivering solutions for small and medium business and today, more than ever before, delivering complete solutions for small and medium business is at the core of our priorities. It’s at the core of our mission. There is an obvious, logical explanation for that: 90 percent of world GDP is being generated by small and medium business, and over 90 percent of global workforce actually comes from small and medium business.
Microsoft Dynamics uniquely aligns with the needs of small and medium business. First and foremost, it is rapid time to value. Small organizations don’t have time to configure and customize. They really need solutions coming out of the box. They really need solutions that fit their needs from the get-go, solutions that is preconfigured by Microsoft and Microsoft partners. And this is precisely where our continuous investment in our solutions for small and medium business come to play that unique role.
A prime example of that is Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015. And yet it’s another example of Microsoft cloud for business, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 is built to run on Azure and in Office 365. So essentially small business gets the best of Microsoft straight out of the box.
Rather than talking deeply about what we’re providing, I thought it would be best to show you how solutions for small and medium business actually act. And with that, let me invite Marko Perisic on stage to show you Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 on Azure, in Office 365.
Marko.
MARKO PERISIC: Hi, Kirill.
Hi, everybody. Welcome to Barcelona. Welcome to Convergence. I’m very excited to be here to show you what Kirill just talked about and as Kirill just said it’s a mobile-first, cloud-first world.
In this world it’s not enough to have cutting-edge technology and to have rich functionality. We need to have amazing customer experiences. So I’m going to demo that through a perspective of an SMB owner, or play the role of an SMB owner, and walk you through a journey of that SMB owner across multiple tasks, multiple devices, multiple browsers, all connected in Office 365 and in the cloud. So I have my first device here. I was told it’s quite a popular device. I think ‑‑
KIRILL TATARINOV: For now.
MARKO PERISIC: For now, I think it’s called an iPad. But, we’ll do our first demo on iPad here. So if we take a look at the home screen we see some, again, very popular apps on the App Store right now, which is Microsoft Office Apps for the iPad. So we have Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, et cetera. And until recently there was one app missing, which was the Dynamics NAV app. So as we ship Dynamics NAV 2015 we ship all apps for iOS, Windows, and Android simultaneously. It will enable a touch-first, this beautiful touch-first experience, with NAV 2015 on all devices. So I’m going to start with a demo and show what this looks like.
So I’m going to start the app. I’m signing in now in Office 365. I’m using my single sign-on, which follows me across multiple devices, because NAV is deeply integrated inside of Office 365. And what you see is this wonderful experience. On the left-hand side I have these beautiful tiles that tell me all the important information about my business. I also have these different color sentiments to tell me what I should be focusing on when it comes to my business. On the right-hand side I have the role center, adapted now fully for touch. As you can see I can easily scroll and manipulate all the data just with touch.
And one thing we noticed is when people use devices they have two modes of work. One is when actively working with the device they typically hold it in one hand in landscape mode, and they touch it with the other hand. So you can see all the commands are right here in the middle of the device, easily accessible as I’m using it in this mode. So as an SMB owner I use the device in this mode.
So let’s take an example, I am at the airport sitting in a lounge and reading something on my device. I might be playing Angry Birds, Star Wars, or something like that. And I’m sitting here looking at the device in this mode, in portrait mode. And as I do that you can see the entire experience adjusts itself for portrait mode. So all the information is now available with more information real estate, and all the commands available right underneath my thumbs.
So what I’ll do right now as I’m looking through this I receive a phone call from Andy Tio, one of my favorite customers, who wants to order some bicycles. So right now I can just type in here and I say customers, and I can see the Cannon Group, and just with my thumbs I can navigate to Andy’s company and I can say, create me a new sales invoice and I’ll tap on the item number, I tap on this ellipsis here. And with my right thumb I tap on bicycle, I tap on quantity, and select five bicycles. And just like that, with nothing else but my thumbs and my iPad I created an invoice.
