In the UK Public Sector, Microsoft Dynamics 365 And Azure have been some of the most successful names along with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement.
Let us find out what makes Microsoft Dynamics 365 so successful while other leading CRM platform vendors have struggled.
Reasons For Success
Process automation: As public sector organisations and government departments strive to do more with less, efficiency is high on the agenda. This agenda is guiding the automation of inefficient and manual processes while replacing outdated legacy systems.
Traditionally, CRM systems supported sales, marketing, and customer service functions. However, today's CRM systems have evolved greatly and can be used to create and nurture solutions to manage correspondence, memberships, or registration services. Out-of-the-box features of Microsoft make it a great choice for the public sector and government departments to automate processes, offer better management reporting, and improve data quality.
Public sector and government departments in the United Kingdom are reaping the innumerable advantages of the Microsoft online suite of services by integrating it with Office 365 and advanced Microsoft Azure services including Cognitive Services, Microsoft Flow, Power BI, and Machine Learning. This helps in enabling process automation across their existing IT landscape, the generation of value from data, and the breaking down of information silos.
Subscription costs: It is a well-known fact that the affordability of software is quite high on the government's agenda when it thinks about implementing new and innovative solutions. Discounted Public Sector Pricing is offered by Microsoft that is based on a tiered subscription model.
Government and public sector departments usually involve a huge number of users and therefore they gain considerable license cost savings using tiered subscription fees.
Last year, government agency the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) along with Microsoft signed a new Azure Pricing Arrangement (APA) through which public sector organisations can be enabled to leverage the Microsoft Azure cloud. This move is likely to provide service discounts and benefits like digital training to organisations and their employees. The new Azure Pricing Arrangement is now made available to all eligible Digital Transformation Arrangement public sector organisations. It also allows them to access the APA benefits for up to three years.
The new APA covers solutions such as Azure Cognitive Services and artificial intelligence, Azure Hybrid Benefits, Azure Analytics, Azure Synapse, and Azure Arc to help users improve cloud services management, create their own solutions, and smoothen the transition from legacy systems to the cloud.
“This agreement shows the government’s determination to adopt a value for money technologies which improve services and ensure government departments and their staff have the digital tools they need, now and in the future,” said Gareth Williams, the government’s chief commercial officer.
“The Azure cloud platform offers the security, scalability, and resilience to help the public sector provide the services that citizens need in a cost-effective way,” said Chris Perkins, public sector sales manager at Microsoft UK. Perkins had then added, “Today’s agreement caters for public sector organisations, regardless of where they are on their cloud journey, and Microsoft is looking forward to working with our customers to accelerate and unlock the benefits of moving to Azure.”