Kirill Tatarinov: Worldwide Partner Conference 2011

Remarks by Kirill Tatarinov, President, Microsoft Business Solutions Division
Los Angeles, Calif.
July 12, 2011

KIRILL TATARINOV: Thank you. Good morning, everybody. I’m truly excited to be here with you today. What a great event. And what a great time to be with Microsoft Business Solutions.

As you heard from Steve yesterday, with Microsoft Dynamics we are on a tear. And I want to start by saying a huge thank you to all of our partners, to all of you who work with Microsoft Dynamics, many thousands of you here in the room, for doing amazing work helping our customers worldwide. Let’s hear it for our Dynamics partners here.

(Cheers and applause.)

With Business Solutions, not only do we work with our partners, we deliberately depend on our partners, and for that we have the richest and the best partner programs, that are coveted by the industry. And with the latest announcements that were made yesterday on adding referral programs to Microsoft Partner Network. Everybody here, everybody who works with business customers, can share in Microsoft Dynamics success, because Dynamics essentially brings everything that we do for our business customers together. And the value of Microsoft, the value of Office, the value of Azure, the value of everything that we do in our server platform manifests itself, in many cases, through Dynamics in front of business customers.

Together, we have seen amazing success. And today we have many brand names, and many customers running their businesses, running their mission-critical applications, powered by Microsoft Dynamics. Customers of all sizes are ready to modernize their applications and move into the future with Microsoft Dynamics.

There is one name, there is one brand, that is not on this slide, but it is all over this event, and that is actually one of the best, and also the most demanding, Dynamics customers that I have. And obviously that name is Microsoft.

Tony Scott, our CIO, is here, and Microsoft, for historic reasons, used to run Diebold. And many of our sales people passionately hated the tool that we asked them to use everyday. And today I’m really proud to report to you that this year Microsoft is Diebold-free. (Applause.) And every single one of you here are actually beneficiaries of this change, because people from Microsoft who help you every day use Microsoft Dynamics. And I hope you have seen this positive change in productivity of people in Microsoft who support you in the last year. Well, in fact, I know you have seen this change, as we’ve seen in the report and survey results that you’ve produced in the last year. So, thank you for that. (Applause.)

Together we’re changing the game in business applications. We have this very ambitious vision for what the business of the future ought to look like. We call that Dynamic Business. The only constant in the world is change. And we’re setting up the future where every business can be dynamic, business that does not stand still, business that anticipates change, business that moves ahead of the pace of the economy and the environment that surrounds it. And we build tools, systems, and methodologies that empowers and enables Dynamic Business.

Our job, and our mission, is to make every business in to a Dynamic Business. And our job is to empower every single one of you here to become Dynamic Businesses through the usage of Microsoft Dynamics solutions. We have the solution that is the easiest and the most intuitive to use. We deliver true value with unrivaled return on investments, and reduced total cost of ownership compared to any other tool that’s available out there, and we’re proud to be the tool that is the most agile, which is the easiest to deploy, the quickest to roll out, and the easiest to implement in any customer size, in any type of organization.

The momentum in this business has been phenomenal. With CRM, we passed another very important milestone this year: Two million users worldwide run Microsoft Dynamics CRM every day to manage their sales, customer care processes, and to run a broad range of line of business applications enabled by xRM platform. Amazing success, amazing growth. I know many of Dynamics CRM partners are out here in the room. Thank you for working with us on enabling the success. (Applause.)

With Dynamics ERP, we celebrated a very important milestone, ten years in the ERP business for Microsoft. And during those ten years, every year we’ve been adding approximately 15,000 customers. No other vendor in this space can tell you that they have been adding 15,000 customers consistently year-over-year-over-year. And we’re seeing growth across portfolio of our products. We have a product portfolio that is designed to serve the needs of customers of all sizes, customers in all industries, customers in all geographies — and every single product in this portfolio has been growing.

And, as reported by Gartner, Forrester, and many other analysts who are watching this industry, Dynamics ERP and CRM today are the unrivaled leader in all the workloads that we cover. And we’re very proud, and we’re very excited to be in this position when we’re absolutely ready to serve the needs of our customers worldwide.

Now, WPC is somewhat of a special event. It’s an opportunity for us to come once a year and to report to our partners on our progress, and report on what we’re doing, and what are we delivering, and are we meeting our commitments. And this WPC, I’m really proud to report to you that our engineering team has executed on all cylinders, and we met every single commitment, and every single product in the Microsoft Dynamics portfolio was updated, modernized, and delivers even more value than it did in the past though innovations on public clouds, private clouds, and deployments that our partners do out of their own datacenters. Very exciting momentum, very exciting progress that we see with Microsoft Dynamics.

Earlier this year we announced the beta version — Steve did it at Convergence — of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. We talked about Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 as the game changer in the ERP industry. And today we have this product released to manufacturing and we’re ready for a global launch in early September, and it’s evident by many customers who are already deploying this product in production, this is the game changer. This is the product that sets the new era for what ERP and business applications ought to be.

