ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Solutions Marketing, Wayne Morris. (Applause.)

WAYNE MORRIS: Welcome to New Orleans and welcome to Convergence 2013. (Applause.)

My job with Dynamics is to shape the marketing and communications strategy for the business group. So I’m very excited to be with here today. And it’s great to have Convergence in New Orleans again. Convergence was last here in 2009, and this year there are 11,500 of us. And more than 25 percent of attendees have come from outside the United States, making this the largest and most globally attended Convergence in history. Give yourselves a round of applause. (Applause.)

Now, our theme this year is A World Ahead. But first, let’s start by thinking back a year ago to Houston where the theme of that event was A World of Opportunity.

It’s been an exciting year with significant releases across our entire Dynamics portfolio. Since 2012 event, we have delivered important new releases of every one of our products, and you can see them here: SL, GP, NAV, AX and CRM.

Our Dynamics engineering teams have done a tremendous job, and I’d ask you to join me in giving them a big thank-you for that. (Applause.) And I promise you, the coming year will be just as exciting starting today.

I’m pleased this morning to announce significant advancement in the areas of marketing, social and mobile.

To help businesses achieve true integrated marketing, we’re announcing a new version of marketing power. We’ve simplified the user experience, added a familiar look and feel, and we’re enabling it to work seamlessly with Dynamics CRM.

Moving forward on the social front, to help businesses and organizations analyze and act on market intelligence from social conversations, we’re announcing an initiative to embed social monitoring capabilities across all of our CRM offerings.

We’re accelerating this effort. And today we announced the acquisition of Netbreeze, a Swiss company with industry-leading capabilities in social monitoring and analytics. And you can check it out. We’ll be using it in our social command center in the expo floor. And there you’ll see it in action as we use it to track activity around this event.

For Dynamics AX, today we’re unveiling a set of new mobile applications for phones and tablets to provide people with a more relevant experience based on what they do and the device they use.

I’m also very pleased to inform you that both Dynamics GP 2013 and NAV 2013 will be available hosted on Windows Azure through our great partners in June of this year.

You’ll see some of these new technologies in action later in this keynote.

We’re very proud and excited about the progress, and you’ll have the opportunity to learn much about these announcements throughout the rest of the conference.

Speaking of announcements, I’d like to extend congratulations to the Lotus Formula One race team. They’re a Dynamics customer. (Applause.) If you’re not familiar, Formula One is just a huge global motor sport, and the Lotus team won the initial Grand Prix for the season in Australia on Sunday. It was great work and a great start to the year, and you can check out one of the Lotus Formula One cars on the expo floor in Hall C.

Now, let’s spend some time looking at what we’ve already accomplished as a community here in New Orleans. Just as in past years, you, our attendees, have given back to the community by contributing your time and skill.

Yesterday, about 400 volunteered time. Some were in the Gentilly neighborhood, and I had the opportunity to go there and see people working together and enjoying the experience. Making a difference. Partnering with Habitat for Humanity to frame up two new houses. And working at the Hope Community Center to brighten it with a new coat of paint, upgrade the computer lab, create a food pantry and build 1,000 feet of fencing around a new playing field for the young people.

Others were planting trees, doing landscaping. And right here in the convention center, many of you gave your time to the Birthing Project, a nonprofit that helps young mothers.

Now, The Heroes are going to play an original composition, “We Won’t Fall,” as we watch your volunteer work and the caring that you provided to the community.

(Community Outreach video segment.)

WAYNE MORRIS: (Applause.) You know, I was there yesterday, and I have to say, that flash mob was awesome. (Cheers.) And there’s still time to volunteer. Activities will be continuing throughout the week at the Community Experience Center. So let’s give a big hand to everybody that participated in the volunteer activities. (Applause.)

I’d also like to recognize Habitat for Humanity, and we have here in the audience Jim Pate, the executive director of the New Orleans area. We are so very proud that you’re a Dynamics GP customer. And we’d like to thank you and your organization for everything that you’ve done for New Orleans. Thank you. (Applause.)

Now, another way we give back to the local community is through the eval program. Your continued feedback is just very important to us. We know your time is valuable, but we do value your feedback, we do read it, and we do act on it. So every attendee who completes an eval triggers a $1 donation to the NOCCA Institute. They support intensive arts education to students in New Orleans.

This morning, we’re going to be treated to a dance performance by a group of wonderful young people attending the NOCCA Institute right here on stage on Thursday. So, please, complete your evals, help us improve Convergence and support a local program that benefits young New Orleanians.

We also want you to participate socially. By that, I mean, join the many other attendees who are engaging in a digital conversation around this event. Get active on the many social media Convergence channels. Be social on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, You Tube and the Convergence RSS feed.

Now, we bridge the online experience with real life with our live wall. There you can see as we monitor and show social conversations as they happen in a physical space we can all share. So if you haven’t checked it out yet, have a look at the video wall and our social experience space on the expo floor. Remember, when you do join in and have a voice and add to the conversation, use the hashtag #conv13.

Finally, don’t miss the opportunity to discover your true identity. Unlock your real potential and join in the fun at our change agent headquarters in Hall E. While you’re there, you can star in your own ad. You can get a professional headshot photo. And the specialists from LinkedIn will help bolster your LinkedIn profile. It could look like one of those.

And this is cool. The team there will help you identify your new title. I did it. This is mine. Customer catalyst. A lot cooler than corporate vice president. I’ll be wearing my new title this week. I hope you’ll go by and you’ll wear yours too.

Thank you all for being here, for all that you’re doing, and for what we’ll do together in the upcoming days and the coming year.

Please join me now as we take a journey together into A World Ahead.

(Infinite Vision video segment.)

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome President, Microsoft Business Solutions, Kirill Tatarinov. (Music, cheers, applause.)

KIRILL TATARINOV: Good morning! Good morning and welcome. I am super excited to be here with you this morning welcoming you to our biggest Convergence ever. Almost 12,000 people joining us today, and tens of thousands more online. Welcome to all of you.

