Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

What are the key differences between Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Dynamics NAV?

So, what we think was the thinking behind Microsoft Dynamics 365….

Dynamics of all flavors were getting their collective butts kicked by NetSuite and we heard MS resellers openly bemoaning that they couldn’t compete because something like DynamicsGP might need 6 months and 450 hours to implement (at 175 an hour) and NetSuite had a 90-day 180 hour implementation track.

MS decided to create some real ‘cloud’ ERP. This was instead of just hosting the same old ERP on remote servers - which seemed really cloud-like until you start doing the math on those same 450 hours to implement.

So they came up with two flavors of Dynamics365 (D365). The base product was a reworking of NAV’s code base to become a true, cloud offering. The D365 Enterprise version was the old AX code base similarly re-deployed.

Now, the first generation of D365, from the evaluations we’ve been involved with so far, seems to be a reworking of the same product, somewhat more cloud based, I didn’t see any multi-tenant and the implementation hours were pretty high - but I think I get where MS is going here, I just think as of Feb 2018, it’s really early on for the release of D365 products - but, as you’ve seen the revenue numbers for MS Azure jump 90% - twice over the last two quarters - and similar gains of OFC 365, SharePoint and other products - I think MS has finally locked into a continuous incremental improvement process for business software that’s really gaining traction.

So our assessment of the D365 products is positive, they’re good now and getting better and we forecast the future is very strong for MS ERP.

Of course this comes with no insider knowledge of MS or the MS channel - it’s just our assessment based on market conditions we’ve seen in recent client ERP evaluations.

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