New directions at Directions

Flights booked. ☑
Hotel room. ☑
Passport. ☑
Purple Zetadocs polo shirt. ☑

I'm ready for Directions EMEA 2013 in Vienna, a city I've never had the pleasure of visiting before.  Vienna will be a new experience for me but I’m a Directions veteran, having attended all 5 of the Directions EMEA conferences since the first conference in Disneyland Paris in 2008.

But, I've never been quite as excited about a conference as I am about this one.  Not only is the first annual release of NAV going to be revealed to us, but more interesting for me are the changes that are already happening, and are about to happen, with the route to market for NAV.

There have been two key innovations in NAV recently that have the potential to fundamentally change the ‘Dynamics’ (pun intended) of the NAV supply chain.

NAV on Azure which was announced at the WPC back in July, and the NAV web client released in NAV 2013, have the potential to revolutionize the traditional NAV customer delivery model and potentially send customer adds into the stratosphere. We will shortly be reminiscing about the old days when NAV was only sold by a salesman in a blue pin-striped suit and crisp white shirt, with his pre-sales consultant in tow and a laptop – quick to ask the question, "what would you like NAV to do?”   The economics of such "projects" dictated that your customers or prospects had to be within a few hours’ drive of your office.

Removing barriers

With NAV on Azure and the web client, provisioning NAV can now happen remotely - there is no software to deploy. Since you already have a browser so many of the barriers for scale and scope have been removed.  The new solutions will be simpler to understand and less customizable, they will be suitable for sale over the internet or possibly the telephone, but there will be no salesman visits, no personalized demos and no bespoke customization. Prospects can be quoted instantly, there will be less risk of projects over-running, less uncertainty and more happy customers.

At Equisys we have been watching these developments closely and will be making our own announcements about the new and improved Zetadocs Express during Directions.  At the event, I'm expecting to learn a lot more from other partners that have innovated on these new platforms and who are embracing the new delivery model, perhaps even with world domination in their sights!

Our vision for Zetadocs has always been to create the most comprehensive document management add-on for NAV, suitable for any NAV user, big or small, standard or bespoke, on premise or in the cloud, classic or RTC. Our products are available for sale in 17 countries in 7 languages making them very well suited for international deployments and the cloud delivery model.  We have some exciting announcements about how we will be making Zetadocs Express attractive to even more customers by offering greater flexibility and choice about platform support and deployment models.  Even if you think you already know about Zetadocs Express, some of our announcements may surprise you!  Until Vienna..

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