Just looking at the registration, I see that 60 percent of you all come again as repeat attendees. So welcome back. And those who are joining us today for the first time, I truly hope that you stay with us and come back next year and the year after and many years into the future. We’re committed to your success long-term with taking that long-term view.

Convergence is a truly unique event from many different angles. You all come from literally aspect of the business, every business function, every technology function, all the industries all over the world. And Convergence is a unifying event that brings us all together. That’s how we see it, and we truly hope that at the end of this week, you come away energized, leaning forward on your commitment to unity in your business.

There are interesting things going on in our industry these days. And in the world of rapid change, it seems that many companies are trying to search for new identities. We’re seeing some companies trying to become database companies. We’ve seen some companies trying to present themselves as customer companies. Isn’t everybody a customer company?

For Microsoft, we are a people company. Our commitment to people has been unwavering throughout the years of our history. Our mission remains unchanged. It is about enabling people and businesses worldwide to realize their full potential. And being a people company, that mission truly drives our actions. How we deliver our solutions. How we’re focused on immersive experience that democratizes the world of business solutions, truly making it available to everybody in business, not just a few select individuals. This mission also drives our actions as we work and connect with our communities.

Recently, we celebrated a very exciting milestone for Microsoft, 30 years of giving, a program that was launched by our founder and chairman, Bill Gates, the program that in the course of 30 years contributed over a billion dollars to the community. And Microsoft employees contributed more than 2 million volunteer hours to many different causes, to causes like Habitat for Humanity like you had a chance to witness and participate in yesterday and hopefully throughout this week.

And Habitat for Humanity is a truly exciting cause that really helps us bring the community together, working together for some very needful causes. And working together in this rapidly changing world is really what needs to happen and what all of us need to do more of.

The world has certainly changed. And even in the last 12 months, and that has been exactly 12 months to date since we were together in Houston for Convergence 2012, even in the last 12 months, the world has changed in a very profound way.

I thought we’d take a brief look at a few interesting statistics from the industry on what has actually transpired in the last 12 months and how the evolution continues.

The miniaturization and consumerization and cost reduction in the hardware industry continues and truly propels the introduction of a broad range of new, amazing devices that helps us change the world of business in our lives.

Very symbolic milestone was achieved last year. Today, there are more connected mobile devices than people on this planet. Truly symbolic and truly exciting how mobility is finding ways in our lives.

Speaking of big data and how much data we actually can accumulate, today, in fact in the last 10 minutes, the world assembled 5 billion gigabytes of data. That’s an amazing amount. Every time we like something, every time we tweet, every time we post a picture, we create this amount of big data that is available for us to make smarter decisions in business and in our lives.

Just as a reference, how fast that change is accelerating. From the beginning of computing times up until 2003, that same amount of data was collected. So it was from the beginning of computing to 2003 and now that amount is collected in 10 minutes. And for us to get access to this data and use it for the business decisions and for being smarter and more intelligent in what we do is an incredible, amazing opportunity.

I also want to mention some incredible technology advancements that many companies around the world have achieved in the last 12 months that truly makes us all proud as we move forward into the future.

One company we’re highlight is SpaceX, a great Microsoft customer. In late May of last year, for the first time ever, they became a commercial organization that successfully launched a capsule to the International Space Station. Great example of technology innovation. And to me, also, a great example of transformation. Company truly responding to the changing world environment, to the turning conditions in space exploration and becoming the leader in commercialization of that particular environment.

At Microsoft, we’re also transforming. And at Microsoft, we’re looking at the changing world and our role in it. And we are evolving to become a devices and services company. So we can continue to bring these amazing, immersive experiences to all people in your life and business, consistent across the devices. That innovation has been incredibly important to us from the beginning of Microsoft as a company up until today. And innovating across a broad range of devices from the living room to the board room is incredibly important for us as we move forward.

The world of cloud and the world of services that is an integral part of this device is another very important part of transformation that we have essentially completed as an organization.

Today, cloud is integral to everything that we do. When we deliver our devices, the service that comes from the device is an integral part of it, and you truly cannot see the chasm, the gap between the device and the service that comes from the cloud.

And, of course, as it relates to the world of business, enterprise services that is delivered to businesses, helping businesses be more agile and implement more capability rapidly with increasing speed is another very important priority for us.

The role Microsoft Dynamics plays in this new Microsoft of devices and services is truly paramount. Essentially, Dynamics is a unifying fabric, bringing a vast amount of innovation across the company and delivering it to business people, to people in business in specific scenarios, really helping you be the best at what you do through technology. That’s our mission, that’s the mission of Dynamics. And that is very integral to our overall approach to the cloud, with one Microsoft cloud where we’re delivering Windows Azure for infrastructure and platform as a service, with Office 365 delivering Productivity Suite, and with Microsoft Dynamics essentially completing that, delivering very specific business scenarios from the cloud. That’s what we’re really focused on today and we’ll continue to deliver to you in the future.

Another interesting thing that has happened in the last 12 months, and frankly observations that I had as I engaged in many conversations with people in this room. It’s really the point of unity and how we need to bring different aspects of the business together. Frankly, after many years of talking about business and IT working better together and IT contributing to business agility, today more than ever before, we see the gap, we see the divide in the world of business, and we see our role as helping you unify your organization, unify people in your organization, get them better connected, business to IT. Get you better unified with your customers. Connect different functions. Connect front office with back office. We see that being hugely important for success going forward.

Frankly, in the last 12 months, what we’ve seen is many conversations where you come to us, where you come to briefings with Microsoft, bringing business people and IT people. And Microsoft and me personally had this unique opportunity to play the bridging role, helping you unify those two functions in your business.

That is the role that we’re very excited to play today and in the future. We are certainly in a unique position, being participants on the side of the business with business solutions that we’re delivering and on the side of technology with vast amounts of infrastructure and platform technologies. And for us to help you bridge and to help the unifying dialogue is truly exciting and truly incredible.

The benefit of collaboration and the benefit of unifying those business functions can be quite incredible. There was a study that was recently published by PricewaterhouseCoopers. And in that study, they analyzed the different functions and different CXO functions in the business.

