For a lot of ERP firms, the story has traditionally ended the same way. The project goes live. The delivery team closes out. The customer exhales. Everyone moves on.
Scott Burkhardt says that’s when he gets busy.
“Clients oftentimes are so focused on the project itself that they don’t quite realize the effort and the management that’s needed thereafter to maintain the system, upkeep the system, all of those things,” said Burkhardt, founder of Poize2, a Dynamics consulting firm that, in his words, does “rescues,” runs managed services, and helps customers with continuous improvement.
That sounds, at first, like a common support complaint. The old assumption was, after all, that implementation was the main revenue driver and that support followed secondarily.
Increasingly, though, Microsoft’s own guidance has suggested the opposite: the work after go-live should be part of Partners’ core operating models.
In its May 27, 2025 Dynamics 365 implementation guide, Microsoft describes five stages of implementation, ending with (wait for it) “Operate.”
In its guidance on creating a support strategy, Microsoft says support should be designed through three categories: support scope, support team and support operations.
In its companion article on support operations, Microsoft goes further, saying teams should “plan and practice” how support will work in real scenarios so they can move from project mode to support mode without creating delays, friction or poor user experience.
The hidden break comes at the handoff
“We have seen the struggle from the transition from the implementation project team to the managed services team,” Burkhardt said.
The problem, he explains, is that the skills, rhythms and responsibilities after launch are different from the ones that got the system live in the first place.
Microsoft’s support scope guidance is unusually explicit on this point. It says the support scope includes what is supported, who supports it, when they support it, and how they support it, and that work should start in the “Initiate” phase rather than being delayed until later.
Its support team guidance tells organizations to map tasks and activities to roles and resolving authorities so they avoid gaps and conflicts in issue resolution.
Its transition checklist tells teams to choose a support operating model and define the role of internal and external support teams.
Read together, those documents reveal the hidden problem inside the old go-live mindset. If support needs its own scope, team structure, procedures and handoff planning, then post-go-live work is not a lighter version of implementation. It’s a separate operating system sitting inside the same firm.
That’s why managed services keep growing in importance: Because the handoff keeps breaking where the old model assumed the hard part was over.
Business Central keeps moving after launch
A second force is pushing in the same direction: the product does not stand still.
According to Microsoft’s Business Central update-rollout timeline, the product follows two major update cycles each year, with major releases in April and October. Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 release schedule places those releases inside the company’s twice-yearly release-wave model, and the Business Central admin centre update guidance says environments also receive minor updates in other months.
That cadence changes the meaning of “live.”
In older project logic, launch implied a relatively stable state. In SaaS ERP, launch is the point where a customer enters a continuing cycle of updates, testing, user adjustment and process maintenance.
“Business Central is becoming a much more robust product,” Burkhardt said. “And what that means is there’s a bunch more clients and companies that now see Business Central as a fit.”
That matters in two ways. A wider product fit can create more implementations. It can also create more systems that need tending after implementation is over.
Microsoft seem to be aware of that, if its channel incentives are any indication.
The requirements for the Small and Midsize Business Management specialization include at least 10 new Business Central deployments with five or more monthly active users in the trailing 12 months, along with monthly active-user growth of at least 35 per cent over that period.
Those requirements don’t measure managed services directly, but they do show Microsoft rewarding Business Central scaling, usage and growth, which increases the installed base a Partner may have to support.
That said, Burkhardt feels that growth is starting to create a capacity problem.
“Now Partners are a bit overwhelmed with all of the needs, demand, etc. that these clients have,” he said.
Recurring revenue is attractive. The operating model is the hard part.
The appeal of managed services is easy to understand: a project-based business rises and falls with implementations, backlogs, and one-time deals, while a services business can produce steadier income.
In its December 2025 IT Services Market Update, Houlihan Lokey said VARs are more frequently adopting managed services to capture growth opportunities and “stabilize or improve margin levels.” The same report said service-based offerings can create more predictable recurring revenue streams and reduce dependence on transactional sales.
But that’s only half the story.
“Managed services is a bit of a tough nut to crack,” Burkhardt said. “The ebb and flow of the demand, the resourcing, etc., it’s challenging.”
That may be the central contradiction in the Business Central channel right now.
Recurring revenue is attractive precisely because project work can be uneven. But running recurring revenue well requires a firm to solve a different set of problems: staffing coverage, ticket triage, escalation routes, service boundaries, update management, customer communication and the constant temptation for support work to turn into unscoped consulting.
A firm has to define scope. It has to define who does what. It has to rehearse operations before go-live. It has to make the transition from delivery to support. The revenue may recur, but the discipline that generates it does not happen automatically.
That’s why simply adding a managed-services line to a slide deck does not create a managed-services business. The business appears when the operating model does.
The channel may be building a second market
Poize2, Burkhardt’s company, has been doing well. It’s been growing in a few different places.
“So we’ve had some really good success, both direct with clients in providing those services and also helping Partners on their side deliver those same services to the clients,” he said.
That suggests two different businesses hiding under the same label.
One is the obvious one: a Partner sells post-go-live services to the end customer.
The other is more interesting: a firm with deeper support capacity sells that capacity to other Partners that are strong at implementation but thin on ongoing coverage. Smaller or newer Business Central firms often need an experienced Partner who can pick up where they left off while still working hand in hand with the Partner.
Burkhardt said Poize2 frames these types of collaborations around honesty about gaps, low ego, and a shared focus on client outcomes.
In a fast-growing product category, after all, not every Partner will build a full support organization at the same speed. Some will stay project-heavy. Some will specialize in rescue work. Some will get good at steady-state support. Some will sell that depth to other firms. If that pattern spreads, managed services will not just be a bigger line item on the P&L; it will become part of how the Business Central channel distributes labour.
What Microsoft Partners should learn from this shift
The temptation is to describe all this as a simple revenue story.
It’s not.
Recurring revenue is great, obviously. But, more importantly, Business Central delivery doesn’t end where many firms still expect it to. Now, even Microsoft’s implementation guidance builds support planning into the project. The product’s release rhythm keeps generating operational work after launch. Market logic rewards firms that can shift toward services. And channel growth puts pressure on the Partners least equipped to absorb that work informally.
This story isn’t about selling more support. It’s about deciding, deliberately, what role Partners want to play in the system that begins after go-live.
Some firms will build and run their own managed-services engine. Some will stay focused on projects and rely on specialist Partners for downstream coverage. Some will do both. But the older idea, that support is what happens after the real work is done, is getting harder to defend.
In Business Central, support is increasingly part of the core work. And for a growing number of Partners, it is becoming part of the core business.