So now I want to go ahead and post that invoice and print that invoice. So I can, again, do that just by holding this iPad and this experience just like a piece of paper. I tap on print. Print the invoice. Send to PDF document. And just like that, with nothing else but my two thumbs, I’ve created a beautiful invoice for Andy that I can send to him now and he can make some payments.
Now one thing you’ll notice is this great-looking invoice looks a lot like some of the Office documents that we have in the Office store. Now, there’s a good reason for that, because within the Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 we allow you to use one of the familiar tools for all of you, which is Microsoft Word, to modify and manage your outgoing document reports. So I’m now boarding a plane, sent the invoice to Andy, and I’m back in the office a couple of weeks later.
So here I am at my desktop now, as I’m on desktop I log into my browser and I can see here the Office 365 SharePoint site, the SharePoint Online. You may also notice I’m running Firefox here, but this is supported across all major browsers, Internet Explorer, of course, and Safari, and Chrome. So as I’m here in my home site I can see all the information for Dynamics NAV integrated with the SharePoint online. So I see all these graphs here from NAV. I can see my travel balance. I can see all the type of information I’m interested in right here on my home screen as I’m in Office 365.
But, because again I’m using single sign-on, it’s very easy for me to just click on this link here, Dynamics NAV for Office 365, and this takes me to full Web experience with NAV inside of Office 365. And here again I see the same information that’s seen on the iPad. I can still see that I have an overdue sales invoice amount pretty high, which is sort of marked with a red sentiment here. And I want to see really what’s going on here. So I can drill into that. I can get a lot more information about these over in the sales invoices. And I can also go in the customer list and as I’m here I can see information about all my customers, and one important thing that happens as I’m inside of this particular tab is, as I click around, Microsoft Social Listening should start engaging any second on my right-hand side. Let’s just make sure we refresh this, make sure I still have my session.
KIRILL TATARINOV: This is Social Listening in context.
MARKO PERISIC: Correct. So let’s try this one more time. And look through my customers here. Here we go. So on my right-hand side Microsoft Social Listening is behind the scenes grabbing all the data from the cloud, from all the social media, and presenting that data to me. So as I’m about to call Andy and ask him to make a payment on the invoice I can see what the social sentiments are about the Cannon Group. And right here I see that there’s an overwhelming certainly positive social sentiment, a few negatives, but nothing that I should really be concerned about. And this really helps me shape my conversation as I’m talking to Andy.
So I checked the state of this business and I realized, OK, it’s time to get to my next meeting. And as I’m in the office I’m using a different device. I choose to use a Surface, because I like the security and management capabilities that I don’t have on the iPad. So with the Surface ‑‑ was that too subtle?
KIRILL TATARINOV: That was heaven. It’s a fact.
MARKO PERISIC: Thank you. And on the Surface I can actually do more. I can actually do two things at the same time. So if I start my ‑‑
KIRILL TATARINOV: Multi-tasking, something the world embraced a long, long time ago. It’s groundbreaking.
MARKO PERISIC: But, on a Surface I can actually do that indeed. So again, I’m starting my app on a Surface. I’m logging in with Office 365, single sign-on, getting into my touch experience, and here we are, the same beautiful touch experience now running on a Surface. And of course this runs on Android, as well.
So now if I navigate to my customer list and I find Cannon Group I can see all of Andy’s information right there, and then as I’m walking over to the meeting I just decide I want to give Andy a call. And I type on this link here, it will ask me to open Skype. It will open Skype in a sidebar view and I can have a phone call with Andy, look at his information, and even better, if I want to have a more intimate conversation with Andy I can actually start a video call on Skype and as I do that I can reset the experience to single call on view to the side here, and I can have a video call with Andy and see all his information right there side-by-side.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Excellent.
MARKO PERISIC: So this is the experience for me as an SMB owner across multiple devices, multiple browsers, in Office 365, running on Windows Azure.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Great. Thank you Marko, amazing presentation.