What they found was that the groups that are collaborating and the companies that have their executives working much closer together on the side of technologies are four times higher performing and four times more likely to achieve great success than those that are not.

That is really the point where this unification of different functions, including the new function, the increasing role that chief marketing officers play in the business, and bringing it all together and having it unified is very important for the business today. More than ever today. And we’re truly proud and excited to play that role as a unifier for your business, helping you connect different roles, existing and new ones.

Our vision for business solutions has been dynamic business. That is our magnetic north star. We want every business to be a dynamic business. Dynamic business is the one that is forward-looking. Dynamic business that is agile. Dynamic business is the one that does not stand still.

I’m very excited that many of you here have become dynamic businesses by virtue of deploying technologies and implementing connecting solutions in your organizations. It is very exciting to us to see your success.

Dynamic business is also united business. And dynamic business is the one that connects different functions around the organization, front office to back office, business and technology, CIO to CFO and CMO. Dynamic business is the one that is truly looking forward, and dynamic businesses, most importantly, connect with its customers and build this customer connection across different functions in the organization.

Every Convergence, we celebrate the success of dynamic businesses. And this Convergence is not an exception. Today, I’m very proud to announce Convergence 2013 excellence award winners. There were over 200 nominations, and we selected a few that are truly exemplary in how they advance their businesses by use of technology. Let’s give those organizations a warm round of applause. (Applause.)

Also this year, we took a look at how those organizations, how those excellence award winners are different from the rest of the industry. And we found some amazing statistics as they shared those data points with us that we would like to present to you.

We found excellence award winners of high-performing companies as organizations, they grow faster, they grow their productivity. Their deployment is much faster than the average in the industry with very rapid return on investment, and they have realized incredible savings in their business as they implemented business solutions and as they unified their technology and eliminated legacy applications.

Today, here at Convergence 2013, we have a great opportunity to interact with those excellence award winners. They’re here in the room, and I encourage you to reach out to them and connect.

We also have great opportunity to have some of them here on stage with us today. And I want to share their stories, and I want their stories to be the core of the discussion as we continue this opening keynote.

Let’s start with Shock Doctor.

(Shock Doctor Video Segment.)

KIRILL TATARINOV: Please welcome from Shock Doctor, Dennis Goetz, chief financial officer; and John Lynch, IT manager. Gentlemen, very excited to have you with us this morning. Welcome. (Applause.)

PARTICIPANT: Thank you.

PARTICIPANT: Thank you.

KIRILL TATARINOV: You have a great success and great growth story from the idea in the head of your founder, to a quite successful company in the sporting world. I must say, I’m a customer. And it’s quite impressive what you were able to accomplish.

And when we see a very, very small startup company growing to become still very focused and agile, but really delivering to the broad world and broad community. The transformation from probably manual and spreadsheet process to sort of more agile system is quite important.

So my question to you, John, how did you do that and what was the technology transformation that underpinned the transformation of the business? What was your journey?

JOHN LYNCH: We implemented Dynamics GP. Dynamics GP, as soon as we implemented, we saw immediate results. Brought our departments together.

You had just mentioned “unified” and I thought that was something that really resonated that our departments brought forward their challenges and what needed to be brought together, and Dynamics GP and all the products and tools that come along with it were able to aid us and get the entire system connected and integrated.

KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s quite exciting. So, Dennis, the company continues to grow. Obviously you guys are not standing still. Acquiring, growing organically, broad sort of push forward. What are the challenges you’re faced with today and how are you solving it with technology?

DENNIS GOETZ: Sure. 2012 was a really exciting year for Shock Doctor Sports. In addition to our organic growth beyond 20 percent, we also acquired our first company, Cutters Gloves. Cutters is best known for its football receiver gloves.

We were able to acquire that company and integrate it pretty seamlessly. Microsoft Dynamics GP allowed us to integrate data, integrate process and bring it on. And it feels like this brand and this company has been with us forever.

KIRILL TATARINOV: Well, that’s quite exciting. That’s certainly great. So as you implement and roll out these technologies, obviously, you look for very concrete improvements. You need to justify your investment in a technology solution, and you need to sort of report on how business gets better through technology. So are there any sort of concrete markers that you report to your business and your shareholders as you go through this journey, John?

JOHN LYNCH: Well, I think it’s all about efficiencies. And we can report back through each project, each technical or business challenge that comes along, we’re able to solve the challenge. And I think that’s the most immediate result that we can bring back.

Dennis talked about our acquisition of Cutters Gloves. Through use of Microsoft SQL Server and Dynamics, we’re able to take the data from Cutters, bring it onto our system, use the tools to integrate it into GP, and as soon as Dennis brought forward this project, we had 90 days to basically integrate everything with this company. And we did it. We did it in less than 90 days.

KIRILL TATARINOV: Well, that’s fantastic. In less than 90 days. Certainly something that you don’t see happen very often in our industry, and that’s quite an accomplishment.

So efficiency is obviously very important. And it’s clear that you’re realizing efficiency, saving lots of hours in sort of processing data and information. What about productivity? What about growing your top line?

DENNIS GOETZ: Growing our top line is clearly one of our big initiatives going forward, especially on the international front. We focus a lot of resources in 2013 and 2014 to grow internationally. And we expect to use Dynamics GP to help us with that. The tools in GP will be critical as we interface with customers, try to grow our business and do it in an efficient manner.

In bringing on the acquisition and through our organic growth, we’ve been able to do that without adding a lot of resources. In fact, with the acquisition, we took some resources with them, but on the operations and IT and finance side, we only added one resource. So we were able to leverage the system we implemented, it levers up as we grow. And that was one of the critical factors in making our decision to select Microsoft GP.

KIRILL TATARINOV: Well, that’s great. What an exciting story. Efficiency, effectiveness, productivity improvements, uniting different functions across your business, being able to onboard acquisitions quickly. Very inspiring story for many folks here in the room. Really showing how the company, without having an enormous IT budget and having still a relatively small workforce and relatively small investment, can propel into the future and become a dynamic business.

Thank you both. Thank you for sharing your story with us.

