SoftwareOne case study
Meet the specialist Microsoft partner customers keep coming back to when their Dynamics 365 environment isn't working — and see the craft that makes it happen.
AgileCadence is a longstanding Microsoft partner with a clear specialization: complex Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations and Supply Chain environments. Its core business is understanding how a customer’s operations truly work and then mapping Microsoft’s ERP and CRM capabilities onto that reality.
This focus has allowed the company to build a reputation for “fixing” Dynamics systems, simplifying IT landscapes, and forming long‑term partnerships based on trust and proven results.
SoftwareOne, by contrast, comes from the world of largescale software and cloud licensing, with deep global reach and a highly industrialized process for managing spend and compliance across complex estates. Historically, its strength has been breadth – serving thousands of customers across multiple vendors and technologies – rather than the deep, niche Dynamics expertise AgileCadence provides. Bringing the two together is therefore less about overlap and more about synergy: SoftwareOne’s global licensing engine paired with AgileCadence’s ability to design, implement, and continually improve missioncritical Dynamics environments.
“This is where we see a huge opportunity,” says James Brentley, owner and founder of AgileCadence. “We become part of SoftwareOne’s huge environment, and SoftwareOne taps into revenue it couldn’t look at before because that Dynamics expertise wasn’t fully there.”
Senior AgileCadence consultants deliver Dynamics 365 Finance, Operations and Supply Chain with a depth that has customers switching to them from bigger names — the specialism is the reason customers come, and the reason they stay.
AgileCadence's 10-day engagements put its team directly in front of CEOs and CFOs — the executives commissioning the systems that will run their organisation. Few partners earn that level of trust or that seat at the table.
With SoftwareOne handling licensing and commercial machinery in the background, AgileCadence's specialists spend their time where it matters most: on the customer, on Dynamics, and increasingly on the AI-ready foundations Microsoft's roadmap demands.
Initially, we weren't the first port of call for a big Dynamics implementation. But time and again, customers became disenchanted with their chosen partner and looked to work with a smaller, more honest, more capable outfit. And then they came knocking on our door.
James Brentley
Owner and Founder, AgileCadence
AgileCadence was founded in 2012 in Perth, Scotland, where it is still headquartered.
“Initially, we weren’t the first port of call for a big Dynamics implementation,” says Brentley. “However, time and again, customers became disenchanted with their chosen partner and looked to work with a smaller, more honest, and more capable outfit. And then they came knocking on our door.
“We now have some 40 global customers across all verticals and are moving into the £1.5 million implementation space. We’ve grown 25 percent year-on-year since day one – all through referrals.”
Dynamics is always the “way in”, but for some customers, AgileCadence takes over the entire Microsoft stack. “That’s where we go from a Dynamics Finance and Operations piece to the CRM, Power Platform, Azure, and any AI requirements our customers have at the same time, which is starting to become more prominent, obviously.
“And that’s attractive to SoftwareOne,” Brentley adds. “Most organizations want their IT infrastructure to revolve around a system that matters more to them than any other – and usually, that’s Finance. When we can make Dynamics work for a customer, the logic and efficiency of bringing all Microsoft licensing into a single contract becomes almost inescapable. And this is where SoftwareOne can benefit because we provision our licenses through them.”
The partnership with SoftwareOne (formerly Crayon) began in 2019.
“We were with Tech Data originally, and they had a marketed Dynamics practice, as opposed to actually having the capability,” Brentley recalls. “So we started talking to different vendors and started to work with Crayon on a huge deal for Dr Martens, the iconic shoe brand. And that’s really where the structure with Crayon came from.”
For years, Crayon’s Cloud iQ platform made it easier for AgileCadence’s customers to buy and manage licenses, consolidating license management, billing automation, and business intelligence into a single, intuitive interface. Now that Crayon and SoftwareOne have joined forces, that same style of transparent, customer friendly licensing has been combined with SoftwareOne’s global scale and commercial strength. The result is a proposition where Dynamics licensing is no longer an isolated transaction, but part of a broader, well governed software strategy delivered jointly by a licensing powerhouse and a specialist Dynamics partner.
“The opportunity for the partnership is twofold,” says Brentley. “First, SoftwareOne can leverage our expertise to deepen its offer to its vast customer base.”
AgileCadence’s specialist understanding of Dynamics allows SoftwareOne account teams to approach Dynamics customers with far greater confidence, opening a clear path for SoftwareOne to grow ERP and related cloud revenues over time.
“Second,” Brentley continues, “I see AgileCadence as a door opener for SoftwareOne. We do 10-day [Dynamic] projects that get us close to CEOs and CFOs because they are the decision-makers who are implementing the system. For an account manager at SoftwareOne, it’s difficult to get that level of access. But we are straight in there with senior management because they’re hiring us to implement systems that run their entire organization.”
Brentley sees a huge opportunity in private equity firms because they own multiple businesses and would be well-served to run their finance systems in a similar way across all of them.
We now have some 40 global customers across all verticals and are moving into the £1.5 million implementation space. We've grown 25 percent year-on-year since day one — all through referrals.
Owner and Founder, AgileCadence
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As Dynamics deployments scale from tens to thousands of users as a result of the partnership, AgileCadence’s implementations become the anchor point around which SoftwareOne can license the wider Microsoft stack – Azure, security, productivity, and, increasingly, AI.
Positioning AgileCadence as a flagship Dynamics partner within SoftwareOne’s expanded ecosystem shows internal stakeholders how partnerships can drive incremental licensing and services revenue. For customers, seeing AgileCadence and SoftwareOne together – on proposals, in joint workshops, and across shared marketing – reinforces a clear message: they can combine deep ERP, CRM, and data governance expertise with the buying power and disciplined processes of a global licensing provider.
This is particularly relevant as AI moves from experimentation to production in the enterprise. Microsoft’s AI roadmap is increasingly tightly coupled with well structured, governed data in Dynamics, Azure, and Microsoft 365. AgileCadence helps customers put those foundational systems in place and ensure the data model is coherent; SoftwareOne ensures they are licensed and optimized correctly. Together, they offer a route into AI enabled operations that is both ambitious and responsibly governed.
“The partnership between us and the larger SoftwareOne entity is relatively new, but it has enormous potential,” Brentley concludes. “If we get this right, the relationship will position AgileCadence alongside SoftwareOne, helping customers see that they can ‘get to’ SoftwareOne through us, and vice versa, and benefit from the combined value of both.”
We now have some 40 global customers across all verticals and are moving into the £1.5 million implementation space. We've grown 25 percent year-on-year since day one — all through referrals.
Owner and Founder, AgileCadence
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