MARKO PERISIC: Thank you, Kirill.
(Applause.)
KIRILL TATARINOV: This is certainly a great example of the best of Microsoft with Azure, Office 365 including all of its components, Microsoft Social Listening all tied together into nice Microsoft Dynamics NAV experience for small business. And today over 100,000 organizations worldwide run their businesses, run their mission-critical business processes on Microsoft Dynamics NAV. And this solution is the gift that keeps on giving with ongoing, uninterrupted, continuous innovation. Dynamics NAV 2015 is just a prime example of how that innovation continues to serve your needs.
With that, I would like to invite on stage our next guest, Gwendal Meledo, who is the CEO of the organization called Onduline. It’s based in Paris, France, and Onduline is a manufacturing business. The business has grown. They started over 40 years ago as a small business. Now they’re in sort of medium to large category with over 1,000 people worldwide in a number of locations. And I would like Gwendal to join me and share with you his journey with Dynamics NAV.
Gwendal.
(Applause.)
GWENDAL MELEDO: Hi, Kirill.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Welcome. Welcome to Convergence. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your business.
Well, I suspect, although it may not be household names, so perhaps just a few words about your company and what you guys do in your own words.
GWENDAL MELEDO: Yes, for sure. Onduline is a worldwide leader for light roofing solutions. And we are producing and delivering light roofing solutions and we have ten plants across the world, and ten subsidiaries and we are currently in hundreds of countries.
KIRILL TATARINOV: And Microsoft Dynamics NAV is your choice.
GWENDAL MELEDO: Microsoft NAV is my choice, but not only NAV. We made the choice to leverage the full ecosystem of Microsoft.
KIRILL TATARINOV: So it’s cloud?
GWENDAL MELEDO: Some cloud, exactly. And some 365, that’s SharePoint, that’s Navision. That’s coming down the pipe certainly, business intelligence delivered through SharePoint Online. That’s all the solutions. We made the decision to go for it. I mean, it was the right fit for us.
KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s terrific. You mentioned to me yesterday when we’re chatting, last night, your business is quite competitive. And the demands are only growing.
GWENDAL MELEDO: You know there is fierce competition, but it’s not only the competition. It’s the global economy. I mean, today we have to adapt and to adapt quickly. We are under the pressure of the global economy rebalancing. There is also our objectives in terms of continents, cash. We cannot afford to wait and see things happening. And the business is under pressure to drive some initiatives.
And IT and me as the CIO of Onduline Company need to provide full support to those business folks and try to reduce the time for delivering in the right manner at the right time to reduce the time that before when we were talking about IT that was a showstopper, because infrastructure, it was heavy. We were late on delivery. We were slowing down those guys. Today we are leveraging the cloud for that.
KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s fantastic. That’s great to hear. Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics NAV enables you to serve the needs of your business and provide this.
GWENDAL MELEDO: Totally right. And right now that means that my main focus is not on technology, because that has been given to Microsoft. I don’t have to deal with that anymore. That’s great.
KIRILL TATARINOV: No infrastructure.
GWENDAL MELEDO: No infrastructure. And my main focus is about change, which is my true job, change management.
KIRILL TATARINOV: OK. What’s next for Onduline, Gwendal?
GWENDAL MELEDO: Well, next we are posturing our deployment. We will partner across the eastern countries of Navision. And definitely to explore new solutions. I mean, we’re talking to you about Power BI. I’ve seen a great presentation there, and it’s definitely a solution that I’m looking after because most of the people in this room dream about getting in the office the very next day and on the morning to have all their dashboard online and I can integrate whatever system of figures across the cloud and provide those guys with those figures. So this is something that I want to go for.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Fantastic. Gwendal, thank you for joining us.
GWENDAL MELEDO: You are more than welcome.
KIRILL TATARINOV: We’re here to help and support you.
