By the end of this week I am hoping that TVision will have successfully attained our Silver partner competency for Business Intelligence. Why not Gold? Why are we aspiring to be second best?! There is one and only one, key requirement for Gold that we at TVision have no interest in fulfilling and that’s revenue from licence sales.
All Microsoft partner competencies have a similar mix of requirements:
- Deep product knowledge: for sales, development and consultancy services
- Customer references
- Revenue to Microsoft
The product knowledge requirements are the same key exams and certifications whether you are Silver or Gold; for Gold you must have more people who have passed the exams.
Customer reference requirement is again a matter of quantity not quality to differentiate between Silver and Gold.
Revenue to Microsoft is also quantity. However for Silver there is no revenue requirement; therefore, a Silver partner can be a pure service provider with no vested interest in selling product. This is why TVision aspires to be Silver.
Our business intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics NAV proposition centres on the key premise that you can drive an enormous amount of reporting and analysis using the tools you have already invested in. Tools within NAV, tools such as SSRS / SSAS, Excel, Powerpivot, Powerview etc. It may be that your Business Intelligence requirements will influence the version of SQL Server you invest in, or encourage upgrade to latest versions of Office. It won’t mean that you need to go and buy lots of new product.
Business Intelligence is bursting with “me too” products that promise fancy dashboards and amazing user experience. The reality is often “dancing bear-ware”, features that confuse rather than enlighten and additional technical complexity adding to your maintenance costs. Going out and buying a new product is not the answer; working with a partner who understands how to help you unlock the tools you already have is, in our opinion, the best first step to realising your Business Intelligence aims.
