The SMB opportunity for app publishers

Article
04/12/2023

Our mission is to empower every individual and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Particularly, focusing on those 78 million small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) worldwide that passionately want more resiliency in their tech intensity and their capability of transforming products and services to face the challenges in the marketplace. To embrace the constant change and grow, every organization must have a business application that breaks down the silos of data, processes, and workflow in their operations. This insight enables employees to respond to daily challenges and opportunities with agility. Market research shows that the business applications opportunity for software companies in the SMB space is predicted to be 51 billion dollars by 2025. As a developer, you want to make sure you bet on the winning platform. The BizApps market growth in this area is 17%; however Dynamics 365 platform growth is increasing at 47%!

Dynamics 365 Business Central

Dynamics 365 Business Central is an all-in-one business management solution that connects operations for SMBs. It ensures business continuity with a cloud solution that connects sales, service, finance, and operations to help teams adapt faster and deliver result. Business Central provides app publishers with a modern business platform that can easily connect to, extend and build on—with little to no code required.

The Microsoft commercial marketplace

Microsoft AppSource is part of Microsoft's commercial marketplace where customers can find, try to get business solutions apps. It's the launch pad for your joint go-to-market activities with Microsoft and a medium for business growth. By using launch promotion, demand generation, and joint sales and marketing, your offer portfolio on AppSource can be the centerpiece of your cloud business engine.

In November 2020, Microsoft AppSource had more than 3 million monthly active users and +20,000 apps. Specifically, for Business Central, there are more than 1500 apps available and the number is growing fast.

Go-to Market scenarios

As an AppSource publisher, you can focus on the following two scenarios with Business Central and Microsoft AppSource:

Connect
Add-on

Connect

Connect your existing online service with the Business Central through a powerful API. Following are some examples of existing connect apps that you can find on AppSource:

Square payments, which allows you take payments with a Square terminal.
Certify which allows users to post expense reports using Certify.com
Scaptify, which connects your Shopify store with Business Central

Learn more about the API to build connect apps: Get started developing Connect apps

Add-on

You can extend the default capabilities in Business Central to add extra productivity features or industry functionality to fit the needs of your customer base. The possibilities are plentiful.

In countries/regions, where Business Central isn't localized by Microsoft, you can extend Business Central based on local requirements to respond to the regulatory or competitive needs of that market.

Here are a few examples of some apps that extend Business Central:

E-Ship and E-Receive from Lanham Associates, which extends warehouse management with barcoding and labeling, scanning functionality, and interfaces with carriers and weigh scales.
Continia Document Capture, which is an end-to-end solution for document recognition, invoice approval and digital archiving.
Philippines localization from Pasi, which computes the withholding tax as mandated by the Philippine government for both customers and vendors.
SwissSalary 365, which is a certified and flexible payroll app that's intuitive and easy to use for the Swiss market.

Learn more on how to build your app: Get Started with AL

Consultancy services

A large number of business users find it easy to buy consultancy services to research, deploy and manage apps. Therefore, next to providing Apps, a publisher can also market consultancy services on Microsoft AppSource to connect with buyers. The offered services could be assessments, briefings, workshops, proof of concepts, and implementations. In general, the services are typically fixed in scope and duration. They're offered at a fixed price or free, and have a defined outcome.

Here are a few examples of consultancy services provided by publishers:

Unified Commerce Readiness Intro: 1-Hr Assessment In this 1 hour assessment, LS Retail assesses how a 4-day engagement helps them with implementing their Unified Commerce Cloud solution based on Microsoft Dynamics 365.
NAV-X Commission Mgt Gold 4-Hr Implementation In this 4 hour implementation workshop, NAV-X supports the customers in implementing their commission management app.

Learn more about Consultancy Services.