Service Orientated Architecture & Dynamics GP–the future is bright

Andrew Hayward keynote the m-hance conference earlier in the year

It being late December I’m reflecting on the year, one of the highlights for me was when I got the pleasure of a long chat, one to one, with Chad Sogge &Daryl Anderson and then a quick chat to Errol Schoenfish. I came away having learnt many things that have really changed my whole opinion of the Dynamics GP product future.

The move to service orientated architecture in GP 2015 version is perfect for developers, as is the tighter integration with .NET from Dexterity. This really does open up the product to do virtually anything we can dream up. In my view, this is a really significant moment in the evolution of GP. Today it can now leverage the investment Microsoft has made with the .NET framework and the full Microsoft product stack, including cloud computing.

I also observe Microsoft handing back third party products to the original developers and simultaneously unzipping the core product for more developers to build awesome things upon it. To me this feels like a message that – hey, we can’t be everything to everyone and also keep it all maintained and yet still drive the product forward, it’s time to let you do that for us. Microsoft have a growing ISV community around that can build great things for specific market verticals, thus allowing Microsoft to maintain the framework, core product, adding new features and performance… boy so many features have been delivered recently! The agile development burndown cadence MS have at the moment is really swelling the bullet points in the sales datasheets and giving us plenty of “new toys” to implement!

I do think there are some amazing years ahead of us in the Dynamics world, presenting many opportunities for the ISV community to grow and build some great products on top of our Fargo friends hard work! I can’t wait to see what the next year brings on.