In 1986 the Navision founders Jesper Balser, Torben Wind, and Peter Bang were looking back on the successful release of their first product "PC-Plus". It was the first easy-to-use accounting package for the IBM PC on the Danish market. It immediately picked up a huge market share and the founders started thinking about how to expand the business. They decided to try to sell a vertical solution for auto-repair shop spare-part management—but they were immediately flooded with requests from potential customers who wanted to have the product tailored exactly to meet their needs. Because of this they decided to get out of the customization business, thus enabling partners to do the customization while providing them with the right tools. PC-Plus used a database, which was based on the ISAM database, which Anders Hejlsberg wrote as a sample program for his Pascal compiler. However the database was not multiuser and if the power went, data could easily get corrupted. Other database alternatives were either too expensive or of poor quality, so they decided to write their own database. The result of this was the Navision product, which had a rich set of tools for modifying the business application and a robust multiuser version-based database. The product became a huge success with a rapidly growing number of partners, who recognized a big business opportunity, and customers, who could have the product tailor-made to fulfill the specific needs of their businesses.

The Windows version of Navision was released in 1995 and became part of the Windows revolution. The rest is history: the company went international, went public, and in 2002 was acquired by Microsoft. I joined Navision in 1987 and have been a part of this amazing journey. Today as part of Microsoft, the team and I have started a new journey with the product now called Microsoft Dynamics NAV and will bring the product to the .net platform. Next, we will introduce a new role-tailored client, enabling us to reach even more partners and customers moving forward.