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Convergence 2005 Conference Highlights
Microsoft Senior Vice President Doug Burgum kicked off Convergence 2005 addressing the crowd of thousands of customers in San Diego as the first keynote speaker.
Right off the bat he emphasized Microsoft’s passion: To be better than everyone else. In particular for the Business Solutions Group, Doug Burgum stressed how Navision and Axapta offer “affordable adaptability” – a term coined to encompass the optimal mix of rich functionality, high adaptability and low cost. “There is no other solution better at combining these three elements than Microsoft Business Solutions,” Doug said.
Project Green Released in Waves
Doug Burgum announced that the highly anticipated Project Green, the result of years of in-depth research of over 2,000 users, will be released in waves, beginning with the next version releases of the Microsoft Business Solutions product lines. As early as next year, users will have access to the first wave of Project Green technology in the “User Experience” of their Navision and Axapta solutions. There will be no need to do a system conversion in order to benefit from Microsoft’s latest and most advanced technologies.
Even in the wake of the Project Green excitement, Doug Burgum reiterated Microsoft’s commitment to all customers across all product lines by announcing the extension of life cycle support from three years to five years. Microsoft is now guaranteeing support for each version for a full five years after release.
Bill Gates Keynote
“Microsoft has the biggest R&D budget of any company in the world,” opened Bill Gates at his closing Keynote address. With that funding, Microsoft is creating what Gates referred to as “a new world of work,” where every business activity is made better by advanced software – both improved software and greater connectivity. The idea is to optimize business processes by automating all tasks that are better served by automation. This will allow employees to move from manual tasks to the value-add tasks that really grow a business.
“We’re taking the applications to a new level of flexibility,” added Bill, who sees the problem as “too much data, not enough information.” He went on to say that Microsoft’s strategy has always been to focus on software and being the best at it, not software and hardware. With the new technologies demonstrated at Convergence, and the high praise of industry analysts, Microsoft Business Solutions is well on the way to achieving that.
“Every year we go to Convergence we learn so much – we learn from other users how they use their systems, we’re briefed on upcoming features and functionality that we can incorporate in our solution, and we have the opportunity to interact directly with Microsoft developers and support staff, which is great.” – Mark Rechtfertig, Bejo Seeds
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