MS Selling Dynamics NAV and GP Business to Infor Company

generic

Just heard rumors that MS is selling Dynamics NAV and GP to Infor.

davmac1

No one wanted Solomon (SL)? 8)

generic

Have they even been maintaining SL software?

davmac1

I believe it is contracted out to a group that includes some of the original owners.
it still gets its regular updates.

geordie

Is it grounded rumor or just chit-chat?

jglathe

Haven't seen anything anywhere else, but it's near FY end, enough time to close a deal.

Miklos_Hollender

Microsoft is losing the grip it had on the world of operating systems due to Android - or to put it differently, by computer usage as such diversifying from desktop PCs to tablets, smart TVs, "transformer" laptop/tablets that look differently enough from normal laptops that people don't quite expect it to be able run Windows software. People already think if for stuff like writing e-mails Windows is not quite necessary, because Android/Gmail does the job etc. etc.

Microsoft has basically two firmly loyal user groups. Desktop gamers (consoles are not ideal for every type of game), which is threatened by Steam slowly supporting other platforms as well, and business users. That means Office, that means Dynamics, and quite some other stuff. While LAMP web servers and web based business/intranet apps are becoming more common, you can say that the office space is still firmly Microsoft territory, largely because of the investments already made and the infrastructure already built ip.

From this viewpoint, giving up anything that is even remotely business oriented would be a suicide. Sell NAV and 5 years later it has an Android client (for "transformers") and works with OpenOffice. No, that is not even difficult today with page web services, sounds rather easy, worst case two years work of a five man developer team plus of course testers.

If anything, I would expect the literal opposite now - consolidate that grip on the business sphere, maybe buy Oracle Financials or the Russian 1C, make sure they will never be compatible with anything but Windows / Office and os on.

Alex_Chow

generic wrote:

Just heard rumors that MS is selling Dynamics NAV and GP to Infor.

Source?

Luc_VanDyck

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumor

Wikipedia wrote:

Rumors are [...] often discussed with regard to "misinformation" and "disinformation" [...].

jglathe

Regarding bootless speculation... just found this here in the technet library:



Also have a look at the Dynamics homepage: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/erp.aspx

Two choices, none of them NAV.

jglathe

Well... somewhere in the menu structure, you'll find NAV: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics ... rview.aspx
Makes one question strategy-wise, though :-k BTW, I hate these multi-colour tile, contentless websites. You have to click endlessly to find something. As if the target audience is only dolts with an attention-span deficit who give up after a few screenfuls of crayoned graphics.

tinoruijs

jglathe wrote:

Also have a look at the Dynamics homepage: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/erp.aspx

Two choices, none of them NAV.

Uh? Strange.
Seems clear NAV isn't the way to go..

Marije_Brummel

Guys, calm down.

This is a problem in the US and is has been for many years. NAV People at Directions US complain about it each time and for a good reason.

For whatevery reason marketing in the US is GP focussed. If you change country to others, even Australia you will see that NAV is well represented.

I disagree with the marketing in the US, but that does not mean anything for NAV other than internal politics in a company larger than several european countries.

tinoruijs

Mark Brummel wrote:

Guys, calm down.

Will do. Thanks for comforting us Mark!

Miklos_Hollender

I think there is no point in trying to make a truly global product anyway. I would be OK with NAV being a mainly EMEA product. The problem is largely that we cannot cover everything through the country-level localization object ranges - it is inevitable that the cultural differences between countries, regions, continents would require a deeper, platform-level split to fulfill properly. There are these things for example when e.g. a German friend of mine worked in America he noticed that people worked longer hours but at a slower speed than in Germany. This matters, because then for example in countries with a faster pace of working keyboard shortcut type stuff are more important, data input speed matters much. This is why I don't really believe in truly global products, there are always these differences. Despite being originally Danish, NAV currently doesn't even properly fulfill the EU regulations as of now - for example a company that has VAT UID's registered in multiple EU countries and thus has to make in them all VAT, VIES, Instrastat reports is seriously screwed as of now without some major tweaks I mean. Or for example I have just seen 2 years ago that Navision still cannot quite compete well Italy because there the regulatory environment is changing a lot and local accounting software vendors send out update CDs every month to cope with it. So Navision is not even properly regulatory conforming in the EU, so I don't really see the point of pushing it to be truly global. That would be yet another case of putting profits before usability.

Marije_Brummel

Miklos, I did not mean with my post that NAV is not designed for the US market.

I spend (remote from my office) 50% of my time working for US customers and it is a great country to work for and implement NAV.

The product is localised and a lot of the US Sales Tax is in W1. If you cross sell in the US you can always Avalara on top of NAV. Maybe you are looking for something like that in Europe. Have you looked at OPPlus?

This problem we are discussing here on the Microsoft website is 100% marketing related, nothing else, and it is extremele frustrated for all the great North American partners.

jglathe

What profits?

Miklos_Hollender

Interesting, Mark. Do you have any idea why is NAV popular in the US? My impression is that as corporations tend to be much bigger there, they are more in AX / SAP / Oracle range.

Or maybe they are not always bigger but you know there is this business stereotype that there are huge cubicle farm type offices in the US everywhere with hundreds of workstations and many layers of management, while we here often tend to work at smaller companies that have like 20 workstations in an old inner city apartment converted to an office and there is only one layer of management: the owner. This of course may be a huge overgeneralization still when I read e.g. Reddit.com it seems there is something in it, as everybody seem to be talking about stuff like "my friend had 3 promotions in 2 years" which makes me think "wow guys you must have really big companies there if you have 3 layers of management at all".

Miklos_Hollender

@jglathe big ones, software licencing does not have a unit cost. Localization and marketing costs comparatively little, so the ability to push a software package into a new major country must be lucrative. I have learned this when I worked for an add-on maker. Once your core market, typically home country, covers your core development costs, localizing it and marketing it for new ones is very profitable. As long as there is no strong local competition of course.

matttrax

Miklos,

Check out the data from the last US census if you're interested.

https://www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html

As with any government website it's not the easiest / best laid out data, but you'll see there are plenty of small and medium sized businesses in the US.