GWENDAL MELEDO: Thanks a lot.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
In this business in this day and age we often talk about delivering predictable business outcomes, delivering certainty, connecting IT and technology so that certainty comes to the business people. Delivering predictable outcomes certainly implies that you know what the future would shape and would look like. And being able to introduce predictions and predictable modeling into business solutions is certainly the next major most important, most significant frontier that we’re tackling with Microsoft Cloud for Business and with Microsoft Business Solutions.
Taking technologies like Azure Machine Learning to solving real needs for real businesses is what we see our customers embracing and delivering today. It is no longer in the future. It is no longer something that we dream about and read about. This is something that we see our customers doing today by harnessing power of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and Microsoft Dynamics working together.
So let me invite our next guest, Mushtaque Ahmed, who is Chief Operating Officer of a long-standing Microsoft and Microsoft Dynamics customer from the UK, JJ Foods. As the name implies, they are in food distribution. They’ve been a Dynamics AX customer for ten years. I think we’re celebrating that anniversary actually at this event here. And Mushtaque will share with you how machine learning and Microsoft Dynamics AX work together to help him deliver predictable outcomes to his business.
Mushtaque.
(Applause.)
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: Good morning.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Welcome. It’s a pleasure to have you here with us. Please.
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: Thanks for having me.
KIRILL TATARINOV: So a little bit about JJ Foods?
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: Well, as the name suggests, we are an independent, probably the largest independent food service company in the UK operating from eight different branches, and predominantly it’s a business-to-business model. So right across the country, 60,000 customers delivering food and catering-related products.
KIRILL TATARINOV: So it is business-to-business type of settings, as type of scenarios your customers are shops.
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: Restaurants, schools, football clubs, office canteens.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Great. You’ve been with us on the Microsoft Dynamics journey for the last ten years. Of course, a lot has changed. How has that transformation been happening?
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: Well, the last ten years is a long way. And what a lovely way to celebrate that with the Dynamics community here on stage in Barcelona. Over the ten years using Dynamics AX we’ve brought in a lot of automation to improve our business efficiency. But the last five years we saw a transition from being 100 percent call center based business to an e-commerce type of business. A lot of our business, at least 50 percent, have moved onto our Web shop. And that brought some challenges in, because when a call center is talking to a customer we can do the up-selling, cross-selling, impulse buying element. But that was sort of missing out on the Web.
So we thought, let’s take it to the next lead. And there was a lot of thinking around this, and suddenly we found that Azure Machine Learning tool is capable of delivering that. So we partnered with Microsoft and went on a journey.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Terrific. And this solution has been built and in place?
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: Well, it’s been running the last five weeks, and there are some interesting numbers coming up.
KIRILL TATARINOV: What are you seeing?
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: Internet sales have gone up by 3-1/2 percent, amazingly, but it’s early days.
KIRILL TATARINOV: So the solution is live. Can we take a look?
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: It is. But you’re asking me to be very brave and hopefully you have got a very forgiving audience here.
KIRILL TATARINOV: You’re among friends. Don’t worry.
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: All right. Already feeling guilty about the English weather. But you are filling 50 percent of the planes between Seattle and London.
KIRILL TATARINOV: We’re sharing all of it.
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: I’ve logged in as a customer here on the portal. It looks like an ordinary, traditional website. But what is extraordinary here is the way the items are presented on screen to the customer. Meaning, we want the customer to spend as little as possible on the website, unlike traditional consumer websites. So Azure ML model is delivering the products with the highest predicted probability the customer is going to buy today.
So here a customer is logged in and I’ve picked some products to add to the basket, which is the top part here you can see. I’m adding items here. The items are going to the cart. And this is when the machine learning tool is predicting from the other customers’ buying habits that when you buy Coke, you may actually need Diet Coke as well. Let’s add another item here. OK, we’ve got Fanta, but at the same time we want some Diet Coke as well. So we call this feature frequently bought together items.
