Microsoft demos new mobile ERP tools

Microsoft's Mobile Sales Assistant (MSA) and Mobile Business Assistant (MBA) are designed to be easy to deploy and manage

Microsoft has demonstrated a new mobile enterprise resource planning (ERP) system designed to increase staff productivity, while being easy to implement and maintain by companies with few IT staff.

At its annual Convergence customer event in Dallas, Microsoft showed off its new Mobile Sales Assistant (MSA) and Mobile Business Assistant (MBA) tools. They support Microsoft’s Dynamics strategy to offer roles- and task-based applications to empower individual employees, according to the firm’s director of mobile business solutions, Bjarne Schon.

IT leaders in medium-sized companies are often reluctant to deploy mobile systems for staff because the tools are complex to set up, and frequently require the management of multiple partnerships with mobile application developers, telcos and other firms, Schon argued.

“Most people walk away from it, even though they can see the return on investment,” Schon said. “But here we’ve built a framework that [our] partners can customise and verticalise to the exact needs of the customer. It was painful for them to build solutions before, because they had to start from scratch.”