ERP064 - Grow your cloud offering

So, I think that for those partners that are trying to enable themselves, going into their smaller customers and saying, hey, can we have a discussion around, you know, how are you doing your, how are you manage your sales? Are you still doing it on spreadsheets or are you using quick books and you feel maybe there are some pain points there because you've outgrown it. Welcome to Evolved Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. Today on the podcast, I'm speaking with Douglas Fury with Tech Data. Doug is a former Microsoft Dynamics business owner who now works as a partner enablement manager for Tech Data. Doug and I discuss some of the opportunities available to Microsoft Cloud partners. Dynamics is a growing practice area for many MS partners, and if you haven't considered how it could help your business, this podcast will help highlight the opportunity available. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast so you get every new episode. Also, if you wouldn't mind, please leave a rating and review in your podcast app. This helps others find the show so we can reach more of the community. Now, on with the show. Also, if you wouldn't mind, please leave a rating and review in your podcast app. This helps others find the show so we can reach more of the community. Now, on with the show. Joining me on the podcast today is Doug Fury with Tech Data. Welcome, Doug. Thank you, Todd. So we're chatting about uh the cloud, um more specifically the Microsoft cloud, but if we can kind of if we end up expanding beyond that, then then excellent. Uh, your position at Tech Data uh is pretty central around enabling partners and uh helping them to expand their business and make sure that they're getting their clients what they what they need. Uh, so this is pretty central to a lot of the things that you're exposed to in the conversations that you're having with uh IT partners. Do you want to expand upon your role and just kind of feel people in on on uh what you do? Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, you know, for for many of you uh listening, you know that Microsoft has invested in what they call their three clouds. One of those clouds is modern workplace. Another one is Azure and then the third one is Dynamics. I focus specifically on Dynamics uh and working in that space, but I have colleagues and counterparts and teams that also work in the other two cloud areas as well. Okay, great. Uh I think most people listening are going to be familiar with uh with modern workspace uh primarily, you know, the office offerings and and things that revolve around. Microsoft 365 and Office 365. Um, I'll just touch on it as a sort of a a launching point for kind of what I I want to uh put to you as a as a as a an idea for this conversation. Um, ages ago, back back in the early days of uh of Bpos, which was I'm sure anyone who's been around in the industry for a while remembers Bpos as the original sort of iteration of what is now Office 365. where they kind of pulled these things specifically exchange and a few other solutions and pushed them into cloud offerings. And I don't know if you remember this, Doug, but uh I had lots of conversations, mostly working inside organizations. And VPs were furious with this change, thinking that this is the death of our professional services businesses and, you know, we make all of this money on supporting and hosting exchange. Uh and upgrades are a big part of our revenue and and they they a lot of people were very dramatically resistant to this move. And I kind of looked around and I was like, look. You know, if Microsoft is pushing this direction, I don't know if you want to throw yourself on the gears in the machine to try and stop it. It just doesn't feel like a a winning battle. And and I think the more I started to work in this this field and and look at how Bpos was being deployed. What I got a sense was is that it just removed a lot of the complexity, the unnecessary complexity in supporting Microsoft infrastructure. You no longer sort of were uh required to look after the bare metal and support that infrastructure more broadly. And and sort of the reason that I that I sort of posit the story is I I think this is uh sort of one of those early opportunities that we're now seeing kind of with Azure. where people are kind of suspicious originally of, you know, how they could enable that in their business. Will they be cannibalizing some of their business if they move all of these services to the cloud and what what value could they then present? Um, and where I we get to sort of the conversation with with you, Doug, is I think the the people need to start to think about. What are the consultative solutions that they're providing to their client businesses and uh technology providers. very sort of appropriately are no longer really IT providers, but more broadly technology providers. They need to think about what the businesses actually require and how technology can enable what they're trying to build. And I think there's a huge greenfield opportunity in the enablement of Dynamics services and a Dynamics line of business for a lot of IT providers and especially