I had the privilege of listening to Microsoft's Kees Hertogh,
Director Product Development for MS Dynamics AX at the iSight 2010
Conference. I was impressed with Microsoft's product strategy
for competing in the $50B ERP software market.
Here are some highlights from the presentation:
The Dynamics AX strategy includes:
- Invest in industry relevance for rich vertical ecosystem
- Focus on Global Market capabilities: multi-site, -legislation
and - language; n-site central deployment
- Enable 2 Tier ERP deployment
- Continual productivity increases for ERP users
- Target organizations with 200-7,500 employees
An example of a 2 Tier ERP deployments is Dell, who uses Oracle
for their financials and is using Dynamics AX at their 6
manufacturing plants.
Microsoft sees the future of enterprise software satisfying 2
sets of interlocking requirements:
- Design for People requirements - a person's workplace, dynamic
nature of that workplace and information presented in context of
the workplace
- Build for Change Requirements - the application enables the
right work process changes, it evolves with pace of business change
and can adapt to the changes, and preserve the integrity of
business processes during change.
They are tailoring Dynamics AX to handle the transaction
oriented processing of ERP systems and also be process oriented, a
driver and enabler for process change and adaptable workflows for
processing.
Mr. Hertogh pointed out that Gartner in July 2009 considered
Microsoft Dynamics AX a 'Leader' in the Midmarket and Tier
2-Oriented ERP Magic Quadrant. Gartner defines the Tier 2 ERP
market as products with a global presence and specifically tailored
to for product centric midmarket companies with roughly 100-1000
employees.
In the last quarters of 2010 and first half of 2011 Microsoft
has the following updates planned:
- Industry Capabilities - Dynamics AX for Retail
- Horizontal Capabilities - Connectors for Dynamics CRM and SAP,
Payroll
- Technology Capabilities - Oracle2SQL data Migration
Assistant, Azure capabilities and the Intelligent Data Management
Framework.
The Intelligent Data Migration framework is a new tool to help
analyze data storage and assist in removing or archiving redundant
and historical data for better database performance and to reduce
storage costs.