But to take this to the next level, once a customer has decided that, OK, I’m done more or less, I want to check out. And at this point we are actually recommending some of the items which are very popular in this market sector. And this is why we can see that it’s almost like a 5 percent uplift in the shopping basket from the recommended product range. Now this is for the customer’s experience, right?
KIRILL TATARINOV: Yes.
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: But remember I mentioned that the call center agent used to do this business. So what we need, having learned from this experience, we took it to the call center as well. Now this is Dynamics AX, a very customized call center sort of entry form. And let me explain the print here. The blue color is the items which you are predicting that the customers are going to buy today with the highest probability. The yellow box is actually again the predicted items, but with the lower probability of hitting a sales today. The green one, you notice that there are some old tickets here. This is what they have already sold to the customer.
So let me add another item to this box. So say there are four items here. And now the agent, without remembering any relevance to this customer, to his product range, click on the show recommendation and on the left-hand side you can see there are four different items recommended. So from here they can easily add the recommended item to the customer’s shopping basket.
So the whole engine is sitting on Dynamics AX.
KIRILL TATARINOV: So it’s all multi-channel, omni-channel I guess I should say.
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: Absolutely.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Dynamics AX powering call agents. Dynamics AX holding the transaction history over a long period of time.
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: Ten years.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Ten years.
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: We used three years’ worth of transactional data to train the model.
KIRILL TATARINOV: So you took the most recent three years of transaction history from Dynamics AX, trained Azure ML to serve ‑‑
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: And the click data from the website.
KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s fantastic. That’s great and it works.
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: Yes, absolutely. So that was lucky.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Terrific. Well, Mushtaque, thank you for joining us. Amazing example of how the future is delivered now.
MUSHTAQUE AHMED: Absolutely, using Microsoft technology, and thanks Microsoft for providing that.
KIRILL TATARINOV: We’re here to help. Thank you, Mushtaque. Thank you for joining us.
(Applause.)
What an amazing example and an amazing, amazing demonstration. Of course, Mushtaque took a little bit of risk, but it’s terrific to see our customers being so brave.
Security. Security today is probably of more importance than it has ever been before in the era of computing. Security threats are growing. Attacks are getting more sophisticated. Attackers are getting more organized. And it’s more important than ever before for Microsoft, our partners, and our customers to take security concerns very, very seriously.
At Microsoft we’re making significant investments not only in making sure that our cloud platform and our cloud technologies are the most secure, but also by sharing security best practices with our customers. We have a special service that’s available to all of you to help you analyze your environment and help you determine how secure and protected you are. And I certainly encourage you to look it up and to consider deploying.
My next guest, Christian Arroya from Nagra Kudelski, knows a lot about security. His firm is delivering security solutions to their customers. And what I would like to do is to invite Christian onstage to join me to share with you what they do, how they do it, and how Microsoft cloud is helping them.
Christian, please.
(Applause.)
So tell us a little bit about Nagra Kudelski.
CHRISTIAN ARROYA: So Nagra Kudelski is a security company with three main pillars. One is a pay-TV content protection. The second is public access with key data for which we control key pass. Stadium access.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Very good. And you’ve been Microsoft’s customer for a number of years on the Office side, and given the line of business that you’re in, I assume it’s private cloud?
CHRISTIAN ARROYA: It’s a private cloud, segregation is an obsession for us.
KIRILL TATARINOV: And we certainly find many customers like Nagra Kudelski obsessed about security and as much as we all work in the industry to make Internet secure, for those organizations it is private cloud. And that’s why we’re so committed to it.
CHRISTIAN ARROYA: Absolutely. And thank you, Microsoft.
KIRILL TATARINOV: It is absolutely our pleasure and our responsibility.
And so you recently made the decision to move off the legacy Oracle environment to Dynamics and made fairly significant commitments to Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM. Can you share a little bit more about it?