for the managed service providers. So that that's kind of my pre-ramble on this. Uh, do you want to your thoughts on on sort of how you see that? Oh, absolutely. I think that you hit it on the head that there was this, you know. A lot of the Microsoft community kind of dug their heels in early and just weren't convinced that they could they could maintain their business uh once things started to move to the cloud. But I think that we've seen that proven wrong, right? Uh over the last 10 years that a lot of businesses are really flourishing uh since they've embraced the cloud. and and brought their customers to the cloud. And it's funny because Dynamics was really one of the first uh tools that was delivered in the cloud way back in the day of, you know, CRM. Uh was the first business solution that Microsoft really offered in the cloud. And I remember at that point in time, I I I had built and run a Microsoft consulting company. And the cloud discussions to get CRM into the cloud went very easily. It was it was really interesting that customers were very interested in saying, hey, I don't want to manage this whole thing. And I don't want you to manage it for me. Can we just use it and you can help can you show us how to use it? And and and make it work for our business. So, actually the sales process uh accelerated a bit when when we started to see Dynamics in the cloud back in the day. And I think it's becoming easier now, the cloud's making it easier to accelerate that business those business discussions and say, hey, you don't have to worry about maintaining an army of people. to manage this infrastructure for you, that's taken care of. Let's talk about how we can solve your business problems today. today. Yeah, I 100% agree. Uh, I I'd actually kind of forgotten that CRM online was was was like way back in the day, that was one of those early services. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it was right around the Bpos time that they both came out at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So I I think one of the things that kind of maybe scares people away from leaning into Dynamics uh and and I'd love your your sort of position on this, seeing sort of uh people switch to this and and uh and moving to enablement. Uh I think people think somewhat rightly that Dynamics is a a bit of a beast and and, you know, difficult to configure. And, you know, it's kind of like if you deploy Salesforce, you're going to spend a ton of money and a ton of time to to get this set up and configured. Uh, how true is that, I think, is my question. Well, I think there's truth in it depending on the size of the organization you're speaking with, right? If you're working with SMBs and they want to fire up CRM, so they can turn three of their sales people onto CRM and they can start to manage their business and have visibility into that part of their business. It's it's pretty easy. If you walk into a Fortune 1000 company. Yes, there are complexities, there's scale that makes it very difficult. So, I think that for those partners that are trying to enable themselves, going into their smaller customers and saying, hey, can we have a discussion around, you know, how are you doing your, how are you manage your sales? Are you still doing it on spreadsheets or are you using quick books? And you feel maybe there are some pain points there because you've outgrown it. Maybe there's a business central discussion you can have. So, I think for for organizations that don't know about Dynamics, the on ramp there is is not as hard as some people say. If you start with some of your smaller customers. So like a lot of the listeners to to the podcast tend to be in the MSP space. or or the the smaller side of the IT consulting space. So let's let's sort of appeal to to those minds initially. And I think it's a good launching point, right? If you're going to dip your toe into this business unit and develop something around a Dynamics practice. Uh what are some of the things that people should consider? CRM, I think is an obvious one. Uh if you can if a client doesn't have a CRM, you know, why sort of send them over to Zoho or Hubspot or something like that? If if if CRM online is a is an equivalent for that, is is that the best place to start? And are there others areas that people should consider? I I personally would start with CRM because if you know. And and when we talk about Dynamics, I think a lot of people, they hear the word Dynamics and it's like black magic. You know, they're kind of their minds just kind of like, oh, that's too big and that's too complicated. And I don't really. So so to simplify it, there are really two components within the product family. One is a CRM or customer relationship tool and the other components and there are various products there. that are ERP solutions, right? They're the finance and operations, that's how businesses run that part of their business. So, I think the complexities of ERP and understanding, you know, accounting practices and finance and maybe, you know, uh manufacturing and and some of the complexities on that side. Uh could be intimidating for MSPs that are used to working with, you know, kind of the the