The need for businesses to innovate in order to more efficiently manage opportunities and interact with customers, employees, and other stakeholders has never been greater. Moving operations and services to the cloud is clearly the path forward. It’s important to recognize that transforming a business can’t happen without moving forward across the entire company, not just individual domains like ERP and CRM. The focus needs to be on the interplay between business processes, software, and the cloud.

Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, running on the Azure cloud, is ideally suited to support the transformative needs of the modern enterprise. The ability of Dynamics 365 to offer an integrated set of core enterprise functions while drawing on an active partner network to deliver lastmile, industry capabilities sets it apart from its competitors. The continuous improvement inherent in the Azure cloud is enhanced by its underlying services, and the innovations that Microsoft develops for its vast customer base can add highly valuable new capabilities for the Finance and Operations customer.

Enterprises in every industry across the globe are driving faster and harder than ever before, trying to ride the waves of innovation unfolding in front of them while simultaneously ensuring that the fundamentals of what it takes to run a business are keeping pace with this change. This need to clean up the old and prepare for the new has left many companies in a quandary: managing change in their businesses has been more decentralized than most would like to believe, a fact that conflicts with the demand of today’s business environment for more collaborative, all-in strategies and processes. The new business imperative can no longer tolerate a strategy for business innovation that isolates business leaders from direct engagement with an IT department that in turn is following an innovation strategy isolated from the lines of business that IT is meant to support.