Enterprise
Microsoft Solutions, Dynamics 365 and .NET Engineering in Dubai
We build and integrate on the Microsoft stack — Dynamics 365, the Power Platform, .NET and Azure — for organisations in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and India. Most of the work is deciding which of those layers a given problem actually belongs in.
"Microsoft services" is a broad label, and it hides the decision that matters. A business process can be configured in Dynamics 365, assembled in the Power Platform, or written from scratch in .NET — and all three demo well in month one. The difference shows up in year three, when the licensing bill, the upgrade path and the number of people who understand the system diverge sharply.
Our bias is to configure before we build. A standard sales pipeline, approval chain or invoice belongs in a product you do not maintain. A pricing engine that encodes how your industry actually quotes work is where custom backend engineering earns its cost. Most estates need both — and in practice a lot of that work is integration: the CRM has to talk to finance, the warehouse, the payment gateway and a fifteen-year-old database nobody wants to touch. That plumbing, not the screens, is where the schedule risk sits.
An honest caveat: Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform are licensed per user, per month — cost scales with headcount, not usage. For a small team of heavy users that is excellent value. For a few hundred occasional users it can quietly become the largest line in the IT budget. We model that before committing to an architecture, and we will say when a custom build is the cheaper answer.
What we do on the Microsoft stack
Dynamics 365 implementation
Sales, Customer Service, Field Service and Business Central. We configure the standard model first and extend only where your process genuinely diverges, so upgrades stay routine rather than becoming projects.
Power Platform builds
Power Apps, Power Automate and Dataverse for departmental workflow that would otherwise live in spreadsheets — plus the governance that stops you ending up with two hundred unowned apps.
Custom .NET development
ASP.NET Core APIs, Blazor or React front ends and background workers — where the logic is proprietary, volume is high, or per-user licensing makes a product a poor fit.
Azure architecture
App Service, Azure SQL, Functions, Service Bus, Key Vault and Entra ID, wired into infrastructure-as-code and a real pipeline. More on our Azure services page.
Power BI and reporting
Semantic models, row-level security and dashboards people actually open. We fix the data model before the visuals — most "Power BI is slow" complaints are data modelling complaints.
Integration and middleware
Connecting Dynamics or a custom app to ERP, banking, logistics and legacy databases, with idempotent handling, retries and a reconciliation report — so failures are visible rather than silent.
SQL Server engineering
Schema design, indexing, query tuning and migration to Azure SQL or Managed Instance — often the fastest win on an ageing system, and cheaper than re-platforming it.
Legacy .NET modernisation
Moving Web Forms and .NET Framework code onto .NET 8 in stages, behind a routing layer, so the business keeps running while the codebase moves. We do not recommend big-bang rewrites.
Identity and access
Entra ID single sign-on, conditional access, role design and audit trails, so joiners, movers and leavers are handled in one place rather than six systems.
Configure, assemble, or build?
This is the conversation we have at the start of nearly every Microsoft engagement. There is no universally right answer, but there are reliable signals. Treat the table as a starting position for a discussion, not a rule.
| Consideration | Dynamics 365 | Power Platform | Custom .NET |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best fit | Standard sales, service or finance processes | Departmental workflow, forms, approvals | Proprietary logic, high volume, unusual UX |
| Time to first release | Weeks, if you accept the standard model | Days to weeks | Longer — you are building the model too |
| Cost shape | Per user, per month | Per user or per app | Build cost up front, then hosting and support |
| Customisation ceiling | Real, and you meet it at the edges | Lower — deliberately | None, which is the benefit and the risk |
| Upgrades | Vendor-driven; heavy customisation makes them painful | Vendor-driven; usually low friction | Yours to own and schedule |
| Who can maintain it | Functional consultants; wide talent pool | Capable business users, with governance | Developers — a real dependency to plan for |
A pattern we return to often: keep the system of record in the product, and put the differentiating logic in a custom service behind a clean API. Dynamics holds the customer, the order and the audit trail; a .NET service does the thing competitors cannot copy. The two talk over a documented contract rather than a tangle of plugins.
Where these projects actually go wrong
Rarely in the build. The recurring failure modes we see are: nobody owned data quality before migration, so the new system inherits the old one's mess; customisation crept into the product's core until upgrades became a rewrite; integrations were treated as a final-week task; and licence counts were estimated from the pilot team rather than the real user base. All four are visible during discovery if someone looks.
Hosting follows the same logic. Steady workloads suit reserved capacity on Azure; spiky ones — a quarterly close, a seasonal peak — are where autoscale earns its keep. We size for the second week of real traffic, not the demo, and put cost alerts in before go-live.