JOHN LYNCH: Thank you. (Applause.)

KIRILL TATARINOV: Now, I know some vendors argue that innovation only happens in the front office. There’s a lot of talk in the industry about social, front office innovation.

Well, our point of view is quite different. And our point of view is really that all functions around the business and back office and front office and all people and all business processes truly need to work together.

And it really comes from agility that is enabled by well-architected solutions that would work together and help companies to unify.

So let me introduce another company that has taken the path of uniting their technology and different functions across the business. Let’s take a look.

(Chobani Video Segment.)

KIRILL TATARINOV: (Applause.) Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a warm welcome to Maureen Hurley, vice president of IT; and James McConeghy, chief financial officer of Chobani. Welcome; I’m really excited to have you with us this morning. (Applause.)

MAUREEN HURLEY: Thank you.

JAMES MCCONEGHY: Thank you for having us.

KIRILL TATARINOV: Maureen, my teams tells me you start your day with a few cups of espresso.

MAUREEN HURLEY: Oh, yes. We have this great espresso machine, bright red, in the IT department, gets us going every morning.

KIRILL TATARINOV: Well, I look forward to having espresso with one of your great yogurts one morning here.

Switching gears, James, obviously lots of achievement. Your story is fantastic, growing from, yet again, your founder’s idea sort of getting into the business, buying a plant and transforming from that point on into this worldwide supplier of the best yogurt in the world. I’m sure technology played a significant role behind the scenes. What’s your view of that?

JAMES MCCONEGHY: Well, first, thanks for the compliment on the yogurt. We do think it’s a great product.

KIRILL TATARINOV: I love it.

JAMES MCCONEGHY: Well, thank you. You know, we obviously couldn’t be where we are without technology. Maureen in the video shows when she got here three years ago, we were running on Excel. We were running on QuickBooks. We knew we couldn’t do that. We were probably the world’s largest QuickBooks user at the time. And we’ve migrated to one central system, one core set of technology with Dynamics that’s allowed us to be global as well as to expand the business domestically.

KIRILL TATARINOV: Well, that’s certainly great to hear. That transformation from a solution for small-business accounting to an end-to-end business system.

Your implementation time is really quite impressive. You’ve recently opened a new plant, and the plant’s opening itself was quite an amazing business transformation. I know many companies would look at as a terrific business case and an example to learn. But the technology side of that new plan is equally impressive.

MAUREEN HURLEY: Yes. We believe in repeating functionality, the same functionality in all of our facilities whenever possible. And the fact that we were able to use a lot of the functionality built within AX 100 percent out of the box. We repeated what we implemented in New York in Twin Falls, Idaho, in 27 days.

KIRILL TATARINOV: Wow. (Applause.) I don’t think you hear that every day — 27 days to go live on business solutions. I think this is truly unique and I think there is, obviously, reason why you’re here as one of our excellence award winners. Congratulations to you. This is quite an accomplishment.

Now, of course, you reach out to customers and you deliver to consumers through a sophisticated network of distributors and stores. But hearing from consumers in this very vibrant world of social interactions is quite exciting, I’m sure. What are you doing around that?

JAMES MCCONEGHY: Do you want me to go? So, you know, first of all, to take it back to what Maureen said, we do focus on speed, and speed is part of our culture. And, certainly, the product set has helped with that.

And one of the product sets that helps us stay close to the consumer is the CRM piece. You know, we’ve really been close to the consumer right from the get-go. But as Maureen said, early on we managed it with spreadsheets, which was hard to manage. But now that we’re using the Dynamics CRM platform, it allows us to get closer to the consumer. We actually have our own in-house staff that answers all consumer calls, all consumer emails, all consumer notes. And we respond and we track and we monitor trends through the Dynamics CRM package.

KIRILL TATARINOV: Well, that’s great to hear. And that’s obviously something that I know many folks here in the room are looking forward to do to essentially get better at customer interactions and connect with those customers in real time to ensure that the product can be tuned. And that’s really the point where you connect your front line, you connect the people that reach out to the end user, and people who are perfecting your product on the back end and supply chain and the whole mechanism in between. That’s quite exciting.

What’s next for Chobani?

MAUREEN HURLEY: Well, Chobani has rolled out a lot of functionality within AX. And as Jim explained, a lot of functionality within CRM.

So now we’re rolling out SharePoint and we’re tying all that very valuable business knowledge up into executive dashboards so that we can make a lot of key business decisions. So those products are key in gathering the data, and we’re going to use SharePoint to present the data to make those very, very important business decisions.

KIRILL TATARINOV: Well, that sounds great. So we’re talking about one Microsoft and really this business solution being democratized for every person in your business through an easy-to-access portal is what’s in the future for Chobani. And it will put you on an even faster growth trajectory in the future, and will make us even more excited and delighted customers of your product.

Thank you both for being here with us. It’s a very exciting story. It’s a very exciting success. I encourage all of you to reach out to Chobani throughout this event. And I encourage all of you to try their product if you haven’t. It is really, really good. I can tell you as a user.

JAMES MCCONEGHY: Thank you, Kirill.

MAUREEN HURLEY: Thank you very much. (Applause.)

KIRILL TATARINOV: So we talked about the importance of customer interaction. And we talked about the importance of reaching out to customers and interacting with customers in this new world of multimodal social ability to communicate and interact from many different modes.

And dynamic business certainly understands that. And we find that dynamic businesses are excellent at interacting with customers and excellent in translating customer connections into true customer advocacy.

They leverage new technology, they leverage social media, they leverage big data to connect with their customers in a new and unique way.

Weight Watchers is an incredible example of a customer that is excellent in connecting with their customers. So let’s take a look.

(Weight Watchers video segment.)

KIRILL TATARINOV: Joining me now from Weight Watchers, Christine Butler, VP of CRM and Business Development; and Loic Vienne, VP of Enterprise Systems.

Welcome, we’re very excited you’re here with us. Thank you.

(Applause.)

A very exciting story of business transformation. You reinvented yourselves several times in sort of evolving your business throughout this journey, the challenges that you faced. Can you share with the group how you dealt with that, and how you overcame that, and how did you drive this incredible customer interaction that are frankly very important in the world right now?

