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MICROSOFT ROLLS OUT AX 2012

Steve BallmerWith a stampede of dogs and ponies, Microsoft officially rolled out Dynamics AX 2012. The event had the feeling of designating AX as the favorite child in the Dynamics line, even if no one said that.  In the webcast, the package was lauded as “Our biggest ERP release ever.” And as a sign of how important it is, CEO Steve Ballmer made the official announcement.

"When was the last time you heard Ballmer that involved with one of the ERP packages?" noted one reseller. Ballmer took a page from the NetSuite marketing playbook in describing the state of the market for financial applications. “Many companies are trapped. They are using applications they purchased 15 years ago,” he said. Ballmer did not dwell on how many of those were Microsoft applications. He did promote the fact that AX “works just like Microsoft Outlook.” Funny, I was unaware that Outlook could make general ledger entries. There was also Gartner research director Nigel Montgomery, who conveniently discussed the slow pace at which mid-market systems are moving to the cloud. “It is taking a long time for ERP systems to be moved to the cloud,” said Montgomery, who reported a Gartner study showed that 60 percent of those surveyed are not looking to move to the cloud for 12 months to 18 months. “Hosted models are very prevalent,” said Montgomery, who continued that the hosted model “lends itself to the SaaS licensing model.” Hmm, doesn’t Microsoft lack a true cloud product and offer hosted systems? Kirill Tatarinov, president of Microsoft Business Solutions, stressed AX’s built-in features for public sector companies, and a range of retail organizations. He also said that with this release business intelligence and analytics “is essentially a core ingredient not a bolt on, not a separate purchase that the customers need to make.”

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