The Multi-Partner Advantage: Assembling Your Business Central Dream Team

#BusinessCentral Has Evolved. Has Your Partner Strategy?

Think about what Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central looked like twenty-five years ago (beyond the name change from Navision to Dynamics NAV and then to Dynamics 365 Business Central). A proprietary database small enough to fit on a USB drive. A set of trade modules with an integrated general ledger supported by a strong development environment. One major release a year, if that. A consultant or developer could familiarize themselves with virtually the entire product in under a year and support customers very competently.

Now think about what it looks like today. Two major releases and ten minor releases every year. Manufacturing, Service Management, Projects. Power BI fully embedded within the product. Dataverse synchronization. Microsoft 365 and Azure integration. Copilot and AI Agent features arriving on a rolling basis. Thousands of certified apps on AppSource, with fifty to a hundred more added each month. Open APIs that make almost any integration possible — and therefore expected.

The product has been completely transformed. And that transformation is a genuine success story: Business Central has outlasted competitors that were acquired, sidelined, exited the local market, or shut down entirely.

Here's the part that hasn't changed. Most companies running Business Central still get all of their implementation and support services from exactly one Microsoft Partner — the same arrangement that made sense back in 2005.

Back then, it wasn't really a choice. The on-premises license file locked you to a single Partner of Record. Third-party app purchases had to flow through that partner. Support cases submitted to Microsoft had to come from that partner. Integration options were limited by a relatively closed database. The community was much smaller. And it was more local - because on-site support meant that someone had to drive to you. Every structural force pointed toward a Single-Partner model, and for the most part that model worked well.

Every one of those constraints is gone.

Subscriptions are bought through the Microsoft Cloud Program, and two partners can hold licenses for the same tenant. Apps can be found, trialed in your own sandbox, and often purchased on AppSource without a partner involved at all. Source code lives in extensions, not in the base application. The scope and breadth of the product has exploded. Distance stopped mattering.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's push to consolidate the partner channel has produced something most companies haven't noticed: alongside a smaller group of very large partners, there's a growing set of small, highly specialized firms — some of them consisting of one to ten people, with many of them holding deep expertise in one or more specific disciplines – such as Projects, Field Service, Manufacturing, Power Platform, Dataverse, or AI. Specialization is the new name of the game, because it is now required to remain effective.

So the question isn't whether you're allowed to work with more than one partner. You are. The question is whether you've ever formally thought about how you want to use the partner channel at all.

Most companies haven't. Their partner strategy is undocumented, inherited, and rarely revisited — which is exactly how gaps go unnoticed and projects get quietly deferred because "our partner probably can't handle that."  And for the companies that have, it is not thought of formally as a "Partner Strategy", rather the effort is framed as “Should we switch partners?” when the question should be “How can we better leverage the strength of the Business Central partner network?”

That's the subject of this new white paper, The Multi-Partner Advantage: Assembling Your Business Central Dream Team. 

Warning: It is long, detailed, and written using 100% human intelligence (insert joke here!).

It covers why the single-partner model was the right answer for most companies for so long, what changed, where we stand today. It also defines Partner Strategy, and suggests instances when a Multi-Partner Strategy may be warranted (and when it isn't). Finally, it touches on the policies and practices required to successfully implement a Partner Strategy, and details the benefits available with a Multi-Partner strategy — better support, better resources, lower total cost of ownership.

The goal doesn't need to be replacing a partner relationship that’s mostly working. It should be to acknowledge what works well, what needs improvement, and then make a deliberate decision to build your own Business Central Dream Team.

Download the full white paper here:

The Multi-Partner Advantage - Assembling Your Business Central Dream Team.pdf

Download PDF • 322KB

If you are interested in learning more or would like assistance with completing an evaluation to determine if a Multi-Partner Strategy may be right for your organization, please contact me at SpeakingBusinessCentral@Outlook.com.

I leave you with this AI-generated image showing a Business Central user experiencing customer delight due to the efforts and collaboration of multiple Microsoft Partners.

The Multi-Partner Strategy in Action

Is this scenario currently the exception or the norm? For many organizations running Business Central, it could be, and it should be.