The big update from Microsoft in October was the announcement that Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is generally available worldwide, for cloud, hybrid and on-premises deployments.
Microsoft has made significant investments into the research and development of Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, to bring full NAV functionality to the cloud and create a modern, intelligent suite of business applications.
Since the October release, Microsoft has made further updates to the solution. From the updated roadmap which Microsoft has recently published, it shows that the Business Central product name will be continued with for the foreseeable future…
This means there will NOT be a Dynamics NAV 2019.
In addition, Microsoft has made some changes to how the solution is licensed vs what you, as a NAV customer, are likely used to. In fact, no new NAV licenses will be sold from April 2019.
NO MORE NAV?
Several of our Microsoft Dynamics NAV customers have asked what this means for them as they are unclear as to whether their current NAV solution will become obsolete, whether they should migrate to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, how much a migration will cost, and when they should make the leap to the new solution.
If you are an existing customer and current on your Annual Maintenance, you can continue to buy licenses, but the platform will not be continued from a development perspective and no new NAV ERP solutions will be sold past April this year. The path forward is Business Central.
THE PATH FORWARD
We recognize that budgeting the cost, time and effort for an ERP migration is not something that most companies want to do. It has always been necessary with on-premise deployments. With Business Central, however, there is an opportunity to move to a modern ERP solution without ever having to contemplate a major upgrade again.
As such, we have launched subscription-based pricing for the set-up, subscription and ongoing support for a Business Central Solution. The model flattens out the capital costs of a major upgrade project and bundles in the subscription of Business Central and on-going Support Desk and Proactive Support Services.