Technologies we work with
.NET 8
C#
Azure
Dynamics 365
SQL Server
Power BI
.NET Framework
React
What is different in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and India
The stack is the same everywhere. The obligations around it are not, and they change what you build.
Arabic and right-to-left
Dynamics 365 and Power Apps handle Arabic and RTL reasonably well out of the box; custom .NET screens do not unless you plan for them. The work is rarely translation — it is bidirectional text in one field, Arabic and Latin names in one list, and printed documents that must mirror cleanly. We treat RTL as a first-class layout mode from the first sprint, because retrofitting it touches every view.
Tax and e-invoicing
UAE VAT is straightforward to model. Saudi Arabia is not: ZATCA Phase 2 requires Fatoora integration, UBL 2.1 XML, a cryptographic stamp, EGS onboarding with a CSID, a UUID per document and PIH chaining. Standard B2B and B2G invoices go through clearance; simplified B2C invoices are reported within 24 hours. That is an engineering workstream, not a configuration flag. We have delivered an ERP-integrated ZATCA e-invoice solution covering EGS onboarding and automated compliance.
Data residency and localisation
Azure operates regions in the UAE, and Microsoft has been expanding capacity in Saudi Arabia. If residency is a hard requirement, confirm current region and service availability before committing to an architecture — not every service reaches every region at the same time. Saudi public-sector procurement also increasingly expects Arabic-first interfaces and knowledge transfer to in-house teams, so we plan for handover rather than dependency. In India the pull is different again: cost-sensitive licensing and heavier legacy integration, which pushes more of the estate toward custom applications.
How we deliver
Discovery
Process walkthroughs with the people who do the work, an inventory of systems to integrate, an honest look at data quality, and a licence count based on real users. Output: where each capability should live — including where the answer is "not Microsoft".
Architecture & scope
The split between configuration, low-code and custom code, written down with reasons. Integration contracts, identity model, environments, residency constraints and a cost model for both build and run.
Build & validate
Short iterations against a working environment. Migration rehearsed more than once, integrations tested against real payloads, and acceptance run by the department that will own the process.
Launch & support
Cutover with a rollback path, monitoring and cost alerts from day one, and documentation plus handover sessions for your team — then support sized to what you actually need.
Why work with Inovsion
We build as well as configure
Firms that only configure always recommend configuration; teams that only code always recommend code. We do both, which is the only honest basis for a recommendation. Our work spans ERP, CRM and custom platforms — some of it is on our work page.
Cost modelled before commitment
Licences, hosting and support are estimated during discovery and revisited at architecture sign-off. You should know the run cost before the build starts, not afterwards.
Built for the region
Arabic and RTL, VAT and ZATCA, local gateways and residency are on our default checklist rather than raised later as a change request. We work across Dubai, Riyadh, Jeddah and Bangalore, and report in the tools your board already reads.
Frequently asked questions
Should we use Dynamics 365 or build a custom application?
Ask two questions. Is the process genuinely distinctive, or does it just feel that way because it is yours? And how many people need a licence? Standard process plus a modest user count: Dynamics usually wins. Proprietary logic, or hundreds of light users: per-user pricing tends to make custom cheaper over a few years. Most estates end up a mix.
We are on old .NET Framework code. Do we have to rewrite it?
Usually not in one go, and we would advise against it. Put a routing layer in front, move one bounded area at a time onto .NET 8, and run both until the old side is empty. Slower on paper, safer in practice — the business never faces a single high-stakes switch-over.
Can Dynamics 365 handle Saudi ZATCA e-invoicing?
Phase 2 needs Fatoora integration, UBL 2.1 XML, cryptographic stamping, EGS onboarding and PIH chaining. Whether that arrives via a marketplace add-on or a custom integration service depends on invoice volume, document types and how far your process deviates from standard. Rules and phasing change — confirm current ZATCA requirements at the time you build.
Is Power Platform safe to let business users loose on?
It is, with governance. Without it, the common outcome is a sprawl of apps whose authors have left and whose data flows nobody mapped. We set up environment strategy, DLP policies, ownership rules and a promotion path from experiment to supported tool — then encourage people to build.
How do you price Microsoft work?
Discovery is a fixed, short engagement with a written recommendation you can take elsewhere. Delivery is scoped against that. We do not quote a build before we understand the integrations, because a number produced without them is guesswork. Talk to us and we will be direct about what we do and do not yet know.
Planning a Microsoft project?
Tell us the process, the systems it must touch and how many people will use it. We will tell you where it belongs — Dynamics, Power Platform or custom .NET — and what it will realistically cost to run.
[email protected] · UAE / WhatsApp +971-506268535 · India +91 9845870246
