Key announcements from Microsoft WPC you should know

It has been a week since the end of WPC13 and we are still buzzing from the excitement of it all.

It was a fantastic event with over 16,000 attendees from partners all over the world.

We caught up with a lot of clients who we currently work with as well as meeting lots of new ones so in terms of our experience, it was a huge success. As Silver sponsors, our sponsor session was a great success and we will soon be releasing the information to those who missed it.

There were lots of big announcements and statements from the events, here is a short summary:

• The Microsoft realignment – One Microsoft
• Dynamics 2013 will be arriving in Fall 2013 and there will be quite a few changes
• AX 2012 R2 Feature Packs
• NAV 2013 R2
• GP 2013 R2
• License types for Dynamics CRM: Essential, Basic and Professional
• Serious investment in private clouds and hybrid clouds
• Office 365 Open expanding to Exchange Online, government and academic offerings
• Power BI for Office 365 preview
• Office 365 integration and Dynamics NAV on Windows 8
• Social Listening available soon for Microsoft Dynamics CRM via Netbreeze
• The City Next Initiative
• New competency from January 2014 – “User Experience”
• TouchWins program which is an incentive scheme for partners to sell Windows 8 touch-enabled devices
• Windows 8.1 is due for release to OEM manufacturers at the end of August

The key focuses for FY14 were announced at the event to include:

• Win in mobile – tablets & phones
• Accelerate customers’ move to our Cloud
• Competing to WIN – offensively doubling down
• Customer Satisfaction – take it to a new level

Some huge statistics including:

• Office 365 is the fastest growing Microsoft product of all time -growing at over 500%
• Azure growing at 150%
• The last 12 months was the biggest launch period in Microsoft history

The final big announcement was that WPC14 is to be in Washington, D.C. on 13th- 17th July 2014 – we can’t wait to see you there!