Dynamics GP and Intelligent Cloud Insights: What is Microsoft trying to do here?

No doubt many of you will have heard about Microsoft’s new Intelligent Cloud connectivity offering  that is part of Dynamics GP 2018 R2. If you haven’t, expect to hear plenty at this year’s GPUG Summit. There’s a lot confusion around this offering and on GP's positioning on what Microsoft calls the "intelligent edge."

A number of people have asked for my take. Now that I understand the offering, I thought I would try to explain it in simple terms. (Note that I’m interpreting a bit for simplicity.)

First, this approach is driven by the fact that Microsoft wants to sell more Azure licenses and services. That’s not a surprise, it’s their business strategy. Second, Microsoft wants to connect more applications to their Azure apps and services, because Azure is pretty cool and …well… see above. As part of this strategy, Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365BC) as a SaaS application was built with connections into all kinds of cool MS toys like Power BI, PowerApps, Flow, and Azure Machine Learning. Once that was done, it made sense to look at connecting this combined offering to Dynamics NAV, SL, and Business Central on premises, along with your favorite and mine, Dynamics GP.

For GP, Microsoft could have built their own endpoints for each product to tie in all of the Azure stuff. But they already had D365BC, so why reinvent the wheel? In the case of GP, just pass data up to a SaaS instance of D365BC and use that to deliver additional functionality. (That’s also going to be the case ...