Dynamics AX 2009 ERP Suite Comes to Market

Published: June 4, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It may be nearly six years since Microsoft bought the ERP suites called Axapta and Navision from the two merged Danish ERP software suppliers, Damgaard and the Navision, who merged two years earlier than that, but Microsoft is still operating four distinct ERP software lines. As Microsoft well knows and surely profits from, customers are stubbornly resistant to moving off software they know well, even if they don't always love it.

That's why the four ERP suites from Microsoft, including the formerly independent Great Plains and Solomon Software suites as well as the Axapta and Navision suites, persist under a unified Dynamics brand as what are still separate products: Dynamics AX, Dynamics NAV, Dynamics GP, and Dynamics SL. This week, Dynamics AX 2009 has been released, and it is coming out on schedule or maybe even a little ahead of schedule. Dynamics AX is the high-end, midrange ERP suite from Microsoft, and it was previewed in March by Microsoft chief executive officer, Steve Ballmer, at the Convergence 2008 event, with a promise that it would be delivered to market before the end of June.

The big updates that come with the Dynamics AX 2009 release are support for the Windows Server 2008 operating system and the SQL Server 2008 database, and Microsoft said back in March that running the new code on the newer operating system and database will boost performance for many parts of the Dynamics AX stack by as much as 70 percent compared to prior AX, Windows, and SQL Server releases. The data compression features in SQL Server 2008 can also allow companies to crunch down the size of their Dynamics AX 2009 databases by anywhere from 40 percent to 60 percent, according to Microsoft.

The new Dynamics AX 2009 software has been paired with, integrated with, and tuned for Windows Essential Business Server 2008, which is going to ship sometime in the second half of this year. This software is actually two variants of the Windows Server 2008 stack, one called Small Business Server 2008 (replacing SBS 2003) and another called Essential Business Server 2008 (not replacing anything, really). Both editions of Windows Server 2008 include the basic Windows stack, Exchange Server 2007, and SQL Server 2008 all bundled in, and will come in standard and premium editions, with prices ranging from $1,089 for the SBS 2008 standard edition with five client access licenses (CALs) to $7,163 for an EBS 2008 premium edition with five CALs. The SBS and EBS versions come with everything customers need to get going to support Dynamics AX 2009, and they are also supported as a single product, not three separate products.

Just because Microsoft invented Windows and Office doesn't mean that it does not have the same integration issues in weaving its server-based ERP software into Outlook clients and Office programs like Excel and Word. To its credit, Microsoft has done a lot of integration work in the past three years for its four ERP suites under its "Project Green" effort, which provided the tighter integration of the ERP software with Office and Outlook--something other ERP providers are doing, too. In fact, the new user interface in Dynamics AX 2009 has the same look and feel as the Office suite, masking the fact that it is coded in a homegrown Damgaard language called X++.

But with Dynamics AX 2009, Microsoft is also taking a different approach to getting people who are not familiar with ERP systems--or who find them difficult and annoying to use--a whole new way of interfacing with the ERP system through something called RollTailored design. In short, Microsoft has taken 30 common roles at the kinds of companies that typically use Dynamics AX and has created an individually tailored dashboard for each of those roles, so employees in those roles can immediately access the information that is most relevant to them. These dashboards were developed in conjunction with students at the IT University of Copenhagen, and they are malleable, not static. If the idea takes off among users--or better still, actually encourages new sales and upgrades among the existing AX installed base--it is likely that this approach will spread to the other Dynamics stacks. The role centers can be displayed on a Windows desktop directly or in an AX portal that uses Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server collaboration software.

"Employees using traditional ERP systems have had to wade through inefficient, time-intensive steps--enter transactional data, run reports, analyze reports--before they can do their jobs effectively," explained Mogens Elsberg, general manager for Microsoft Dynamics ERP, in the announcement for the new release. "Through Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009's Role Center, employees from the executive suite to the warehouse have access to role-relevant business intelligence to help them make decision more efficiently. The Role Center provides a centralized view of each person's prioritized work lists based on their organization's configurable business processes and clearly identifies specific steps to take, thereby optimizing productivity."

The new ERP software also has a new multi-site feature, which allows the data from multiple geographical and language variants of the Dynamics AX 2009 suite to be consolidated down into a single, drillable view so managers and executives can look across their factories and supply chains as a single entity even though they are organized as separate units. The ERP suite also has integration with Microsoft's Office Project Server, which allows managers to administer projects in Project Server but feed data into and draw it out of the AX suite to do it.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 is available now in the following countries, ranked alphabetically: Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Other countries will get their language and tech support later this year for the new ERP suite. Customers with AX 3.0 or 4.0 can upgrade directly to AX 2009, but those on earlier AX releases are going to have to do a multi-step upgrade.

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