What is Dynamics 365?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a family of cloud-based business applications that combines enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) into a single, modular platform. Rather than buying one large monolithic system, organisations license the specific apps they need — Sales, Customer Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Business Central, Field Service, Project Operations, Human Resources, Commerce, and others — and run them on a shared data foundation called Dataverse.

The platform launched in 2016 as the successor to Microsoft's earlier Dynamics AX, NAV, GP, SL, and CRM products. Several of those legacy lines still live on inside Dynamics 365: Finance and Supply Chain Management evolved from AX, Business Central evolved from NAV, and the CRM modules evolved from Dynamics CRM. The benefit of consolidating them is that they now share identity (Microsoft Entra ID), reporting (Power BI), automation (Power Automate), and extensibility (Power Apps, Copilot Studio, and Azure) with the rest of the Microsoft cloud.

Dynamics 365 is sold per user, per app, and is most commonly deployed by mid-market and enterprise organisations that have outgrown entry-level accounting tools but want to avoid the cost and complexity of a custom-built ERP. Pricing is published on Microsoft's site but real-world cost depends heavily on the partner implementation around it: data migration, configuration, integrations, training, and change management often dwarf the license fee.

Dynamics 365 is almost always implemented with help from a Microsoft partner. Microsoft itself does not deliver implementations except for the largest customers; instead, a global network of certified partners — ranging from boutique specialists to large global SIs — does the work. Choosing the right partner and apps is usually a bigger decision than choosing Dynamics 365 itself.