CHRISTINE BUTLER: Sure. So, Weight Watchers is a global company. We’ve been in business for 50 years, not a lot of people know that. And we have meetings business, we have Weight Watchers Online. We can do meetings at your place of employment, hint, hint, if anybody is interested. We are on mobile devices. We’re on social. We’re pretty much anywhere the customer wants to engage. And when you think about weight loss, it’s a journey. And so it’s not a purchase decision in a supermarket at any point in time, it’s truly when do our customers need the information that is going to keep them succeed, lose weight, keep it off, tell their friends and become brand advocates.

The challenge that we face is that it’s been very hard to manage all of those connections and to have them be very meaningful and very relevant. And so I’m so happy that we are now able to do a lot of that work, and it’s just getting better every day.

KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s great to hear. So, making it meaningful and relevant.

Loic, what’s behind this, the technology foundation that makes the customer interaction so vibrant?

LOIC VIENNE: One of the key things we’re going to do with Dynamics is to be able to bring both channels, the professional channels and the online channels together, and be able to use all the information we’re collecting to drive marketing campaigns, to support the call centers, and also to support our sales force in the B2B world as well. So, a singular view of the customer, and of all the interactions available across all the channels.

KIRILL TATARINOV: So, multichannel, online channel interaction, rapid response. You’re in the cloud.

LOIC VIENNE: Exactly. For me, I think like any IT manager now says the cloud is the way to go. I don’t want to have to deal with all the datacenters and the hardware technology. I’ll leave that to you guys, Microsoft. That way I can focus on supporting our activities, and showing them the needs are being followed, and we manage the job delivering more and more people value.

KIRILL TATARINOV: And for you it’s truly sort of one cloud that we jointly deliver.

LOIC VIENNE: But I think what was key for me is to implement a single global instance in the cloud supported by Microsoft SharePoint BI solution that brings all this information together, and focus you to Dynamics. So, now we have a global solution being used across the U.S. and Europe, and across all the channels, again, online, customer service, B2B channels. I think it’s going to be even more important now. We are expanding our offering to mobile, through healthcare, through SMS and so forth.

KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s quite interesting, and it’s quite fulfilling for us to see sort of Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online coming together to enable this incredible transformation that incredible journey that you’ve been on for a number of years now.

Now, Christine, what’s next for Weight Watchers? What’s the future? And what should we expect?

CHRISTINE BUTLER: Well, Weight Watchers is evolving. And I think what you can expect us to see is that customer incentives just grow and become even more relevant, and to see how we use the results that we’re getting. One of the great things that we’ve been able to do is actually our service providers, we’ve got about 20,000 service providers out in the field, every single day they are leaders who have lost weight and kept it off with the program. And those service providers can send members messages. And we’re starting to hear some feedback now from our members that say they miss me, I got a card, I got an e-mail.

And I remember the first time we got some feedback, I remember just kind of running down the hall and being, we got some member feedback. And it was like it was a big deal for us, because we’re in the business we’re in a very sensitive business. People tell us what they weigh. And when you do that, you have to treat it with the utmost respect, and you have to be there for them whether it’s six in the morning or midnight. And so now, there’s more to come.

KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s great. We’re truly looking forward to the next frontiers that Weight Watchers is going to take on. And I’m incredibly excited to be part of the journey working with you and enabling your success.

Thank you both for being with us today.

CHRISTINE BUTLER: Thank you.

LOIC VIENNE: Thank you.

(Applause.)

KIRILL TATARINOV: There is one more story that I want to share with you this morning, one more customer story, one more story about unifying all the assets, where all of this comes together, organizations that truly became dynamic business by uniting with their customers, uniting their technology, uniting front office with their back office, and truly raising the bar in competing in their part of the industry.

Let’s watch.

(Video segment.)

Please welcome from Revlon David Giambruno, senior VP and chief information officer, and Steven Berns, chief financial officer. Welcome, gentlemen, I’m excited you are here.

(Applause.)

The speed of glamour and beauty is unforgiving. What a quote.

STEVEN BERNS: Thank you, but it is true. It is really, and we all kind of know, the world is speeding up, and my job is really to give the management team the information in the context that they need to act in context. And that rolls out to the business teams. It rolls out to everyone.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: And the better I do that, the happier he is.

KIRILL TATARINOV: And what do you need from the technology side? It sounds like you guys found a very sort of amazing vibrant way of working together.

STEVEN BERNS: What we needed was very simply enabling the business teams to have the right information at the right time to deliver to our consumers really the product that they want. And so what we need to do is, they want to consume information, whether it be branded information, when we send media messages to them, we want to do it in a way that they’re looking to consume it, so that they understand what Revlon’s products are offering to them, and we can deliver that in a meaningful way to create a sustainable model. We’re not looking for something that’s obviously not sustainable.

So, David has enabled the company to really have that flow of data that enables that timely decision-making.

KIRILL TATARINOV: That’s great to hear. And you’ve been in business for many years, 80-plus years Revlon has been in existence. And any company that’s been around for so long, I’m sure you had a hodgepodge of different systems, and different environments. Every office has something unique.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: Yes. We kind of call it putting the fun in dysfunctional in an enterprise way. And so we were an equal opportunity ERP acquirer for a long time.

And we got to the point with Steven and the executive team is the effort in pulling all the information together, while effective, wasn’t very efficient. And again, it’s all about speed and capability, and my job is really to make systems work for people and not have people work for systems, right? And it was like a joke. In Revlon I called it, we would get all this data and we’d have these big rocks, we’d break them into little rocks, then glue the rocks back together so everybody could look at it differently — fun, but not effective.

And so we’ve literally been collapsing 21 ERP systems down into one, one globally, one pane of glass, one way of doing things. Because it’s really about in Revlon, right, for us it’s about instead of facing in, it’s about turn around and facing out to the customer. And enabling the global teams to act in unison, right? Like any other company, we think globally, we act locally, but it’s again enabling the business teams, the leadership teams, to get that information quickly. And in case you missed it, we live in the information age, right?

