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Kirill Tatarinov: Microsoft's Russian rocket
The head of Microsoft Business Solutions is out to fashion acquisitions and partnerships into the leading force in management software.

Even with somewhere north of $1 billion in annual sales, Microsoft Business Solutions is dwarfed by the enormous Office business that it shares space with in the company's quarterly reports.

But Kirill Tatarinov, the group's leader since July 2007, said MBS brings more to the broader Microsoft than revenue from its Dynamics-branded systems, which manage a company's customer relationships, suppliers, inventory and other business basics.

It provides a "proof point to business decision makers" using the whole set of Microsoft server technologies, Tatarinov said. The Dynamics products "take advantage of all the innovation that's happening" on Windows Server, Visual Studio, Office and other major products Microsoft sells to businesses.

The software-industry veteran, a Russian immigrant who pursues ski racing in his spare time, is unequivocal about his goal for MBS, which competes in a fragmented market selling business applications to small and midsize organizations.

"We wouldn't be in this business if we didn't have aspirations to be No. 1," he said in an interview ahead of a major sales conference in New Orleans this week.

Success would make good on two of the biggest acquisitions in Microsoft's history and challenge major competitors in the business-software space, including Oracle and SAP, as well as the more focused enterprise resource planning (ERP) players Lawson, Infor and Sage Group.

The broad ERP category includes software that coordinates suppliers, tracks inventory, handles billing and other basic financial management. Microsoft is also in the customer relationship management, or CRM, software business, which is sometimes categorized as a segment of ERP.

Microsoft Business Solutions is atypical within the software giant in that it is spread geographically among three locations, a result of its formation through acquisition. There's Great Plains in Fargo, N.D., acquired for $1.1 billion in 2001, and Navision, a Danish company purchased in 2002 for $1.3 billion. The third location is Microsoft's new Advanta Office Commons, three leased buildings in Bellevue's Eastgate area.

Better integrating the products and the teams with each other and within the broader company was a substantial challenge facing Tatarinov when he took the job.

He also had to step out of the shadow cast by Doug Burgum, founder of Great Plains, leader of the Navision acquisition and a major presence in the evolution of Microsoft Business Solutions until he left the company in June 2007.

After Burgum's departure, Satya Nadella got the top job at MBS in fall 2006, but was abruptly moved to lead Microsoft's Internet search business seven months later.

The leadership turnover was unsettling for many of the partner companies that act as middlemen between Microsoft and the companies that use the Dynamics software, providing sales and service.

"It left kind of a big hole in the Dynamics world as far as uncertainty," said Andy Vabulas, chief executive of Interactive Business Information Systems, a top Microsoft partner in Norcross, Ga. "Suddenly, Kirill Tatarinov gets in there and nobody knows him."
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