CHRISTIAN ARROYA: Yes. So we’re looking about a new modern platform with two sides. One is user experience and the second is about the technology, flexible and agile. And it took us about nine months of analysis to decide finally that Dynamics was and is the right platform to go.
KIRILL TATARINOV: And so you made your choice. And now we’re starting the journey together.
CHRISTIAN ARROYA: Yes. In September we started the journey, and we expect in January 2016 to be ready.
KIRILL TATARINOV: How many people are going to be using the tool?
CHRISTIAN ARROYA: 2,400, at least.
KIRILL TATARINOV: And that’s this combination of everything, I guess you could say, the best of Microsoft for the needs of your business in private cloud environment.
CHRISTIAN ARROYA: It’s absolutely everything relating to finance to CRM, et cetera.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Obviously with this deployment being such a critical element of the future, I can imagine that your team will be fairly busy in driving that deployment. And you can trust that we’ll be there with you every step of the way, like we do for this community.
CHRISTIAN ARROYA: Thank you very much.
KIRILL TATARINOV: All right. Thank you for joining us, Christian. It’s terrific to have you as our customer, and expanded usage of Microsoft Dynamics Cloud in private setting for your business.
CHRISTIAN ARROYA: Thank you.
(Applause.)
KIRILL TATARINOV: As we look at our global community of customers and we analyze the types of benefits that our customers gain from deploying Microsoft Dynamics, we find some outstanding statistics. And I just want to pause for a brief second to let you soak these numbers in. There are phenomenal advances that we see customers do, phenomenal advances in productivity, revenue growth, return on investment. It’s just phenomenal, phenomenal statistics, and phenomenal business outcomes that we see in the world of business through Microsoft Cloud.
And it’s become a very exciting tradition for us to celebrate the success of our customers at Convergence events, and today is not an exception. And today we celebrate those customers who are excellent in the use of technology in their geographies and in their industries. Those customers were nominated by their partners through a very vigorous process of selecting them, and they are fantastic at how they put technology to good use of their business. So let’s give the winners a warm round of applause.
(Applause.)
We’ve positioned Convergence as the sharing and learning event, first and foremost, and those excellent award winners are here with us, and they’re available to share their experiences with you. So I encourage you to seek them out, have a conversation with them, and understand what have they done uniquely to be in this elite category of our customers.
And of course, behind every one of those success stories, behind every single success story, and behind every one of the guests we implemented solutions and shared it with you, and behind every one of those excellence award winners there is a partner. And Microsoft’s strategy on partnerships is invariant. We’ve been deliberately dependent on our partners, not only as the delivery arm, but also as the provider of complete, finished solutions, as implementation partner, as value-added reseller, as the cloud partner.
I’m very excited about the growth in our partner channel. I’m very excited about the growth of very well trained, competent people that work in this community to help this community embrace the future with Microsoft cloud for business and Microsoft business solutions.
I want to join ‑‑ I want to invite to join me here on stage Chris Wyatt, who represents one of the newest partners who joined our community. Chris Wyatt was the head of services for IBM in Europe and we’ll have a little dialogue on how this partnership, that was quite unlikely even five years ago, is helping this community get more from technology.
Chris, please.
Thank you very much. Welcome.
CHRIS WYATT: Thank you very much, delighted to be here.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Well, it’s terrific you are here. Who would have thought only a few years ago that IBM and Microsoft would be on stage together talking about the business community?
CHRIS WYATT: Indeed, I mean times have changed. What our clients are telling us is that their needs and their expectations of transformation are different now. They need speed, agility. They need flexibility. They need solutions that can scale and deliver value quickly. So therefore, what we need to see, and what we need to be working with are teams that have got solutions that are cloud-ready, that are designed for mobile, that have got analytics inside and do that critical thing of scaling. And the Dynamics product set, they do those things.
KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s terrific. Things have obviously changed at IBM as the world transformed.
