Dynamics 365 will bring together the best of Microsoft’s CRM and ERP cloud offerings into one cloud service with specific, purpose-built apps for business functions like Finance, Sales, Customer Service, and Supply Chain Operations—with built-in insights, intelligence, and workflow. The apps are designed so they can be easily and independently deployed, which means you can start with the business area you need and scale as the business demands. All Dynamics 365 apps, plus the larger portfolio of cloud solutions like Office 365, will share a common data model so it will be a breeze to adopt additional capabilities.

With a common data model across Office 365, Power BI, Cortana Analytics, ERP (formerly Microsoft Dynamics AX), CRM and many other cloud business applications, it will be so much faster and easier than ever before to deploy and integrate solutions. Basically, all of Microsoft’s intelligent business apps will align to the new common data model, and an extensibility model, that combines existing tools with PowerApps (an app builder) and Flow (a trigger based workflow builder like Zapier and IFTTT). This evolution eliminates historical boundaries created by business applications like CRM and ERP.

Dynamics 365 is Microsoft’s next generation of business apps in the cloud that bring together the full power of Microsoft productivity, advanced analytics, Power BI, Azure IoT, and a new common data model platform. As such, two worlds are coming together: structured business processes and unstructured productivity. The move is quite significant and warranted a name that reflects this completely fresh approach to business applications in the cloud.