Microsoft's LinkedIn acquisition bears its first fruit

Today, Microsoft announced a major customer win thanks to its LinkedIn acquisition. Park Place Technologies, a leader in third-party datacenter maintenance and support, announced that it plans to deploy Microsoft cloud services including Dynamics 365, Office 365 and LinkedIn to its employees. A major organizations deploying Office 365 is not a big news, but this customer win is significant for Microsoft because of Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn. Park Place selected Dynamics 365 mainly because of the deeper LinkedIn integration. Park Place will first deploy the Microsoft Relationship Sales solution, which combines the power of Dynamics 365 for Sales and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

“We looked at a few of the major ERP/CRM solutions out there—and some are big and robust and fancy—but we realized that Microsoft is already driving the wide-ranging integration with LinkedIn, which is what’s driving our business, and we determined that that’s where the big value is,” said Chris Adams, president and COO, Park Place Technologies.

“But of all of those enterprise apps we looked at, Microsoft was the only one that had the built-in and optimized LinkedIn capability,” he added. “All of those other apps are good—but Microsoft’s ability to automatically include all of this relevant data for our salespeople directly in line with how they already work was the big differentiator for us.”

“Microsoft is uniquely positioned with integrated offerings across the whole cloud stack,” said Adams. “We’re confident this trusted, global platform will further enhance productivity for our employees and provide more value to our customers.”

“Park Place Technologies is at the forefront of IT service and support with a commitment to innovating ways employees are empowered to deliver value to customers,” said Alysa Taylor, general manager, Business Applications Group at Microsoft. “Putting the power of Microsoft’s intelligent cloud behind Park Place’s customer care organization will connect people, processes and data insights to optimize productivity and transform its service delivery operations.”