CHRIS WYATT: Things have changed a lot. All those watchwords about being faster, delivering quicker, that’s the watchword now.
KIRILL TATARINOV: I think IBM over the years, IBM Global Business Services, the organization that you represent here, here in Europe, have established ourselves as true trusted advisor to the larger, larger organizations. And in that trusted advisor role you obviously have a choice of a broad range of technologies.
CHRIS WYATT: Indeed, and we work with a broad range of technologies together with Microsoft. We’ve actually now got over 1,000 joint clients around the world, which is very exciting.
KIRILL TATARINOV: That is very exciting.
CHRIS WYATT: And I was going to tell you just a little bit about one of those if I may today.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Of course.
CHRIS WYATT: This is a client where we’ve been working together on CRM engagement. They’re from England, and they are, in fact, the English Rugby Football Union, the RFU.
KIRILL TATARINOV: All right, are there any fans here in the room?
CHRIS WYATT: There may be some fans, rugby fans? There may be. Never mind, we’re fans.
KIRILL TATARINOV: OK, great. Of course, we’re fans of our customers.
CHRIS WYATT: We are indeed, yes. So together this 360-degree view that we’ve been building that enables them actually right from the fans at the grassroots level up to the fans who come and attend the events to build a richer picture of information about all of those sets of people. Obviously then using that set of information you can develop a more personalized experience for the grassroots guy and for the guy watching the game.
Now that experience then delivers more value for those fans and more value back for the RFU. Now, I’ve done quite a few CRM engagements in my time as a consultant and quite often there’s a ‑‑ and I saw it and heard it, in fact, on the cloud video earlier, about turning customers into fans. Now here at the RFU, of course, it’s about turning fans into customers.
KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s a fantastic story. Thank you for sharing it. Thank you, that’s quite exciting.
CHRIS WYATT: Pleasure.
KIRILL TATARINOV: So what’s next, the partnership, IBM Global Business Services?
CHRIS WYATT: Indeed, growth and more growth, and there are two ways, two things to do, two things to focus on to get that growth. We’ve agreed together a clear goal and a clear focus, and that is a focus around industry. At IBM, as you say, we’ve got a business services team, over 14,000 people out there every day bringing that experience of the industry issues, industry processes, operations to clients.
Now what we need to do is marry that, what we are doing is marrying that industry expertise with the Dynamics product sets, which are functionally very rich, to sort of get another step change in the value that we’re going to bring together. We’re going to use some new capabilities, as well, some things from IBM that are just groundbreaking. IBM interactive experience, our world-leading, the world’s largest, in fact, digital agency, to make sure we can together design the experiences that clients need.
KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s fantastic.
CHRIS WYATT: And I didn’t talk about the goal. I talked about the focus. Maybe it’s more of an ambition, but we want to be No. 1, No. 1 partner globally to the enterprise Dynamics business.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Well, that’s fantastic. What a great goal, thank you very much, Chris. And thank you for joining us.
CHRIS WYATT: Pleasure.
KIRILL TATARINOV: Thank you for your partnership, terrific.
(Applause.)
KIRILL TATARINOV: This is about transformation. And we had a chance to talk about transformation in the world of business and in the world of technology. We had a chance to share with you how Microsoft is transforming to bring this amazing, amazing set of technology trends to you and benefits to your business here and now. We had a chance to share a few amazing stories, a few amazing stories of customers that are putting this technology to an amazing use today. And we’re here committed to your success.
And I truly hope that the next couple of days will serve as the reassurance to our existing customers that you made the right choice going with Microsoft Dynamics and you have a chance to learn more tools and more tricks to make your business even more successful. And I truly hope that those who are prospective customers come back next year as our committed customers.
And I want to thank you yet again, our team members here in the room, and our partners. We’re here committed to your success. Microsoft is here to serve the needs of global business and help you deliver amazing business outcomes.
Thank you all very much. Please enjoy Convergence 2014.
(Applause.)
END