data center and providing, you know, uh solutions just uh from that perspective. So I think a good on ramp for those organizations is from the CRM side where the complexities aren't as great. You don't have to have specific accounting experience. But I think that the one addition you may have to add and you probably have people in your organizations to do this is really kind of some business process mapping. You know, uh to understand how does the sales and marketing function work within your organization. Map that out and make sure that when you implement CRM that it is kind of either uh it's either working the way your business already works or gives you an opportunity to improve how you're doing it and then implement a solution that provides those improvements as well. Yeah, and I think that like I said. I think this is a sort of a an area of growth for a lot of IT providers. where they're now implementing ERPs and PSAs especially in their business and they're doing a lot of this work. And they can kind of turn their efforts of the work that they've done internally to their clients businesses as well. And and really help them around that operational muscle. Uh and I think that business process mapping and just sort of understanding, what are you actually trying to accomplish? What does the work actually look like around here? Uh and and that's a consultative opportunity that I think a lot of people don't really uh sort of perceive the the opportunity. both in additional revenue, but also the trust, the loyalty and the stickiness of being able to help a client uh understand their business and functionally improve their business with technology. Absolutely. And I think that through that process as you you kind of described there, is through the process of of taking them through this process and holding their hand. creates lifelong relationships, right? And and and that's one thing that I think Dynamics does uh I think more so than any other cloud solution is that it creates really sticky customers. And you build good, solid, deep relationships and the relationships are less transactional and more consultative. Yeah, great. So the other half that I think people could consider where there's an opportunity for it, you know, if you have a larger organization that potentially requires an ERP uh implementation, I think to your to your point. It's not necessarily something that people will feel comfortable with and and probably uh in the near term of this the development of a Dynamics business shouldn't take on themselves. But I uh this is an area that I kind of call out as a perfect spot to find a Dynamics partner that does not do infrastructure. They have no interest in competing against your MSP or IT consultant business and they would love the opportunity to help your clients develop their their ERP and their Dynamics uh deployment, right? Right. Absolutely. Yeah, and that's you know, you're highlighting what one of the the biggest proponent. or the biggest uh, you know, positive components of our Tech Data relationship with our customers is. is that we have thousands and thousands of modern workplace or MSP partners that are used to going in and selling hardware and implementing networks. and and storage and those things. Uh and they have good relationships. And then if they bump into a Dynamics opportunity, they don't know what to do with it. Right. So many times they come to us and they say, hey, can you make an introduction for us to one of your Dynamics partners? And we'll figure out what the requirements are, how big the company is, what they're looking for. And then we'll go through our Dynamics partner portfolio and we'll make a match and we'll say, okay, you two go to market together and go close a Dynamics deal together. And. They can structure the deal any way that they want. They can structure it in either the Dynamics partner, I'm sorry, the MSP keeps the Dynamics licensing or they work on a referral basis or whatever it is. So we've established these relationships and these now are turning into uh repeatable relationships. where they may do one opportunity together, one deal together, and then they go back and go find more together. And the beautiful part of it is you kind of hinted at it there, Todd, is that these are non-competitive partners. They're not. You know, we've got MSP partners that don't know Dynamics and we've got Dynamics partners that are really good at that, but they don't do a lot of the MSP stuff. So they complement each other and they really don't have to worry about cannibalizing each other's business. Yeah. That's excellent. And I think it's it's sort of a there's there's a bit of a trust factor that uh, you know, I've I've in my past, well, in the organizations that I've run, I've I've leveraged uh partners that were great at specific skill sets. And historically, you know, the one that pops to mind the most would be SharePoint. You know, there's there's there it's pretty easy to deploy SharePoint and kind of have the basic services enabled. Uh the vanilla deployment as it were, but it doesn't present a ton of value. Whereas if you can get a partner that really understands SharePoint, can do a bit of consulting with that business and really make it sing for them, it's an entirely different animal. And and that is that that has uh in my history of enabling uh partner relationships that way, I'd never got burned, right? So I think that there's sort of a false narrative in people's head, a bit of a fear that, you know, if I introduce some other partner, then, you know, either I'll be seen as less valuable somehow. Or they're going to, you know, say, well, we don't need this other guy and they steal steal your business away from you. And I can say from my experience, it's almost universally not true, right? Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. I have not seen that, um, and I know that I I back in the day, I had built a a successful Dynamics uh consulting organization. And we established those types of relationships and we understood that uh, you know. If we started competing against each other, uh we're both going to be worse off, right? Um. So the the smart the smart partners are working to work together and not compete and those are the ones that we're paying close attention to and working with here at Tech Data. Okay, great. So I think that just to to reiterate that point of uh uh leveraging you guys uh as a distribution partner uh asking Tech Data for some help to get those introductions. I think is a good idea. I think initially, you know, I I would have imagined you reach out maybe to Microsoft uh the channel partner support and ask for that that that type of uh referral. But I think it's probably a better idea, I think the the responsiveness and sort of the due diligence from uh from a partner like yourself is going to be much better uh produce a much better result for the partners. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think that one of the things, you know, and I love I love Microsoft. I love the Microsoft ecosystem. I think that there are many Microsoft partners out there that would agree with me that, you know, Microsoft is a big company and it's sometimes it's hard to get answers and and have a level of responsiveness that helps them be successful. successful. Tech Data has an entire team here that focuses just on Dynamics. And we've got SLAs in place where we will we will respond to you within 24 hours to get you the answers that you need. Right? So we have a team here of licensing experts as well as uh partners that are uh people that are managing those Dynamics partners with us, as well as the modern workplace partners and the Azure team as well. So. We have the entire Microsoft cloud covered and a lot of a lot of people working to help out our partners. Okay, great. Uh. Is there any other areas of this business around what you're seeing people sort of leverage the Dynamics business for or to to be successful? Or any things that we haven't touched on yet? I I think that one of the opportunities I hinted at earlier was um that, you know. A lot of these SMB uh customers have, you know, when they started their business, they they said, well, let's get quick books and it'll solve some problems for us, right? Um. So I would think that any MSP has dozens of part of customers that are using quick books, right? Uh. And many of those customers have probably exceeded some of the functionality that's in quick books and they're experiencing pain. So just having partners go in and talk to your customers about, are you using quick books and are you experiencing any pain or limitations? Those are easy questions to ask and I'm willing to bet you, you get a lot of yeses to those questions. And then it's very easy to turn that discussion into, well, let's talk about Microsoft Dynamics and see how we can provide a platform that's going to actually help you scale and move your business forward instead of inhibit its growth. Um. So I think that that's something that we're seeing within our customer base that is really resonating and driving Dynamics discussions. And now, maybe this is old terminology, but uh my understanding would be the sort of the NAV and the AX side of Dynamics. Is that would that be which I always forget which one's the big one. I think AX is the big one. AX, yes. And actually, so now I I appreciate you bringing that up. Because now um there's been some rebranding now. Um, so in and I did mention earlier, there's a CRM component and then there are these ERP product family the product family of ERPs and depending on the size or the type of business, there's a different ERP solution. So in the day back in the day, there was Solomon or Dynamics SL and then there was Dynamics AX, which is Exapta, uh, you know, uh Dynamics GP, which is great planes, and then Dynamics NAV, which was Navision. So, uh of those four products, Microsoft decided they were going to take AX, which is their enterprise solution and turn that into a cloud solution, which they can now call FNO, and then take the NAV product and migrate that and turn that into their SMB ERP solution, which now they call Business Central. So we're talking about, when we're talking about Dynamics in the cloud, there are two solutions, yet there are four on prem solutions that these two solutions were born out of. Right. Okay, yeah, I think most of us want to look towards