Microsoft's binge on acquisitions over the past 18 months has been a very exciting time for those in the Dynamics CRM solution space, as nearly every acquisition (maybe all of them if we can somehow fold Xamarin into Dynamics) has been a targeted addition to the Dynamics CRM platform. Looking at the latest Dynamics CRM release last month, we've seen Field Services and Portals added as SKUs to the CRM Online space, which were formerly Field One and AdxStudio respectively, both of which went from acquisitions to fully integrated, Microsoft published solutions in about a year's time. Include with that the Voice of the Customer solution released with CRM 2016, and in the last 16 months we've seen Dynamics CRM go from a sales automation and case management product to a fully integrated platform to manage the entire business engine, covering sales, delivery, implementation, service, and feedback.
The acquisition LinkedIn, while maintaining their branding, is going to grant Dynamics CRM even more access to the social analytics space, expanding on the Social Insights platform available in the Microsoft Dynamics Marketing product, hopefully allowing Dynamics CRM to combine the mapping and graphing features available in Office 365 (Delve, Office 365 Graph) with the immense amount of information available through LinkedIn.
We're very excited to see where Microsoft and LinkedIn are going to take this new opportunity, and can't wait to follow this acquisition further past the financial side and on to the technical aspects, learning what new features will be available.
For more information on the acquisition, here is a link to Microsoft's News Post on the acquisition: http://news.microsoft.com/2016/06/13/microsoft-to-acquire-linkedin/