When Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central first came onto the market, the general opinion was that it was more suited to smaller and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Larger businesses tended to stick with other ERP solutions, or even with traditional on-premises software, which many believed gave them more control, more functionality, and full customization options.
But the ERP landscape has changed, and so have the priorities of IT leaders. Today, CIOs and IT decision-makers aren't just evaluating ERP systems based on how many users they can support or how much data they can process. They're looking for platforms that can scale with the business, support global growth, and help them adopt emerging technologies such as AI.
Business Central has grown into one of the most widely used ERP systems in the world, with Forbes naming it among the top cloud ERP platforms on the market. With over 50,000 companies using Business Central worldwide and availability in 170 countries, it has become a modern AI cloud ERP capable of supporting the needs of many large and growing businesses.
Here are three reasons why more large retail and hospitality businesses are choosing Business Central.
1. Scale your business without the infrastructure burden
Business Central's operational capabilities have continued to expand, making it an increasingly powerful cloud ERP for larger organizations.
Running on Microsoft's globally scaled Azure infrastructure, Business Central allows businesses to benefit from Microsoft's investment in cloud performance and resilience without managing the underlying infrastructure themselves. Microsoft has also moved from some environment-level limits to user-based limits, giving businesses more processing capacity as they add users.
For the most technically minded:
- While until recently the limit for web service calls was 600 per minute per environment, today Business Central can handle 6,000 web service calls per 5-minute sliding window, per user.
- The limits for scheduled tasks (job queues) have also been upped from 3 concurrently running tasks per environment to 5 concurrent tasks per user.
- The system can easily handle over 10,000,000 web service calls in a day – that's over 25,000 per minute – in a single environment.
These numbers are not from a sandbox environment, they come directly from telemetry. That is, real customers, in a real-life environment, are running this amount of data successfully.
Additional capabilities such as SQL compression and service monitoring help optimize database size, performance, and storage.
2. Protect your data with best-in-class security
Microsoft has made no secret of how seriously it takes cloud security and compliance. It invests about US$1 billion in cloud security each year and has continually improved its cloud security services in a variety of ways, from data encryption and automated threat detection to identity isolation and just-in-time access.
Some of the certifications they have received include: ISO27001, SOC 2 Type 2, ISO27017, SOC 1 Type 2, ISO27018, and many more.
With Business Central, you can take advantage of the full security infrastructure that the Microsoft cloud provides to all users, without having to front the cost and complexities yourself. Its built-in features ensure that all data is automatically backed up and securely stored, protected against all the latest and future threats by some of the best cybersecurity experts in the industry.
As businesses adopt more AI, Microsoft is extending its security and governance capabilities to cover AI agents and help organizations adopt them with greater confidence. AI-assisted security tools also help teams investigate, prioritize, and respond to potential threats, while Microsoft's broader Zero Trust approach provides consistent identity and access controls across the environment.
Microsoft is also working to reduce the risk of outages through zone redundancy, which helps Business Central Online remain available even in the event of Azure availability zone failures. These efforts speak to the system's reliability: Business Central has maintained a global uptime of 99.99%.
3. Join thousands of businesses already succeeding with Business Central
One of the clearest signs that perceptions of Business Central are changing is the growing number of larger organizations successfully running their operations on the platform.
Microsoft recently shared that while most BC customers have under 20 users, there are thousands of BC customers that have over 100 users. And several businesses successfully running on Business Central have over 1,000 users.
While most customers’ databases are below 100GB, some are running databases with up to 1TB of data (unsurprisingly, many of them are businesses that moved from on-prem and brought years of data with them). The Microsoft team also shared that in just one month, several customers migrated databases larger than 500GB-600GB to BC SaaS.
4. Prepare your business for the future of AI
Scale and security are only part of what IT leaders need from a modern ERP. As AI becomes increasingly important to how businesses operate, the ability to adopt new technologies without replacing the core ERP system is becoming just as important. Business Central is rapidly expanding its AI capabilities and moving toward a more agentic ERP model.
Copilot-powered assistance and Analysis Assist help users work with business data and insights more efficiently, while autonomous agents such as the Sales Order Agent and Payables Agent can take on defined tasks and workflows with less manual intervention.
Microsoft is also expanding the ways AI agents can work with business systems. Innovations such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) support enable agents to connect with external sources, while AI-powered forecasting can help businesses anticipate demand and make more informed decisions.
With access to Microsoft's wider ecosystem—including Copilot, Copilot Studio, Power Platform, and Azure—Business Central gives businesses a strong foundation for adopting new AI capabilities as they emerge.
Modernize your business with Business Central and LS Central
According to the most recent Forrester TEI study on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, the software has been proven to deliver a 209% return on investment (ROI) while modernizing operations.
It’s for all of these reasons – and more – that thousands of retail and hospitality companies entrust their business to LS Central, which builds on the strengths of Business Central, and enhances it with specialized industry functionality for retail, food service, pharmacy, hospitality, forecourt, and more.
Want to find out how we can help you take advantage of the cloud and grow your business without limitations? Contact us for more information.
