Microsoft Dynamics 365 business applications saw 51% year-on-year growth for the quarter ending September 30, 2018 (Q1 2019 in Microsoft's financial year). The growth in Dynamics products came against a background of better than predicted overall revenue growth of 19% ($29.1 billion) and 29% higher operating income ($10.0 billion).
Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft, said,
“We are off to a great start in fiscal 2019, a result of our innovation and the trust customers are placing in us to power their digital transformation. We’re excited to help our customers build the digital capability they need to thrive and grow, with a business model that is fundamentally aligned to their success.”
Continuous Dynamics 365 enhancements
The October Dynamics 365 upgrade saw a host of enhancements and new functionality. A new connected field service product integrates Dynamics 365 for Field Service with Azure IoT Central to help customers become proactive, predictive and more cost effective with their connected devices. Bidirectional flows of alerts and commands are supported between devices and Dynamics 365 for Field Service. There are also substantial improvements in optimising service scheduling of resources.
Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations now supports embedding Microsoft PowerApps in the user experience, allowing customers to use PowerApps to configure unique user experiences that embed data from external sources into the Finance and Operations user experience. There are also upgrade automation enhancements that make major version upgrades a self-service operation for customers, using Life-Cycle Services capabilities in nonproduction environments. Upgrade automation includes environment, data and code upgrades. Customers can also test, diagnose and fix issues as needed.
Microsoft also continues to build AI capabilities for its business application platform, resulting from consistent research and development investments, made over multiple years, designed to help customers be more productive and secure and to deliver differentiated value across the cloud and the edge.
