Partners face increased demand for cloud migration

ACE Micro has been a Microsoft Dynamics partner since 2002, empowering industrial supply, medical equipment, and industrial machinery distributors with fixed-price solutions that optimize operations and maximize time to value. While its core business focuses on the implementation of cloud-based Dynamics 365 Business Central, ACE Micro still has more than 100 customers running its on-premises predecessor, Dynamics GP. Despite educating customers about migrating to Dynamics 365 for two or three years, it is only in the last 12 months that the team has seen a surge in customers ready to make the move to the cloud.

“Between the universal need to make systems accessible and secure that started with the onset of COVID and the potential end of life of on-premises systems looming in the not far distant future, our cloud migration message is really starting to sink in,” said Mark Munson, President and VP of Business Development at ACE Micro.

But with significant numbers of customers looking to move in the same timeframe, partners like ACE Micro face the challenge of finding enough resources to handle multiple migration projects while still pursuing everyday business. “This is a problem felt by a lot of partners right now. There are just not enough resources out there to handle this backlog of migrations that we needed to address,” continued Munson. “With just existing customers, we’re looking at roughly 25 migrations a year over the next five years, which is a staggering amount of work on top of our new business work.”

Luckily, ACE Micro connected with the team from Enavate, a Microsoft services provider that offers partner-to-partner support for migration to Dynamics 365 Business Central. As Munson related, “By working with Enavate, we saw the ability to take the technical migration effort and hand it off to a trusted partner so we can execute against those numbers with confidence.”

Migration “factory” approach provides scale

Enavate migration services use best practices developed by a team of well-known Dynamics GP and Business Central experts, as well as an internally developed Dynamics GP Assessment Tool that helps clients understand the complexity of their system and data so they can be proactive in planning a successful migration.

“Our team has literally hundreds of years of combined experience in moving Dynamics GP clients to Business Central, so it was a logical next step for us to develop a factory-like delivery methodology to help partners streamline the migration process,” said Kasey Metzger, Product Leader at Enavate. “Our approach makes it much more efficient and more cost-effective, keeping these projects on time and on budget. Partners can focus on high value, high touch services and leave the tedious, repetitive steps to us.”

This factory approach starts with having the client run the Enavate Dynamics GP Assessment Tool. This tool gives both Enavate and partners like ACE Micro visibility into how complex the client’s GP solution is, what ISV products they have installed, what modules and features they are using, as well as any anomalies that could cause migration errors or post-migration reconciliation issues. Then, Enavate serves as a virtual arm of the partner to provide a two-step technical migration. First, the team runs a test migration, bringing the client’s GP data over into Business Central so they can review it together with the partner and ensure that everything is in its best possible state for their business requirements. Once that is validated and any changes are made, Enavate then completes the live migration as the second and final step.

For ACE Micro, this process has become central to its strategic plan for resource availability. “With their tools and expertise, Enavate allows us to move more of our clients in a shorter period of time. We’ve already migrated a dozen clients to date, with 29 more migrations in our pipeline over the next twelve months,” said Munson.

Driving customer success with Business Central

Once they move to Dynamics 365 Business Central, customers gain the inherent benefits of security, scale, and redundancy that come with the cloud platform, but also have access to a much more robust set of capabilities for business management. “While we explain the benefits of getting updates every month and significant feature updates twice a year—not to mention the thousands of ISV solutions available on AppSource, customers don’t always grasp it until they see Business Central in action,” said Metzger.

To ensure customers are taking advantage of all the benefits now available to them, ACE Micro offers an unlimited support plan to provide any training and education they need to be successful.

“Once users dig in and realize how much more user-friendly Business Central is compared to GP, how much better the UI is, and the improvements to the integration to the rest of the Microsoft stack, their eyes pop and they have that ‘wow’ moment,” said Munson. “But it takes some time, because change can be scary. Our goal is to drive adoption, so we make sure that they have the support they need to get there.”

No end in sight for migration opportunity

While the benefits for moving Dynamics GP clients to the cloud have become clear, recent developments around AI have added urgency to migration considerations. “With AI, clients that have already been slow to adopt the cloud are seeing themselves in the unfortunate position of being two cycles behind technology wise, so there is added pressure to take action now to avoid falling further behind competitors,” said Steen Larsen, Global Partner Sales Leader at Enavate. “There is a lot of work in front of us, because it’s not only the Dynamics GP community that is still large; there is an even larger Dynamics NAV user base.”

While Enavate is working closely with Microsoft to ensure it has the processes, methodologies, and tooling to help partners support the migration needs of the entire community, migration is just the first step in the overall opportunity.

“The value of migration is not just Business Central,” continues Metzger. “When you move to Business Central, customers have access to the full Microsoft Cloud, including Power BI and Power Apps, for example. Suddenly clients see that they can bring all this siloed, disparate information in, that they can build apps to meet custom needs without six months of development time or an enterprise-scale price tag. It really just opens up so many conversations.”

“Our approach makes migration much more efficient and more cost-effective, keeping these projects on time and on budget. Partners can focus on high value, high touch services and leave the tedious, repetitive steps to us.”

— Kasey Metzger, Product Leader, Enavate

“With their tools and expertise, Enavate allows us to move more of our clients [from Dynamics GP to Business Central] in a shorter period of time. We’ve already migrated a dozen clients to date, with 29 more migrations in our pipeline over the next twelve months.”

— Mark Munson, President and VP of Business Development, ACE Micro

Enavate expands market capacity for Dynamics 365 Business Central migrations