The counter-intuitive benefit of shorter projects

As we’re working to build the partner network around Seamless, I am often talking through (what we believe to be) the benefits of using Seamless for delivery of integrations. We have a background in delivering IT change projects and one of our favourite Seamless benefits is that developing integrations becomes much much quicker. If we have a connector plugin already built, it is simply a matter of specifying the right fields and associated rules. If we don’t, we can often build one in under a week (assuming being reasonable API access).

For companies who make a lot of their revenue selling time (i.e. time taken by software engineers to build applications), it seems counter-intuitive that we’re touting shorter projects as a benefit. Er, what’s up with that?

 

Our response is simple: I’d rather you sold a 60 day project than lost a 120 day project to a competitor.

Our partners will be competing with any number of other organisations who will have different ways to deliver software. Today’s average user has experience of sophisticated web services and expects that software delivery companies can quickly connect up different services. Agile approaches add an additional dimension of expectation because clients expect to see phased delivery of packages of requirements.

Sure, reducing delivery time reduces upfront professional services revenue, but it makes our partners’ projects more commercially attractive. If this can be done in a way that also reduces risk (using technology that is proven to work) and increases flexibility (extendable plugins, a myriad of configuration options, etc.), then the offer becomes more attractive on day one (commercially) and over time (ability to adapt to inevitable business change).

Finally, let’s not lose sight of that fact that, over time, “lost” revenue may be recovered (plus more) through sharing of the subscription fee.

 

 

[icon name=”exchange” class=”” unprefixed_class=””]  Learn more about partnering with Seamless. We could talk about it all day.

Splashing the big bucks, our Microsoft Inspire story (part 1 … part 2 when we’re back)

In about a month we’ll be headed off to Washington, D.C. to join the Microsoft partner community at Microsoft’s global partner conference, Inspire. Attending Inspire with something to say was always a goal for us when we set out. We knew we were working in the Microsoft world and the partner conference is the place to build a network around any Microsoft enabled business.

As you can imagine, a conference of this nature is a significant expense. There are conference tickets to be purchased, flights, accommodation, food and Hard Rock souvenir pin badges. (If Jon doesn’t read this post carefully, I’ll try expense the pins … watch this space!) Returning home with a just handful of business cards would be a significant failure. We consulted with former attendees and built out our plan. With about a month to go, we’re doing okay and I thought it might be interesting if we shared some of our thinking.

 

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Rolling out the big guns – SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle

The initial development of Seamless focused on ensuring we could support clients and opportunities that we were, at the time, working on. That quickly resulted in connector plugins for Microsoft Dynamics, Freshdesk, Autotask, Hoopla and SharePoint lists. As these have been stable and in use for a while now, this has given us the chance to focus on building connector plugins for more popular enterprise-grade tools.

That left us with an interesting choice … what next? We decided we’d focus on a handful of widely used applications which are deployed in thousands of different ways at organisations across the globe: Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle. We’re delighted to announce these are now built, tested and hungry for data.

 

Seamless wall of fame May 2017

 

These plugins are all configurable, offering the best mix of rapid deployment and ability to control and extend the plugin’s work to meet the requirement at hand.

  • Configure mappings (i.e. fields to integrate) using XML to identify relevant tables and fields
  • Extend the feature set of these plugins using .Net to code extensions which are deployed on top of the existing plugins (i.e. you are not constrained by the limitations of any given plugin)

 

[icon name=”phone” class=”” unprefixed_class=””]  If you have an integration need for any of these technologies, please reach out and discuss with us how we can address this, quickly and affordably.

[icon name=”exchange” class=”” unprefixed_class=””]  More information on Seamless can be found here.

Swaying our way to Microsoft Inspire

We’re getting ready for Microsoft’s global partner conference, Inspire, in Washington, D.C. later this year. It is a meeting of the good and the great in the Microsoft partner community with a view to connecting with Microsoft employees, other partners and industry experts. You’ll not be surprised to learn that it is a significant investment – time away from our day-to-day jobs, conference tickets, flights, accommodation and maybe even some souvenir key rings. Needless to say, we’re working hard to ensure we have the right supporting material to hand.

One of our conference objectives is to continue building the partner network around our Seamless integration service. With this in mind, and maybe also just a little bit because we like to play with interesting apps, we’ve built a Sway presentation which we’d like to share.

 

Make data islands a thing of the past

 

Hat-tip to our friend Sean K for the suggestions. First round is on us.

How are customers using Recursyv products to make work easier?

We’ve spent the past few months working feverishly to create software tools that we’re proud of and that are true to our vision of making work easier. With the support of our first clients, we’ve got our product suite – Seamless and Sales In-a-Box – built, tested, deployed, updated (ahem, no-one’s perfect on day 1!) and into various production environments. We’re delighted that we’ve now taken a few minutes to write-up the work we’ve been doing as case studies and publish them onto the website.

 

Recursyv customer stories

 

Customer stories

 

We owe a huge “thank you” to the teams at Technica and Feefo for supporting us from day one, having patience while the products were refined and faith that they would work from the get-go. We hope that the chocolate chip cookies eased the journey.

