Has anyone been keeping track of Microsoft’s stock price?  If so, you know it has gone through the roof.  At the time of this article being written, Microsoft market capitalization has passed the 1 trillion dollar mark to become the world’s most valuable company and surpassed rivals such as Apple and Amazon.

https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20190727_LDC111.png

Not bad for a company that was considered a dying breed as recent as 5 years ago.  How did a massive company very set in its ways accomplish this feat in such a short period of time?  Quite simply, they gave up on fighting change and instead embraced it.  The company’s revenues have shifted from being almost entirely focused on Windows and their on premise installs of Office to being fueled by their cloud offerings, namely Azure and Office 365.  In just the past quarter their cloud division revenues increased by 68% year over year, and they are making significant strides in taking over the first mover in the space, Amazon Web Services.  Not only did they change their product focus, but also their approach.  Microsoft’s old boss, Steve Ballmer, has been quoted as calling Linux and other open source software as a “cancer.”  The Linux operating system now has more installs on Azure than Windows.

So what can DynamicPoint and other software companies learn from this lesson?  Simply put, it is not about fighting leading technologies and the change they bring, but adapting to them.

That is exactly what DynamicPoint is doing with its new line up of Office 365 apps.  We offer a fully integrated Customer / Vendor / Employee Portal, Expense Management and Invoice automation solutions on top of the Office 365 platform.  The Office 365 business suite of products offers a platform for software applications that can be compared to the mobile dominance of iOS and Android.  Mobile app development companies don’t have to create a camera application, location services, notification platform, etc. all from scratch.  Instead they use all of these features offered by the platform and they focus on bringing them all together in unique and valuable ways.  Take Uber for example, if you look at the most important functionality to their product it is the ability to see where drivers and would be passengers are located.  To enable this from scratch would require a ridiculous amount of investment to create a map of the world, launch satellites for GPS and create mobile location services.  They didn’t have to do any of this.  They just brought it all together in a way that is easy to use and entirely changed how we get around town.

The Office 365 platform is very similar. It has the ability to securely create sites using SharePoint and share them with internal employees and external partners, report on data using Power BI and publish this information for sharing, create robust and flexible workflows with hundreds of actions and connections using Flow, configure forms with the drop of a field on a Forms template, develop mobile apps using the PowerApps platform, store and share documents by way of SharePoint and OneDrive, just to name a few.  Why would any company that is attempting to create a software product stage an attempt of fighting these products and associated functionality when they can leverage it all.  Especially when these plans start at $5 per user per month?

At DynamicPoint we believe it would be a little irrational to say the least to compete with these technologies.  So instead, we use them all.  Each of our products, Portal, Expense Management and Invoice automation, take full advantage of all of these features in delivering an incredibly robust solution to our customers at a fraction of the costs of building this all ourselves and of the competition.  Our reporting features using Power BI, workflows leverage Flow, site layout and security use SharePoint, mobile apps use PowerApps, and more.  We believe there is a lesson to be learned from Microsoft’s success.  And we are looking forward to the opportunities it brings and the value we can deliver to our customers.

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By Mike Marcin, DynamicPoint
Office 365 Apps for PurchaseInvoiceExpensePortal that extend the reach of your ERP & CRM application.