Why Does the LinkedIn Acquisition by Microsoft Benefit Dynamics?

I guess we all have heard about Microsoft’s planned acquisition of LinkedIn. In the press release, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella said, “Together we can accelerate the growth of LinkedIn, as well as Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics as we seek to empower every person and organization on the planet.” I have to admit, I am struggling to figure out why that would benefit the Dynamics products and more important, how does it benefit us and our customer’s businesses?

LinkedIn has done an amazing job over the last 13 years. They now have 433 million members worldwide with strong growth and has become the defacto Facebook for professionals and businesses. Sometimes a little too much Facebook…

I recently read an article in The Wall Street Journal about why the acquisition benefits the Dynamics space to try to understand more about the statements from Microsoft. The article quotes Gartner that Microsoft has 5% market share when it comes to ERP products, that sounds like too low of a number, especially when they claim that Workday has 3% of the market. Someone has incorrect facts. The ERP market according to Gartner is $26.6B, so how is Microsoft’s $26.2B LinkedIn investment going to grow their market share?

I see the synergies when it comes to Microsoft’s CRM product and also the Human Resources aspect to both the CRM product as well as the Microsoft Dynamics AX and their other ERP products. There are many benefits from a contact perspective, recruiting, human capital, research, surveys etc.

In the article by WSJ, it is stated that Microsoft sells ERP software to customers that can install and run on their own servers, however they have been focusing lately on delivering it via a cloud service - Microsoft Azure. That is correct! Then it is mentioned that LinkedIn’s large pool of resumes positions Microsoft’s ERP products to help HR manage the growing number of temporary and contingent workers, such as drivers for Uber. That is a pretty big investment for just doing that…

I am struggling to find benefits when it comes to core ERP. Maybe it is the name ERP that is confusing us here: Enterprise Resource Planning. Maybe it is time to rebrand ERP to something else so the world doesn’t think it is only an HR tool.

I am interested to learn more about this and will be watching the news. If you have ideas on how this will benefit the Dynamics industry, please let me know.