So, my ability to deliver them the information they want in the way that they want it, and we are moving to a tablet view of the world. They just want to consume it, right, right, make it actionable. And then from there it’s really about driving profitable growth for Revlon.

KIRILL TATARINOV: Well, that’s an amazing story and getting to one, I’m sure it’s quite an undertaking that not only take the technology decisions, but also a very significant cultural transformation in a business that, as you said, people were allowed to make independent decisions. And I’m sure you folks worked together in a very deliberate fashion to drive the transformation with your people, to make them more united around one business process.

STEVEN BERNS: Yes we basically had had a complex situation, but we really needed it to be simple and it was simple. So, if you let people just say, hey, we have a transaction, all we want to do is capture the information. We want to then deliver that information in a simplistic fashion for the decision-maker so that they can then enable a better outcome going forward. So, we’ve kind of made very simple things complex, and now we’re breaking that apart. And as David said, what we’re able to do with the consumer, both our customers, that is major retailers, as well as with the consumers, that is women globally, we were able to provide them quick answers to questions they have, quick products, or products that are servicing their needs, and doing that and Microsoft has helped us do that in all different ways, starting with our basic Microsoft Office. But, really as David said, AX is enabling us to make a leapfrog step to drive our business much more efficient, but also that effectiveness, because we’ve been so  even though we’ve been effective the efficiency  the inefficiency we had was really depleting our effectiveness. So, as we look out, while we’ve done a very good job competitively, we see really the road has just begun for us.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: And I say this, we have lots of brands, but again to the simplicity piece, is it about like we make lipstick, right? And we have to do that efficiently and effectively.

KIRILL TATARINOV: And I’m not a customer.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: You may be, it’s up to you. Who knows what the future holds for us.

STEVEN BERNS: But, it is, it’s keeping one simple idea, like we make lipstick. Make it simple. Make it effective, because the value is about what we can deliver to make our customers basically feel glamorous, right. But, are you going to spend your energy on the back end or are you going to spend your energy making great products, getting the right products to the market, right? That’s what it’s really about. It’s about that engagement, because that’s going to help make him happy about profitably growing the company.

KIRILL TATARINOV: Well, that’s an amazing story and it’s certainly sort of unification come to life. Uniting with your customers, uniting the two of you and seeing the business and IT, and different functions working so closely together. Uniting your people around one solution from many dysfunctional ones to one that actually functions and delivers your results.

STEVEN BERNS: And the thing that I really hone in with my organization is, we’re just here to help, really. We’re a logistics capability. We’re just literally here to help the company do what they need to do. And part of that is using technology as a competitive weapon. I mean we’re not going to outspend our nearest competitor, but we sure can out-speed them, right? And that’s what it comes down to.

KIRILL TATARINOV: And ladies and gentlemen, this is a really great example of a CIO who says yes and a CIO is responding to the needs of business. And to me that is the key ingredient of that unity, that is a key ingredient of how IT needs to move into the future and really enabling the business to achieve great results.

Now, we talked about customers, we talked about the brand. And I know you’ve been working very closely with Microsoft folks on some new sort of forward-looking technologies that would enable you to do even more in reaching out and listening to your audiences.

STEVEN BERNS: It is about how do we thrill my internal customers, right? And that’s what we’ve been working on. So, I think we should show everybody.

KIRILL TATARINOV: Yes, let’s have Fred Studer join us here on stage, and Brad and David would actually show you what Revlon and Microsoft have been working on together for the future. Fred, awesome, thank you.

FRED STUDER: Thanks very much. Is everybody ready to have some fun? Come on. Let’s get this rolling. So, David, I’ve got to say that was a great story. You look fantastic.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: Thank you very much.

FRED STUDER: You bet, you bet.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: I make lipstick. Again, I should always look fantastic.

FRED STUDER: Yes, I have an excuse; I make technology here.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: Everybody’s got their problems.

FRED STUDER: So, let’s tell these folks what we’re going to do. So, actually we’ve got an amazing situation here. We’ve been working with David over the last several months and really talking to him about ERP, which is awesome, and you guys have done a great job getting to one. But, we thought, what about a sales and marketing experience.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: Because it’s always what do you do with it?

FRED STUDER: Exactly, so what we’re going to show you today is an experience that’s actually all real code. This is all stuff that these guys hopefully are going to start to use. And it starts off in this wonderful tablet. So, hopefully you guys can see this. I have all of my personal tiles. I can see everything here. By the way, great job on Emma Stone. But, I also can get some work done. So, as we think about just the sales experience, the account manager experience as I go into here, maybe you can just highlight to the folks what, as a Revlon account manager, what they have to think about.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: So, we kind of look at it in the Revlon account managers, and so we have account teams living basically in the Walmarts and the Targets of the world. And when you think about it they’re the start and end for everything in Revlon. So, they help drive our sales, but at the end, they’re the output about our ERP, the MRP, do we have the right product in the right store, product mix, what shipped, what didn’t ship? And so to really give them a pane in the world that’s highly actionable, so they can drive sales and, again, deal with any issues quickly and effectively, and to me it’s everybody wants this tablet view of the world, right?

They want their information in context and the way they can act on it. They don’t need all the other noise in the system, because that takes away from them dealing with our customers. And that’s really the most important thing that’s going to drive profitable growth for Revlon.

FRED STUDER: So, getting some great information, but you can see, very intuitive. They want to be mobile. They want to get the  

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: And collaborative.

FRED STUDER: It’s all about collaboration and seeing performance. So, this back office, front office, but you notice I’ve got an appointment. So, Contoso is one of our biggest retailers and we want to make sure that they’re OK. So, I can touch into this and very quickly see all of the great information that an account rep needs. I get to see the tasks that are relevant, some notes, and in fact you can see even cases. It looks like that store in particular is driving a lot of good Color Stay makeup. That’s good.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: And it’s about reacting to it quickly and in context.

FRED STUDER: Exactly, and specifically you can see that I’ve got a call with Reuben. I can get ready for it. I can see what he needs. But, you know what, we’ve got to have a call.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: We do.