those cloud models to be future proof, right? Absolutely. So if you're and it it breaks out pretty easily. If you've got an SMB customer, the the cloud ERP solution is Business Central. And if you have more of an enterprise, uh, you know, customer, the right solution for them is what they call FNO, finance and operations. Okay, perfect. Um. The other part that I I I would say that my exposure to some of the products that I've seen being built in in uh in Dynamics. Uh, one of the strong uh sort of influences that that I really like about working in that ecosystem is is it's heavy ties into the rest of your Microsoft stack, right? Absolutely. Uh being able to work in Outlook is something that is a really strong ask and a demand in some cases for sales people. And if your Microsoft 365 uh accounts are are automatically tied into your CRM through through email and there's a lot of tagging and things that can happen. pretty much automagically. So tracking communications with a client, you're not updating uh uh tools in parallel to try and keep all of that that data current. It's just automatically built into the stack. Are there some other features that that that that sort of stack enablement really allows? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you know, to your point, uh it it's beautiful for a sales person to be able to be in Outlook. Which I think most of us live in most of the day, right? And actually be entering data that you know is then automatically is going to be pushed into CRM and recorded in CRM. So that's beautiful from a sales person's perspective, but the other thing is from a sales manager perspective. That creates accountability. So if you're running, you know, if you're running metrics on activities and other things like that, your sales team doesn't really have the opportunity to say, well, I didn't enter it, right? Because of that tight integration with Outlook. There are tasks in CRM and so forth that can be pulled in. Additionally, Business Central, you can actually go in within out from Outlook and look into the Business Central ERP solution. And you can look at things like inventory if you're looking for a specific product and other things. So Business Central, CRM, Outlook, all those things are tightly integrated. Uh and work really well together. As well as other tools like Teams and SharePoint, uh all of those tools fit together. And is this something that even like IT providers and and MSPs should be considering on, you know, like maybe they've been on quick books on prem. for example, and they're considering, do I go to quick books online or do I go to zero? Should they actually consider uh Microsoft Business Central for that? I would absolutely yes, suggest so. Because it it it really it it's a great tool, it it integrates with everything that you're already using. Uh, but at the same time, it gives you exposure and experience. So now you can go to your customers and you can say, I use this tool every day. Right. I know how it works, I know how to uh engage with it in order to improve my business. Let me do the same thing for you. Yeah. That's a great idea. I hadn't even considered that there's uh there's another uh accounting package that is potentially better integrated to your ecosystem, right? Yes, exactly. Exactly. Uh. Uh any sort of final words of wisdom or a call to action for for the listeners before we wrap up here, Doug? Uh. I think, you know, the only call I have taught is that if if you're interested in learning more about, you know, how to leverage Dynamics in order to, you know, increase your your top line and and create better margins in your cloud business. Uh Tech Data is a one-stop shop. We can help you do that in addition to this partner to partner kind of model that we just described. We also have enablement services. So if you want to understand how to become a Dynamics partner and make those investments in your business in order to. You know, uh 12 or 18 months down the road, make the transition, we have enablement tools and resources that can help you do that. So. Uh we have tools like our Dynamics Cloud practice builder. We have people for you to work with in order to kind of take you through that process. Uh and then once you can get to the other side and drive some Dynamics business, you have then the ability to participate in our partner to partner network so we can start bringing new Dynamics leads from the MSPs that that really don't want to invest there. Excellent. Okay. That's great info, really appreciate the perspective, Doug. Um, any is there any place that people could reach out to you directly or should they just reach out to Tech Data uh frontline? No. Uh, reach out to me directly, my email address is Douglas.fiori, last name is F as in Frank, I O R E at techdata.com. Or we do have uh a Microsoft Dynamics alias at Tech Data, which is MS Dynamics at techdata.com. Okay, perfect. I'll include those uh links in the show notes as well. And if you haven't started your Dynamics practice in your in your IT consulting business, there's no time like now because the future is bright in in the cloud, right? Absolutely. is. Absolutely is. Thanks for your time, Doug. Hey, thank you, Todd.