It delivers ERP for everybody, and every single person in the organization can benefit from Microsoft Dynamics, and from the powerful simplicity that the products bring to our customers. Now, the question is often being asked in relation to ERP in cloud, what are you, Microsoft, going to do and are you ever going to put your ERP product and your ERP investment in public cloud?

Earlier this year at our Convergence event in April, we announced that every new release of Microsoft Dynamics ERP product will be available on Windows Azure platform in the public cloud. So, the timer is on and the race is on, but actually what is happening with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, which is available on on-premises deployment and private cloud, or partner cloud today, we’re taking the first very significant step towards the cloud with Microsoft Dynamics AX.

And today I’m real excited to announce a very important tool for those of you who work with business applications certainly appreciate it, a tool that we’ll call Rapid Start for Dynamics ERP, a tool that dramatically reduces time to deploy, configure and customize ERP systems, tools that run on Windows Azure, tools that truly help our partners deploy the solution quicker. I know many of you will benefit from this tool. Many of you have been able to achieve even bigger results with Microsoft Dynamics once the tool becomes available later this fall.

Also today, at WPC 2011, I’m very excited to announce the latest updates to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, a great service that is running in the cloud since January, available in 40 countries, and all of those languages. We essentially transformed the way we build the product with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. We made the commitment that we will issue a service update twice a year. In January we made the service available, in Q4 we will issue an update. It is a very important, significant update for a number of reasons.

First, it makes CRM an add-on to Office 365. So, every single customer who signs up to use Office 365, and there will be millions of them out there, will have an option to add Dynamics CRM Online on the same bill, on the same provisioning engine. We’re also making very significant enhancements, as many of you requested, in our enterprise capabilities, improving disaster recovery, improving federated identity, improving some security and privacy aspects of the tool.

We’re adding a wealth of social capabilities. People want to interact in different ways. The CRM enables those social capabilities, and we’re adding those capabilities in a way that actually improves productivity. It is not useless chat that we’re adding to the product. It’s actually something that helps people be more productive. And finally, as many of you requested, we’re adding capabilities for specific industries that make Dynamics CRM more industry-focused.

So, I thought the best way to show you the power of that solution, and the power of that service, and the power of bringing it all together for our business customers, would be to show you Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, and the way it works with Office 365 and the Windows Azure platform.

So, let me have Varun here join me on stage and Varun will actually play a role, as many of you play every day. Varun will play a role of the sales representative who works for one of our partners and he sells Dynamics CRM every day, but he also uses Dynamics CRM to sell the product and to serve his customers. So, Varun take it away.

VARUN: Thank you, Kirill. (Applause.)

So, today I’m playing the role of a sales account manager at ProsWare, a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner. I start my day on my Windows Phone. And I’m using an app delivered by Microsoft that connects me to Dynamics CRM in the cloud. Through this app I have access to real-time social feeds that deliver activities and events that I subscribe to here on the device. My people feed shows me updates from people on the side of my organization that I follow. My record feed surfaces information from Dynamics CRM, so I can follow opportunities that I’m interested in as they move through my sales pipeline.

Now, over here I see a post from Eric on my marketing team. He’s announced that his organization has shipped a set of material to empower our sales force and help them go compete. I also see that my manager responded to a post that I sent out about the fact that I’m going to be here in LA. He’s asked me to follow up on a key opportunity here in LA for a competitive prospect.

And so what I’m going to do is let him know that I’m on it, go ahead and post that. I’m going to combine these two pieces of information to work on this opportunity. But, because I’m a sales guy I’m on the road a lot, so what I’m actually going to do is head over to Starbucks, grab some coffee and flip open my laptop where Office 365 follows me wherever I go.

What I’m looking at here is a real-time dashboard for Microsoft Dynamics CRM embedded natively inside of the Outlook application. This dashboard provides me with a 360-degree view of all of my key sales information. Now, with one click I’m going to drill into the account record for this particular customer. So, here we are inside of the account record for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Now, I see we have some basic information here about this customer. What I’m going to do is harness the power of cloud services to learn as much as I can about this particular customer before I engage them.

The first thing I’m going to do is connect to the Windows Azure data market, a service delivered by Microsoft in the cloud, that’s automatically enriching this account with information about this particular customer. So, you’ll see here we now have address information that’s been surfaced in the record, as well as any other information that’s out there in the public cloud for me to be able to consume.

I’m also going to use cloud services to bring in social information from Twitter, location-based information from Bing, all designed in order to make me as intelligent as I can possibly be about this particular customer.

Now, the awesome thing about Office 365 is that it provides federated authentication across organizational boundaries. So, what that means is that I can see here that David, my customer, is an Office 365 user. And even though he’s in a separate organization, I get presence information from Lync embedded inside of the CRM application, and I can just reach out to David and give him a quick heads-up that I’ll be following up with him.

Hello, David. Got a sec, Varun from ProsWare sending over to you shortly.

So, with that I’ve done the smart thing and notified this particular customer that I’m going to be communicating with him. I love you, Rubin.

