Impressions from Convergence 2011
The event kicked off with an opening keynote jointly presented on April 11, 2011 by Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft and Kirill Tatarinov, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Business Solutions. They unveiled Microsoft's vision to take Microsoft Dynamics ERP solutions to the cloud and presented the first look of the new Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 release. Kirill Tatarinov highlighted Microsoft's vision for business solutions and the need to innovate for taking business to a new high. Steve Ballmer shared his insights on what the future holds for cloud and how Microsoft is inventing new and better ways to connect, work and be entertained. As an example, he cited about Microsoft Dynamics CRM - "It doesn't just work with Outlook, it's in Outlook!" and echoed the main benefit of Microsoft Dynamics - easy to use being familiar to Microsoft Office...
With this high note, the event proceeded with multiple business and technical sessions while the expo floor was buzzing with action from over 200 partners. While I walked the expo floor, I noticed that barring ourselves and a few others, most of the partners were boutique shops focusing on Dynamics implementations. This re-affirmed the strong need for a global SI like Infosys to be the partner of choice for Microsoft Dynamics implementations for Global multinational companies! Also, with Microsoft looking to up the ante in the SaaS based application space with its CRM and ERP, we firmly believe that the set of pre configured solutions (ERP-in-a-box) from Infosys will begin to see rapid traction riding on the Microsoft Dynamics platform.
Across the 4 days at Convergence, we had hundreds of visitors at our booth to gather insights into our Microsoft Dynamics capabilities and micro-vertical solutions while they took part in the xBOX raffle by playing the prize wheel and amazed by the gigs of our magician. We also had a host of planned meetings at our booth with our customers and prospects.
We also networked with Microsoft senior executives across industry verticals and business functions, to identify solution co-development and joint business development opportunities.
To sum it up, it was a great experience for the Infosys team at Convergence 2011 with two of our customers nominated as finalists for Customer excellence awards, strategic discussions with Microsoft senior executives and fruitful discussions with our customers and prospects!
