11.03.2010
Microsoft is offering financial enticements to customers of on-demand ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor NetSuite to switch over to Microsoft's Dynamics family of business applications.
NetSuite customers will be credited up to US$850 for each user who converts to Dynamics GP, NAV or SL. The promotion is in effect until June 25 and available to customers in the U.S.
Microsoft's announcement has a ring of familiarity, as NetSuite itself has made a string of similar marketing efforts in the past against other vendors.
No single ERP deployment method, whether on-demand or on-premises, will be appropriate for every business, Microsoft said in a statement. Microsoft offers Dynamics as an on-premises application or it can be hosted through partners, but it has not moved to the multi-tenant SaaS (software as a service) model used by NetSuite.
With multi-tenancy, many customers share the same instance of an application, with their data kept private from other customers. The model saves computing resources and makes version or feature upgrades easier, since all customers can be served at once.
Microsoft's ERP strategy also includes a series of on-demand extensions for Dynamics.