FRED STUDER: So, I can just touch into this here. Hopefully Rubin is available.

REUBEN: Hey, Fred, how is it going, man?

FRED STUDER: I’m great, Rubin.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: Any way we can move lipstick.

FRED STUDER: You’ve got your game face on, for sure.

REUBEN: If by game face you’re referring to the lipstick on my face, then yes. I have my game face on.

FRED STUDER: It looks great. Hey, Rubin, I’m here with David and we actually  

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: Hi, Rubin.

REUBEN: Hey, guys.

FRED STUDER: We realize that you’ve been having some unbelievable success with Color Stay. How is that going?

REUBEN: Yes, Color Stay is going gangbusters for us. And also, thanks for getting the extra shipments to us. We’re really capitalizing on that opportunity. So, I’m not sure how you’re running your supply chain management, but you must have some kind of super ERP system.

KIRILL TATARINOV: Yes, it must be Dynamics.

FRED STUDER: A little AX 2012 R2, right?

REUBEN: Yes, I was contractually bound to say that.

FRED STUDER: Great, we all love it. Well, Rubin, next time you should sell more of that makeup than using it. But, it does look good on you.

REUBEN: I’m going to go wash this off.

FRED STUDER: Hey, I know that we talked last time that we wanted to get your feedback about some of the marketing. We’ve got this grand campaign around Nearly Naked and we wanted to see if we could get your feedback on the campaign before we launch it.

REUBEN: I’d love to. You guys partner with us really well and always happy to give you feedback from our perspective. So, yes, send us the info and we’ll get back to you.

FRED STUDER: Great. Hey, Reuben, thanks a lot, you always do great jobs for us. We appreciate it, buddy. By the way, how about a tablet that runs two applications simultaneously?

STEVEN BERNS: Shocker.

FRED STUDER: I know it’s pretty revolutionary. So, basically I come back to this, David, and like all good reps I want to just check this and note that I’ve completed that task and now we’re ready for the next thing. So, I’ll tell you what, you guys have an amazing brand.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: We do, incredibly powerful.

FRED STUDER: Revlon is global. So, what in a marketing role do people like the brand manager of Nearly Naked that I’m going to play next.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: And, by the way, you don’t even know you’re wearing it.

FRED STUDER: Yes, I am a Nearly Naked fan now. I thought it was makeup that only I knew was there, David.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: Sorry to ruin it for you.

FRED STUDER: That’s OK. Thanks for sharing that with everybody, and my best friends on camera.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: From marketing, and it really is about process and collaboration. So, we’re obviously a global brand, but we enable market stack globally, and you have market localization. And so it’s incredibly important, like what we’ve seen with the collaboration capabilities, because one of Revlon’s key capabilities for growth is our collaboration experience. And so the ability, again, to build a process, collaborate globally and act on it. And that is probably the biggest thing is about acting, providing information that all of our teams globally can act on, because without that it really doesn’t matter at the end of the day.

FRED STUDER: Totally. So, as the brand manager, I want to be able to see exactly what I have to do. So, you see the nice user experience around the process flow that drives me very clearly to a task that I need to accomplish. In this case, I have to approve some marketing.

But, as we talked, we wanted to send Reuben, our main account, just to see if he could collaborate. But notice just within this CRM experience, we have collaboration. We get to see in fact there is a message. We actually sent that. Let’s see if that was Reuben, and he loves the campaign. So, we get to collaborate right within this experience, with both people internal and external. And, in fact, we get to see video right within this experience.

So, the other piece here that we will go into is obviously everything is social. You need to get feedback from everybody. And so knowing how these campaigns actually land right from within the experience is pretty important.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: It’s hugely important because it is about the front end driving through the back end, the back end reacting and driving through the front end, right? It just really is incredibly symbiotic. And the ability to put that into a process, see that cleanly, again, like you saw in the video, it’s acting as a single pane of glass for Revlon, puts everybody on the same page. And the speed of Revlon just keeps increasing. And that is our competitive advantage.

FRED STUDER: That’s great. So, we want to launch this campaign. So, as soon as we launch this, I’ll come back here. But I want to basically go see very quickly how this product is doing, how the launch is going. And so there’s a ton of information. All of us are hopefully either tweeting or on Facebook, or doing those things. But this is real data. This is what Wayne talked about as a new social listening and analytics product.

So, this is going to permeate all the applications that we have. Very quickly what you’ll see is that I get to see all of the different responses in the native language. So, I see English. I see Spanish. You actually have some good Portuguese coming, because you guys are global.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: Yes. And I think that’s one of the important things is we ship to 100 countries. So, obviously the complexity of listening to all those different languages, it incredibly simplifies that. And even if you look at the demographics of the U.S. with the Spanish and the Portuguese, the ability to focus on our customer, and not focus on, frankly, the technology, although this is really cool technology, and I love being a technology dealer, because that’s kind of my job.

FRED STUDER: You are a dealer. But I also get to see very quickly the different share of voice, the Twitter, the Facebook. But one of my favorite things that we’re able to do now is social sentiment. That’s being able to go out and actually measure is it positive, negative or neutral. And you see actually, congratulations, you guys have a very positive, therefore green, sentiment.

But one of the things I want to do is drill in. Now, we’re talking about Nearly Naked.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: Let’s do face.

FRED STUDER: Let’s do some face. So, as I click into face, very quickly the user, in this case the brand manager, but this could be any marketer, can actually see the trend details of really what’s going on. But the important pieces very quickly I can see the sentiment is actually going up, I see all the document percentage, and this sentiment indicator. So, let’s drill into sentiment, because we want to see how people are actually responding in the social world. And, again, I see all of the great capability of this technology coming out with sentiment of 8.4, again, very good.