Business flexibility, celeb news, Lego modelling and IT architectures – you heard it here first

As much as it pains me to admit it, I fear that Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin were onto something when they coined the term “conscious decoupling”. In the data integration space, the ability to break down a service into components is a significant enabler of flexibility. That’s good because technical flexibility translates to business flexibility. If the only constant is change, as we’re so often told, then flexibility in technical architectures is the way to prepare for change.Continue reading

Hooray – we’re listed on AppSource!

We’re delighted to announce that Sales In-a-Box has been listed on Microsoft’s AppSource. You can now download a trial directly from AppSource and assess whether the simplicity of Sales In-a-Box will allow you to quickly deliver the benefits of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales.

You’ll need an environment to deploy into, but after that it is only a matter of clicking on Free Trial and the deploy will start. A few short minutes later, you’ll have Sales In-a-Box with a set of demonstrative sample data. Not long after that, we’ll reach out to you to discuss how it’s going and what your thoughts about the software are.

 

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Would you like some bedtime reading?

As part of our preparation for Microsoft AppSource, we’ve prepared some overview papers on Sales In-a-Box. We couldn’t live with ourselves if we didn’t share them more widely, so we’ve added them to the website too!

[icon name=”file-pdf-o” class=”” unprefixed_class=””]  Why should I use Sales In-a-Box?

[icon name=”file-pdf-o” class=”” unprefixed_class=””]  Getting to grips with Sales In-a-Box

[icon name=”file-pdf-o” class=”” unprefixed_class=””]  Why focus on weighted pipeline?

As you’d imagine, we’ve added them to the Sales In-a-Box product page as well.

Happy reading.

Does Microsoft Business Edition pricing mean Recursyv In-a-Box is doomed from the outset?

As part of the revamped licensing for Dynamics 365, Microsoft (MS) is also introducing a new “flavour” of the solution – Dynamics 365 Business Edition. This is pitched to be a scaled-down version of the whole Dynamics 365 offering (known as Enterprise Edition) and, as best we understand at the moment, will come to include most of the significant functional areas of Dynamics 365 (i.e. Sales, Customer Service, etc.). The SME focused accounting/financials offering, formerly known as Project Madeira, is already available in the US under the Business Edition licensing. UK release dates are currently pencilled for some time in spring 2017.

This begs a fundamental question for Recursyv: In-a-Box products, should we even bother? (Whoah – deep breath!) In a recent post, we shared the design ambition for the In-a-Box product suite (IaB). If you don’t have the inclination to click through it can be summed up as “paring down the enterprise toolkit within Dynamics 365 to suit the needs of small/medium businesses both in terms of reducing up-front cost and ability to be rapidly deployed”. (We’re getting the marketing department working up mugs with that wording on it any day now). This is part of our vision of work made easier.

We’ve spent some time discussing and debating whether there is a genuine future for our product. It is a sobering thought that forced the consumption of many chocolate-chip cookies. Is it worth putting time and effort into building and promoting IaB when MS are pursuing the same market space with Business Edition? After the consumption of far too many chocolate-chip cookies and fuelled by a sugar-rush high, we’ve decided to progress. Here’s why…

  1. ‘Spring’ is 6 months away and that release date is not cast in stone. It is likely, but it could be pushed out. On top of that, partners will need a few weeks/months to get their heads around the new offering and what it does. Businesses who need something now aren’t going to stand still for 9 – 12 months.
  2. It seems unlikely that MS will be able to get the solution absolutely right for all small/medium businesses and some degree of configuration/customisation will be necessary. Admittedly, this is skating on thin ice as our proposition assumes we’re using our experience to build a “one size fits most” solution. That’s not to say we don’t believe MS will build a remarkable solution, we do – we’re staking our business on the development of the platform after all. However, we also believe that our experience in speaking to local users over many years brings value which we’ve built into IaB and we’re not convinced this is easily replicated.
  3. It seems likely that Business Edition will be a platform which can be extended (i.e. like all previous versions of Dynamics). We expect that we will be able to deploy the IaB solution on top of Business Edition. And if we can’t, we have the design specifications and we can rebuild it on Business Edition relatively quickly. (The value of IaB is in the design decisions made to specify the solution, the actual build is made relatively straightforward by the power of the Dynamics 365 platform).

There’s one final consideration, and an important one at that – price. MS have introduced a number of “pre-business edition” offers on Dynamics 365 targeted at customers who are likely Business Edition candidates (i.e. user communities < 25 users). If customers take Dynamics 365 on these prices, they’re able to stay on the offer price for 36 months with no obligation to move to Business Edition in that timeframe.

In practice, this means that we can achieve our vision of making work easy by quickly getting customers experiencing the power of Dynamics 365 at very compelling pricing. In time (i.e. at some point in the next 3 years), we’ll have conversations with those customers about the best next step and whether that involves IaB, Business Edition and/or Enterprise Edition. Of course, during those 3 years, the IaB and Business Edition products will undoubtedly mature further creating an even richer set of options.

 

If you want to discuss deploying IaB within your business, or get more insight on the pricing offer, please contact us.

Additional note: as you’d imagine, there are more terms associated with the interim pricing offer than make for compelling reading as part of a blog post. These include being subject to MS annual increases (as you would be on all MS subscription prices). Recursyv prices transparently and will share the MS platform pricing separately from the Recursyv IaB pricing. Please get in touch to discuss the details further.