Microsoft has launched its most ambitious Dynamics 365 push yet. Hundreds of new features. Copilot and AI agents embedded across its entire enterprise platform. All announced in its 2026 Release Wave 1 on March 18th.
The pitch to SAP customers is explicit. Your staff already trust Microsoft tools. Now those tools can run your business too.
SAP is ending mainstream support for its legacy ECC system in 2027, less than two years away. Thousands of organisations are being approached right now with this argument. Boardrooms are hearing it. Budgets are being allocated around it.
It is seductive. It is also misleading.
A Pitch In Plain English
Microsoft’s argument to large SAP customers has three parts.
First, familiarity. Your staff use Outlook, Excel, Teams and Power BI every day. Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations sits inside the same ecosystem. Adoption will be smooth.
Second, cost. Dynamics 365 is cheaper than SAP S/4HANA once you factor in licensing, hosting and implementation.
Third, timing. With the 2027 deadline looming, moving to Dynamics 365 is faster than migrating to a new version of SAP. Why go through an expensive, disruptive upgrade when you can make a clean break?
Each of these claims has merit on its own terms. Together they add up to a picture that is carefully incomplete.
What The Familiarity Argument Leaves Out
The people who use Excel are not the people who run SAP.
Finance, procurement, supply chain, manufacturing and HR are complex, interconnected processes built over years. The interface your staff sees every day is the front door. Behind it sits 20 years of business logic, process design, custom configuration and institutional knowledge. It has been built, tested, broken, fixed and rebuilt to match the precise way your organisation operates.
Microsoft’s pitch is about the front-end. But ERP migrations are not a front-end problem. They are a back-end problem. And the back end of a large SAP system has nothing to do with whether your finance director finds the interface familiar.
All About The Back End
Look at what is happening inside the Dynamics 365 ecosystem right now. There is an entire industry of third-party providers. Dooap, Rillion, Truvio and others are selling tools to fill the gaps in Dynamics 365 Finance. Accounts payable automation. Invoice processing. Supplier management. Processes that SAP handles natively, out of the box, as standard.
You do not build a cottage industry around a product that does everything it promises. Those add-ons exist because the core product needs them.
The statistics confirm where the complexity lives. According to ISG, 60% of SAP migration projects exceed budget and timeline. These are projects where the platform doesn’t change. The data model, the business logic, the institutional knowledge all remain the same. And still, six in ten fail. The complexity is in the back end. Which is where Microsoft’s pitch doesn’t go.
What Microsoft Quietly Admits
There is something else the pitch leaves out. Microsoft says it directly, if you look carefully enough.
Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations is best suited to mid-market and upper-mid-market organisations. SAP dominates large global enterprises. They’re the Fortune 500 companies running complex, multi-country operations across dozens of subsidiaries. Microsoft’s own partner materials acknowledge this consistently. Dynamics 365 hits the sweet spot for companies that need enterprise-grade functionality without SAP’s complexity.
Which raises an obvious question. If Dynamics 365 is best suited to organisations smaller and less complex than SAP’s core customers, why is Microsoft pitching large SAP customers at all?
Because SAP’s 2027 deadline has put 35,000 large enterprises under pressure to make a decision. That is the largest captive audience in the history of enterprise software. And Microsoft is the most powerful sales organisation in the world. The pitch isn’t being made because Dynamics 365 is the right answer for these organisations. It’s being made because they’re in the room.
Microsoft’s own Terms of Use describe Copilot this way: “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.”
There is a financial imperative behind it. Microsoft spent $37.5 billion on AI infrastructure in a single quarter last year. Copilot is the centrepiece of that investment. It is what the 2026 Release Wave 1 is selling. A company that has placed the largest technology bet in corporate history needs its entire ecosystem to perform. The 2027 deadline isn’t just an opportunity. For Microsoft, at this scale of investment, it is a target.
Which makes the small print worth reading carefully.
Microsoft’s own Terms of Use describe Copilot this way: “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice.”
Start With The Business, Not The Platform
This can all feel overwhelming. A hard deadline, a powerful pitch, a market moving fast. But the decision itself is more straightforward than the noise suggests.
I have spent more than 19 years inside enterprise software transformations. I have seen organisations stay too long on legacy systems out of fear. And move too fast to new ones out of pressure.
The answer in both cases is the same. Start with the business, not the platform.
Understand what your current system does. Not just what the documentation says, but the processes, workarounds and institutional knowledge accumulated over two decades. Then decide based on that reality, not a vendor’s ROI model.
For many large organisations, the right answer is a well-executed migration to SAP S/4HANA. Standard configuration, clean data, minimal customisation. Not the exciting answer. But the one that keeps the business running and positions it for what comes next, including AI.
For the right-sized, right-structured organisations, Dynamics 365 could be the right platform. At the right scale, it makes sense.
But nobody buys a car by only looking at the dashboard. And no organisation should make this decision because their staff use Excel.
Image Courtesy of Microsoft