But I want to go right into Twitter. I want to just show you how powerful this is, because not only do I get to see the analytics, and see that your sentiment history is good. I see actually the different pieces here with regards to both positive and negative. But my favorite part is that I can go right into Twitter and click right into this tweet, and see this parsed out syntactically showing the green as positive, where there’s product name in the yellow, and if it was negative you’d see red. But very quickly I can even reply here.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: That’s really important to us. We have customer service centers, and I always kind of joke, anybody can manage good news. And for us it’s, yes, you want to know the good news and what’s working, but what’s not working, to drive that back through our supply chain, but also to our customer service centers. If there’s a problem with a product, to get to see that early, react to it whether it’s in the product itself or frankly if it’s just that users are having an issue, so we can, again, just help.

FRED STUDER: Absolutely. And you said you were global, so I’m going to show you some powerful things here. I’m going to shut off English. And notice very quickly now I start to see the Tweets in the most popular way. Now, this is Spanish. For you Spanish speakers, you’ll see that this is actually translating in the native language. It’s not just translating it and then doing the sentiment. It’s doing it in the context of that native language, eight different languages. And that, from a context perspective, is huge.

But not only that, I can actually watch this. I go to this alert. Let’s just say that I am the product manager, and I wanted to see negative or positive tweets, or Facebook posts, or blog posts. I can actually put in my e-mail and talk about exactly when I want this. The system will send this to me.

But, even better, as the brand manager in this example, I want to see trends. And I can actually even see the sensitivity to high alert so I can see both positive and negative sentiments that are trending. So, very quickly, I’m able to ascertain how my campaign is launching.

But now, just to close up, we know that there’s a lot of great capabilities in the tool itself, but being able to embed that in my CRM system right here with this little widget that shows me in this case the tag clouds, but very quickly being able to drop that into a website, seeing all the books and gadgets, being able to see the top discussions, seeing the news and blogs, and ultimately even the top influencers, now that’s power.

DAVID GIAMBRUNO: And it is powerful. We all talk about big data, but the real secret to big data is making it little data, little data that people can actually act on rather than needing this massive infrastructure. So, we see this as incredibly powerful and enabling to really, like you said, the democratization of information around Revlon, and make it actionable that’s personable to the person that needs to use it.

FRED STUDER: And the good news here is that we’re completely democratizing this social capability. Everybody that has CRM is going to get this as part of that product. So, I hope you guys are as excited as we are.

I really appreciate it, David. Thank you very much.

Go try some Dynamics, guys. Have a great event.

(Applause.)

KIRILL TATARINOV: Thank you, Fred. Thank you, David. Really appreciate it, great job, you guys.

Out of all the messages that you heard this morning, uniting with your customers and what you just saw in this demonstration is one activity that is the most revenue-enhancing for your organizations. That’s why we truly wanted you to see the demonstrations from sort of the vision of Revlon as our customer. And this is why I’m so proud and excited to be able to now deliver this technology innovation to you, helping you connect with our customers in a much better, intuitive way, and as a result drive your revenue, drive your revenue even higher.

You saw four very different companies, four very different companies that are in different industries and do very different things. They’re different sizes and in different locations. But they all have a few things in common. Most importantly they all became dynamic businesses through usage of technology. And they all have done an amazing job uniting with their customers, uniting business and IT, and truly empowering their business through technology. They have all done an amazing job uniting their people and really acting as one. They’ve all connected to their business processes, and they are now acting as one unified organization moving into the future, moving into this world ahead.

So, before we close this morning’s discussion I wanted to show you another video, another video that hopefully brings it all together for you, sort of serves as the wrapping piece for what we’ve been talking about this morning.

Let’s take a look.

(Video segment.)

KIRILL TATARINOV: We’re in this together, ladies and gentlemen. And Convergence is that very important and very exciting point of unity for us. It’s also an opportunity for us to come in and report on what we’ve achieved in the last year and what we’re going to achieve in the year ahead, sort of put the mark into the future.

I’m really proud that our engineering team has delivered on every single commitment that we promised you at Convergence 2012, and I’m also very excited about the road map that’s been laid out into the future that Wayne shared with you earlier today. And I’m confident that next year we’re going to stand in front of you and report on our progress yet again, because for us it is unwavering commitment to your success. It is unwavering commitment by taking that long-term view, and delivering time and time again on what we promised, delivering on our promise of helping you all become dynamic businesses, helping you all unite your technology, unite your people, unite your business processes, and most importantly unite with your customers in a highly connected and prescient way.

Convergence is also a really unique opportunity for us to reinforce our commitment to our existing customers, and mostly our existing customers that are here in the room. At the end of this week, I want you to go back to your organizations and I hope you feel really good about the trust that you placed in Microsoft and Microsoft Dynamics. And I hope you’re going to be able to report to your shareholders and to your businesses on how the choice will continue to propel your businesses into the future.

We also have a number of prospective customers here in the room — and, frankly and very plainly, I want you as our customer. And I hope that next year and maybe even sooner you join us as a customer of Microsoft Dynamics working together with us, uniting the world of business and becoming dynamic businesses. There are some industry influentials and industry experts here in the room. I think they’re all carefully positioned right here in the front sections and they’re trying to hide from me, but there’s no hiding there. I want you to reach out to this group. They have something to share. They have some amazing experiences that they assembled by talking to many great customers around the world, some that you showed today and many others. And they can share their experiences and their knowledge with you, and help you make great choice for the future and great technology platform that would help you move forward and become dynamic businesses.

And of course, here in the room we have a great assembly of our partners. In every customer success that you saw today there is a partner working closely with Microsoft behind each and every one of those success stories. Our commitment to our partners is invariant. We work very closely with our partner channel, and we’re very excited to drive forward this vibrant triangle of success with customer, partner and Microsoft working together.

It is about people and technology. It is about devices and services for Microsoft today. It is about cloud, whether it’s private or public cloud. It is about Microsoft and you. I’m very excited to have you here as our guests this week. I truly hope that as a result of this week’s discussion you lean forward, you reinstate your commitment into the future and you work very closely and come having learned a lot from this event.

Please have a lot of fun this week. Enjoy the conference. Learn a lot. I want to hear from you. I want to hear from you from a broad range of social channels that are available to you. You can reach out to me at [email protected], on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Yammer, whichever way you want to engage and communicate, we’re here for you, we’re committed to your success. Enjoy the event. Thank you. Thank you so much.

END