Comment: Are Microsoft building towards an end-to-end field service offering?

Aug 26, 2015 • News • Microsoft • end-to-end • field one • Software and Apps

Microsoft’s acquisition of FieldOne recently caught the headlines but other additions to the software giant’s portfolio could suggest that the plans for field service may not end there...

Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire FieldOne Systems LLC (“FieldOne”), a provider of field service management solutions that allow organisations to better manage and deliver service to their customers in the field.

“In today’s connected world, people expect to engage and be engaged by organizations in new ways, in ways that are most convenient for them” commented Bob Stutz - Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Dynamics CRM on the official Microsoft Blog when announcing the acquisition.

“To help businesses respond to these changing expectations, we are committed to providing the most comprehensive customer service offering, and this includes the best field service capabilities.” He added

Stutz went on to comment “Field service management is a specific but critically important area of customer service, providing companies with the ability to deliver end-to-end field service.”

This is a unique, and transformational point in time for these solutions as enterprises look to improve their responsiveness to customers

“This is a unique, and transformational point in time for these solutions as enterprises look to improve their responsiveness to customers with service in the field – taking service directly to the customer anytime a service cannot be managed by phone or other channels.”

“In this critical area, FieldOne really stands out. They have the baseline functionality that organizations need to drive a more effective field service operation.”

“They are a leading provider of end-to-end solutions that enable businesses to drive revenue, reduce costs and deliver great customer service. Their industry-leading solution specialises in delivering a full set of capabilities that include work order management, automated scheduling, asset contract, inventory and procurement management, workflow capabilities and mobile collaboration – providing enterprises with a comprehensive modern field service solution.”

In an announcement on the same day on their own blog FieldOne CEO Ilan Slasky stated “For FieldOne, having the breadth of the Microsoft sales and marketing organisation, and leveraging their product development group to augment our R&D efforts was instantly attractive.”

“Our ability to aggressively grow our business across the enterprise is much, much stronger partnered with Microsoft and they have identified field service management software as an enormous and rapidly growing market. For Microsoft, the opportunity to bring a fully integrated field service solution into the Microsoft Dynamics group, pairing it with the powerful capability of applications like Azure, Parature, Cortana Analytics and Power BI, led to a natural conclusion that it made perfect sense to acquire FieldOne.”

Indeed it seems as though Microsoft have certainly placed field service high on their agenda in the enterprise realm, having also announced a significant partnership with IFS in May this year.

In addition to this Microsoft have also made some acute acquisitions in the mobile productivity space this year acquiring calender app Sunrise, email app Acompli and most recently task manager app Wunderlist, with all three being cross platform tools that work across both IoS and Android.

With Acompli already being re-branded as Outlook and further integration across the three surely to follow it seems that Microsoft have quietly gone out and bought an excellent suite of mobile productivity tools that can help them establish a much broader stake of the growing enterprise mobility sector.

Whether or not these tools will also be integrated with Dynamics CRM and FieldOne remains to be seen, but they would certainly add further strength to an end-to-end a Microsoft field service offering.