Interview - Patrick Mouwen

The hosts welcomed Patrick Mouwen, a Netherlands-based solution architect with 15+ years in Dynamics, who's become the unofficial evangelist for one of Microsoft's most underutilized powerhouses: the Commerce Scale Unit (CSU). What started as a technical deep-dive quickly revealed why this caching layer might be the secret weapon your organization didn't know it needed.

Patrick painted the CSU's evolution from humble beginnings—when Dynamics Commerce was just simple file transfers between POS systems and ERP—to today's sophisticated API-driven architecture. The CSU sits between your ERP and front-end applications, caching data in deployable regional instances that deliver lightning-fast responses for inventory lookups, pricing calculations, and order processing. It's the difference between customers seeing spinning wheels and instant results.

The conversation took an interesting turn when Patrick shared his "wild guess" about the future: CSU expanding beyond commerce to become a universal API layer for all Dynamics data, potentially including Dataverse and third-party sources. He demonstrated this vision with a real example—showing how partners could skip building custom pricing services for Customer Engagement by simply tapping into CSU's pricing APIs that handle 98% of scenarios, including the new unified pricing engine.

The biggest roadblock? Licensing. Patrick's AI-assisted cost analysis shows the per-order impact is surprisingly low, but there's no license option for companies wanting to use just a few APIs rather than full commerce functionality. Despite technical hurdles around documentation and the need for both functional and technical expertise, Patrick can typically implement a headless e-commerce solution using 20-25 key APIs in just five days.

Resources mentioned: CSU documentation on GitHub, inventory visibility integration, unified pricing APIs, headless commerce architecture, Azure AI search capabilities.