When Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central first came onto the market, the general opinion was that it was more suited to smaller and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Larger businesses tended to stick with other ERP solutions, or even with traditional on-premises software, which many believed gave them more control, more functionality, and full customization options.
But times have changed, and technology has, too.
Today Business Central has become one of the most popular business enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in the world, to the point that Forbes recently listed as the Best overall cloud ERP on the market.
Over 30,000 businesses, many of them large, use BC to run their business, and with availability in 155 countries and counting, the system has become truly global.
Here are three reasons why Business Central has grown beyond its initial definition as an ERP for SMBs, and why you should consider it if you are a large retail or hospitality business, or plan on expanding your footprint.
1. Get reliable service, no matter how many users or how much data you have
The operational limits of Business Central have been expanding constantly in the past few years, making it an increasingly powerful and reliable business system for larger businesses. Today the system doesn’t set any operational limits for number of users, or sessions, database size, or transactions. Each BC cloud instance comes with 80 GB of database storage, which, as Microsoft says, is more than ample for most organizations. And if your company needs more storage capacity, you can easily add it.
But what about throughput?
In the past few months, Microsoft has moved from limits set per environment to limits set per user, which means businesses have much more processing ability than before.
For the most technically minded, some details directly from Microsoft:
- While until recently the limit for web service calls was 600 per minute per environment, today Business Central can handle 6,000 web service calls per 5-minute sliding window, per user.
- The limits for scheduled tasks (job queues) have also been upped from 3 concurrently running tasks per environment to 5 concurrent tasks per user.
- The system can easily handle over 10,000,000 web service calls in a day – that's over 25,000 per minute – in a single environment.
These numbers are not from a sandbox environment – they come directly from telemetry. That is, real customers, in a real-life environment, are running this amount of data successfully.
And Microsoft is making continual performance enhancements. Features such as SQL Compression – a technique also used across other Microsoft Dynamics 365 cloud services – help to both reduce database size and improve performance. Service functionality keeps track of unexpected database growth, so that customers can catch issues early on and avoid unanticipated and unnecessary storage use. And Business Central admin dashboards help customers manage and plan their storage costs on an ongoing basis with total visibility of storage usage, so you can always see exactly what you’re using and how much it will cost.
2. Protect your data with best-in-class security
Microsoft has made no secret of how seriously it takes cloud security and compliance. It invests about US$1 billion in cloud security each year and has continually improved its cloud security services in a variety of ways, from data encryption and automated threat detection to identity isolation and just-in-time access.
With Business Central, you can take advantage of the full security infrastructure that the Microsoft cloud provides to all users, without having to front the cost and complexities yourself. Its built-in features ensure that all data is automatically backed up and securely stored, protected against all the latest and future threats by some of the best cybersecurity experts in the industry.
But what about the risk of outages in the Azure environment? To make this a concern of the past, Microsoft has been introducing zone redundancy, which makes Business Central online services resilient to Azure availability zone failures. These efforts have borne results: in the last quarter, Business Central had a global uptime of 99.98%.
3. There are other businesses like yours already using Business Central
No matter your size, requirements, or industry, chances are that plenty of businesses with requirements and needs similar to yours are already happily running their company on BC.
During the latest Directions EMEA, a conference for the Business Central community, Microsoft shared that while most BC customers have under 20 users, there are thousands of BC customers that have over 100 users. And several businesses successfully running on Business Central have over 1,000 users.
What about database size?
Microsoft recently said that while most customers’ databases are below 100GB, some are running databases with up to 1TB of data (unsurprisingly, many of them are businesses that moved from on-prem and brought years of data with them). The Microsoft team shared that in the last month alone, several customers have migrated databases larger than 500GB to BC SaaS.
It’s for all of these reasons – and more – that thousands of retail and hospitality companies entrust their business to LS Central, which builds on the strengths of Business Central, and enhances it with specialized industry functionality for retail, food service, hospitality and more.
Want to find out how we can help you take advantage of the cloud and grow your business without limitations? Contact us for more information.
