Monday, December 19, 2016
Dear Partners,
First, I want to thank you for your business, your confidence in us and your partnership with us for 2016. This year our engagement with Partners, including you, grew to the levels that surpassed our expectations, with nearly 700 1Click Partners worldwide.
For 1ClickFactory, 2016 started out just right with us launching our new Partner website. This impactful release for Partners of our portal made our online services available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We went live in March after more than a year of development. Now the portal is available to you, our Partners, to make doing business with us even easier as well as gain access to help with upgrades (both NAV and AX), software development, CfMD and, of course, Dynamics NAV on Microsoft Azure; no matter your geographic location. If you have not seen or registered on our portal yet, try it out for yourself this holiday season – with 1Click :).
During 2016, we saw how NAV on Microsoft Azure grew exponentially. More than 50 1Click Partners, that use this service daily, have experienced stable performance paired with a shockingly simple set-up and interface, making the move to Azure superbly simple. That justified trust in Microsoft Azure has made Dynamics NAV on Azure the “it” service for 2016. Microsoft’s strategy of providing a business solution in the cloud (available anywhere on any device, 24/7, with tight integration to Office 365) is paying off in spades and is helping drive the market forward. There are now more than 200 customers and almost 2,500 users using NAV on Azure through 1ClickFactory.
The Dynamics NAV market is, from where I sit, slowly starting to overheat. We’ve seen an increasing number of partners coming to us, not just for the upgrade service, that we are so known for, but also for help with the development and customizations for their customer solutions. They simply do not have the capacity to fulfill the needs of their markets. In 2016 we redoubled our efforts in NAV development, investing heavily to increase our NAV development capacity by 50%.
On the upgrade side of NAV, I’ve talked to many partners that do not feel they even have time to discuss upgrades with their customers, so they are spending less and less time on this opportunity. Given this, we have worked to make it possible to outsource more of the upgrade process to us, including the go live data migration. Our tooling for “RTC” upgrades from NAV 2013 were also improved dramatically in 2016 and this allowed us to decrease the cost to Partners and their customers for these upgrades. On top of that, we invented an upgrade service for our Partners with customers on our Microsoft Azure, enabling the Partner to participate at a high level or not at all in the upgrade process, while still making their margin on the upgrade deal. I expect more of this in 2017, as customers will start to understand that the beauty of being on Microsoft Azure is that it will become easier to follow Microsoft’s lead and upgrade cycle of simple annual upgrades (read more).
What else changed at 1ClickFactory? Well, our CfMD (Certified for Microsoft Dynamics) service took off. We ran more than 100 CfMD self-tests (the easiest way to get you Dynamics NAV application certified) in 2016.
The one part of 1ClickFactory’s business that was slow in 2016 was Dynamics AX services, likely due to the uncertainty that new versions always create for Partners and their customers. Not surprisingly though, Dynamics AX7 is beginning to take off and we have seen a steady increase in orders for upgrades, development and consulting in Q4 of 2016, which gives me high hopes for this part of the business in 2017.
Finally, as we embark into 2017, we are expanding our service offerings and geographical representation. You might not know this, but 1ClickFactory also has seasoned expertise in the web content management systems Umbraco and SiteCore. We have been developing for web-partners on these platforms since 2012. In 2017, we are expecting to release an upgrade service for SiteCore websites…staying aligned with the rest of our businesses. We will also expand further our local representation, so you will be seeing even more of us in 2017.
With this update and from all of us at 1ClickFactory, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Søren Fink-Jensen
CEO, 1ClickFactory