So, now that I’ve qualified this customer I’m going to add them to my sales pipeline, and what that means is I’m simply going to create an opportunity inside of Dynamics CRM. I’m going to call this opportunity Contoso Key Compete Account. Go ahead and click save. Now, the really great thing about our organization is outside of Lync we’re also using SharePoint Online for document management and collaboration across our organization.

So, because of that, CRM is automatically provisioned a SharePoint Online workspace, and pre-populated it with all of the key information from that marketing bomb, so that I can actually work on it inside of this opportunity and have a great head start, all of the competitive materials I’m looking for, all of the document templates, really accelerate my productivity.

Now, ProsWare has also equipped me with this Windows 7 slate device. This is running a custom application that they’ve build that’s designed to further empower their mobile sales organization. This application is hosted in Windows Azure and it’s built using HTML 5, which means that it will work on any browser, any platform, and any device. You’ll see here that I have access to the same social information here that you saw in the device and on the PC. I can interact with that. But, I also have deeper analytics and business intelligence.

So, for example, I can see here that there’s a chart that’s tracking my sales performance year-over-year. This chart is showing me some healthy trends. My service level agreements are being met. My seats are rising, and my customers are rising, which is great. And I can also interact with this application using a natural user experience, bring up analytics. I can keep interacting with this application and bring up more intelligence. So, in this particular case I’m looking at the results of a survey that we did for a limited set of customers that we engage with to learn what cloud services that they’re using, so that we can see whether we’re improving and taking share from the competition and driving our business forward.

So, what I’ve shown you over the course of this demonstration is really the power of the cloud, and how an organization like ProsWare is harnessing that power in order to drive value for their joint customers.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

KIRILL TATARINOV: Thank you, Varun. What a great example of how we are changing the game in business applications. In just a few minutes he won the customer. He had them at hello. He is in the process of converting them from Salesforce.com to Dynamics CRM like many thousands of customers are doing today, and he had it all in the cloud with Office 365, Windows Azure and Dynamics CRM.

Now, what we’re finding in the cloud as we work with many of our customers is that partners play an even more significant role as we deliver solutions from the cloud. Customers are really helping us making sure that more customers move from initial clicks to buying, and we see much higher conversion rates when our partners are engaged.

We see bigger deals when our partners are engaged, and we see greater loyalty, resulting in ongoing renewals, which is very important in the world of cloud services.

We continue to support our partners as we transition into the cloud. Earlier this year we published a very important white paper that we call “Partner Flexibility Cloud Guide,” which really guides our partners who have been working with us for many years in business applications on how to move into the cloud, pricing, intellectual property, how do they work, how do they engage, how do you continue to stay practical. I encourage you to take a look at this document. This will help you as you go through that transition. There are also many, many partners here in the room who made this transition, and who work with us in the cloud. And WPC is one such event where those connections, and in reaching each other by sharing experiences, is very helpful.

One of those partners I want to highlight is an organization called PowerObjects, and I had the pleasure of visiting PowerObjects last year in Minneapolis. They’ve been in the cloud for many, many years. In fact, they started providing hosting solutions in the late ’90s, and they made the transition to Dynamics CRM Online and SharePoint Online and Office 365 in recent time. And as they did this transition, they saw almost a 50 percent increase in their customer ad rates, which is quite significant and quite exciting. And they also see that their selling cycle got dramatically reduced. In the last year, they sold two Fortune 500 organizations in under 30 days, which is quite phenomenal, and quite astounding, for those of you who understand traditional selling cycles in organizations of that size. So, PowerObjects, and many others, zero to ten, many other partners who work with us in the cloud, are here ready to engage and talk to you, and help you learn.

As we move to the cloud, and as we transition into the future, it is really important for us to grasp the idea that Microsoft Dynamics is what brings the power of innovation from Microsoft to our business customers, and our mission here is to help organizations become dynamic in the cloud with the wealth of investments coming from Microsoft. That is what we stand for, and together we can absolutely do that. And we’re counting on your success, and continued profitable relationships as we move our investments into the cloud.

There are a couple of things I would like you to do. Number one, if you’re not using Dynamics CRM Online today, and if, god forbid, you’re on Salesforce.com, it is time for you to switch. (Applause.) If you’re Gold Certified, or Silver Certified, you have Dynamics CRM Online for your people. It is available and you don’t have to pay for it. So, it’s a crime for your business if you don’t use the service. (Applause.)

Michael Park will speak later today, and he will go much deeper in his value keynote on Dynamics and what we’re doing, the product roadmap. If you’re interested, I encourage your to attend. Be thinking of Microsoft Dynamics if you work with our business customers, every single business organization is ready for Microsoft Dynamics. Think about competitive opportunities. We talked about Microsoft being Diebold-free. There are approximately 5,000 organizations out there running Diebold as their CRM for customer care. It’s that product and those people who need to move, and you can help them, if you work with them, move to Dynamics CRM Online.

And, finally, lead referral programs. Every single one of you here in the room can share in the success of Dynamics as we change the game of business applications and make every business to be the Dynamic Business.

Thank you very much.

(Applause.)