Customer Experience tops the list of critical business objectives for SMBs in Asia Pacific
SMB decision-makers will also invest to improve the experience of employees and business partners.
Delivering on these objectives is linked to other strategic needs, including responding faster to change and strengthening operational resilience.
High to Critical Business Objectives
How IT is responding.
To achieve its objectives, IT leaders in the SMB segment have prioritised enhanced use of business data, along with improvements to IT delivery speed, reliability and resilience.
In fact, 70% of SMBs in our latest study of SMB operations across the region ranked the need to unlock the full value of business data as a critical IT objective. This correlates to high solution adoption intent for:
- Cloud ERP (45%)
- Customer Journey Analytics (43%)
- Business Intelligence (42%)
- Customer Relationship Management (41%)
- Policy-based data governance tools (42%).
Source: The Future of Operations: Advancing AI Innovation and Cloud Agility in Small to Medium Sized Businesses, a Forrester Consulting study conducted on behalf of Crayon, March 2025
Let’s look at how Microsoft and Avepoint combine in a solution that delivers impact against all these critical business priorities.
Dynamics 365 delivers impact at the core.
When it comes to leveraging data to drive CX outcomes, Microsoft Dynamics 365, including Business Central, absolutely delivers. It unifies front- and back-office processes into a single, intelligent platform—bringing together ERP, CRM, finance, supply chain, sales, and customer insights under one roof, and infuses speed to value with the aid of Copilot.
Access to integrated intelligence is a key reason 45% of SMBs are prioritising cloud ERP and supply chain tools, and 43% want to adopt customer journey analytics within two years.
By choosing Dynamics 365 and Business Central, they can:
- Automate manual finance tasks to close books faster and redirect time to strategic planning
- Gain proactive visibility into inventory levels, vendor performance, and supply chain bottlenecks
- Align marketing, sales and service data to personalise customer interactions in real time
With integrated Power BI (and Fabric) for reporting and analytics, decision-makers can move from static reports to interactive dashboards that update as new data flows in.
For partners, this means opportunities to design solutions that link core ERP and CRM with tailored workflows, AI-driven insights, and custom apps— in short, delivering the kind of agility that fuels growth.
Key Takeaway: Dynamics 365 and Business Central respond directly to the solution adoption trend data for Cloud ERP, Customer Journey Analytics and Customer Relationship Management.
AvePoint secures and governs the experience.
As Dynamics 365 enables SMBs to grow and scale their operations, AvePoint ensures those systems are governed, backed up, and compliant.
AvePoint’s Policies & Insights platform offers:
- Automated enforcement of Microsoft 365 policies
- Real-time risk detection across Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Outlook
- Governance capabilities for permissions, data exposure, and retention
This becomes especially valuable when customer data from Dynamics is shared across Microsoft 365 services. Secure collaboration that does not compromise on compliance is critical for customers in regulated industries and those expanding into new markets.
By extending protection beyond the application layer into the collaboration ecosystem, AvePoint helps partners deliver secure, insight-driven and policy-compliant operations.
Customers can restore data at the entity, record or field level to avoid business interruptions, with all metadata, properties and permissions maintained.
A single reporting interface shows the protection status of all Dynamics 365 items.
Customers can also bring their own Microsoft Azure Key Vault encryption key to meet compliance requirements and protect against cyber threats and data leakage.
Key Takeaway: AvePoint offers the visibility and control needed to manage compliance risk in businesses that are working in and collaborating across data-rich platforms.
Aligned to Experience and Resilience
For SMB customers, Dynamics 365 and AvePoint form a bridge between business productivity and responsible data stewardship.
With Dynamics 365 and Business Central:
- Employees gain tools to work smarter, faster, and more collaboratively.
- Customers receive more personalised, timely, and consistent engagement.
With AvePoint:
- Data sharing and collaboration are controlled and compliant.
- IT teams have greater confidence in policy enforcement and backup resilience.
Designed for Business Value Impact
For partners, its complete solution that connects process automation through to data protection.
The combined value proposition of Microsoft and AvePoint isn’t just about technology features.
It’s also:
- Aligning your offerings to fit with SMB priorities around experience, data smarts, and resilience
- Enabling faster, safer, and more insightful digital operations
- Building recurring revenue streams based on managed services and lifecycle support
Let's create opportunities, together
Ready to talk about solutions that deliver into the business objectives for your customers?
Together, Dynamics 365 and AvePoint provide a solution that delivers for SMBs that need to improve customer experiences with enhanced use of business data, whilst supporting IT delivery speed, reliability and resilience.
If you’re ready to lead this conversation and align your offerings to market demand, we’re standing by to help you explore this solution.
Simply enter “Dynamics 365 and AvePoint’ into the free text field when you leave your details, and we’ll be in touch to get a conversation started around:
- Guiding customers in conversation around Customer Experience gains in their organisations
- Access to technical and pre-sales resources
- Getting started with Dynamics 365 via our Partner to Partner program and through-partner ERP Implementation Services
- Options to engage marketing support to promote customer wins and success stories.
Thank you for your interest in this solution! One of our team will be in touch to assist with your inquiry.
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