CognitiveGroup

24th March 2011

Introduction

Microsoft's focus and key priority at the moment is the readiness from organisations and getting more companies accredited through certifications. Our number 1 focus around design of AX is and will continue to be Simplicity. We are not trying to build the next SAP or Oracle, instead we are looking to offer a more transparent solution with less complexity - Ultimately to be the main ERP provider that is the fastest to adapt to changes in our customers’ requirements, enable them to respond to market opportunities more quickly, while reducing risks.

What are the new features of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012?

This release will have a tremendous amount of innovation, and can easily be classified as a generation shift in ERP. However, this is the first release of AX that is deeply focused in the public sector with various functionality to make it more suited to this industry such as budgetary control and encumbrance accounting which has all been well received by the TAP community. The public sector is one of the main growth areas in AX, along with manufacturing, service industries and retail.

How should the Microsoft Partner Channel be preparing for such changes?

It is very important that partners focus on readiness and technical competence with their clients and on future implementations. They will need to have a deeper understanding of SQL reporting, SQL analysis services and have a higher level of internal skills around Visual Studio and SharePoint to improve implementation success.

What is Microsoft's long-term strategy for the AX product?

We will continue to execute our industry focused strategy, focusing on public sector with this release and deeper, more relevant sectors with functionality to be added from our industry specific partners. Dynamics AX is to be a global product to global customers where it is able to run a business on one global instance, operating on different time zones, currencies, etc. Again our focus on purposely built Simplicity is key. We want to continue to focus on productivity and increase the adoption rate to make sure more users are utilising AX and getting the full benefit. Lastly our focus is on "time to value", which is getting more value out of an implementation in a shorter amount of time for our customers. Dynamics AX 2012 should go a long way towards that, and there will be many more releases beyond that. The strategy will be consistent from Microsoft for a long time to come.

What new markets are Microsoft looking to target with AX?

Manufacturing is the biggest market, expanding from industrial equipment, toward chemicals and food, reach from discrete to process manufacturing typologies.. Distribution, CPG and retail are also expanding. We’ve also seen great traction in Services industry in the past year marquee customers like AMEC in the UK are great example of this. And as discussed, public sector will be the big push going forward with this up and coming release.

When will Microsoft's Retail product be ready?

MS Dynamics AX Retail R2 has already been released on Feb 1st 2011.

On the shortage of high level skills in the channel:

Unfortunately there is a shortage of skills at the top end in the channel, technically people are highly focused, but there is a lack of dedicated solution architects which have an direct impact on the success of the largest projects. Being able to have the skills to understand a clients needs and to translate these needs into a technical design and specification is a hard skill and is something we are addressing within the channel. We are working with universities and business schools to get Dynamics AX into education programmes however this shortage in capacity will grow with the introduction of MS Dynamics AX 2012 rather than reducing so we have to look at a new ways to attract more resources into our ecosystem. We are also working closely with key partners to ensure they focus on the quality of solution architects and are aware of the long term importance on projects. There will soon be a complete curriculum around how to do solution architecture, which will be released around Q2 this calendar year. There will be specific certifications and workshops on core process and structure to educate the market on how solution architecture should be done to improve quality and consistency. Another battle is to increase project "reference-ability" within the channel to make it easier to attract consultants from other ERP backgrounds. The problem with pure SAP and Oracle consultants is that all they tend to be very linear and only know 2 or 3 modules which is not the way forward. The more compact ERP systems like JD Edwards and Baan are more suited to the future of AX in terms of balancing the skills shortage. There have been lots of successful people from Baan and JD Edwards to have crossed trained into Dynamics AX but people who have classic training on SAP and Oracle can have narrow experience.

From a Dynamics AX Professional: "What's Microsoft's strategy for integrating CRM 2011 beta with AX?"

We have already released the connector, it's on premises and in the cloud.

How will Microsoft's AX connector impact products such as Scribe?

Microsoft will offer a purpose built connector between CRM and AX. Scribe are focused on complex implementations and integration to many other platforms and technology solutions. It is just AX to CRM rather than GP and other dynamics platforms.

From a Dynamics AX Professional: "Knowing that SAP recently acquired Sybase as their Mobile Solution as a strategic additional component in their ERP offering. The question rises: What are Microsoft's plans to have their own Mobile Solution available in AX?"

They have good partners out there doing this, Microsoft have no plans for their own solution.

From a Dynamics AX Professional: "When and how will we be able to get a preview / VPC of AX2012 here in the UK?"

From a Dynamics AX Professional: "Will AX 2012 bring the development environment more inline with .NET?

With AX2012 we further increased our .NET interoperability, for example: The objects in the AOT are now accessible through Visual Studio, supporting full ‘intellisense’ for all AX objects. We’ve enabled development through managed code and enabled customization through ‘eventing’.

From a Dynamics AX Professional: "When there will be documentation available regarding proposed AX 2012 implementation methodologies for the new Organisation/Legal Entity/Ledger/Chart of Accounts/Main Accounts/Dimensions structures?"

This documentation will be provided at General Availability of the product in Q3 of this calendar year.

From a Dynamics AX Professional: "Will XP be supported or not to run AX2012 rich client ? - NO AX rich client will be dropped, they are not testing it, customers are moving on to Vista or Windows 7, MS wont support the configuration?

If not supported will it work? If so are there any caveats?"

With MS Dynamics AX 2012, Windows XP will no longer be a support Client OS for Microsoft Dynamics AX. Windows Vista and Windows 7 are the supported client OS-es.

From a Dynamics AX Professional: "Regarding the AX source control with Team Foundation Server, is it still the case that each developer has to have their own AOS and database or has the solution evolved?"

This situation has not changed since AX 2009.