"Gartner concludes that only one offering qualifies as a leader in the
market at this time: Microsoft Dynamics AX."
This is good news for everyone involved in both using and delivering services around AX, especially if you are working with AX 2009. I have been blogging about some of the features and changes in AX 2009 for some time and I find my own oppinion to be aligned with what Garter expresses around the technological aspects.
After reading the report, I thought about my experiences with Axapta/AX and I found it worth summarizing my history with Axapta and AX to put the product envolvement in a subjective perspective (from Damgaard via Navision to Microsoft as software vendor):
I first looked at Axapta 2.1 in 2001 and back then, it was considered to be a product with quite rough edges (a very young product born around 1998). The company I worked for at this time, decided to wait until version 2.5 before doing the first implementations. We got a lot of experience from these implementations and discovered that the product still had some rough edges (for instance the returning issues around the famous axdat.udb file espesially in solutions with clustered Application Object Servers). Then we got Axapta 3.0 adding more functionality. Axapta was already branded as a true international solution, but the requirements for doing a central implementation supporting users in different time zones, was driving the requirement for the number of AOS licensed heavily and such solutions did'nt support access to the data stored in the AX database across time zones (it was at best Unicode enabled if you remembered to enable this before synchronizing the database for the first time). This was also in the same period where Microsoft bought Navision. After using more time on finding work arounds to technical issues compared to bringing value to the customers, I decided to do something else for the next 3 years (I was a little bit fed up to be honest). When the opportunity to return to what then was called AX (4) back in 2007, I first considered the architectural changes (eliminated the axdat.udb file and put the license/session handling into the database, replaced the AOCP protocol with RPC, buildt a new Web application based on SharePoint, a pure 3-tier architecture and a greater range for the very important RecId value) and found it very promising. Based on this, I decided to give AX a second try. My experience with AX 4, proved that AX 4x was a big step in the right direction with regards to architecture. Now we only lacked support for handling users accross different time zones on one (or several) AOS instances with scaling and redundancy beeing the drivers for the number of AOS licenses required. This was finally introduced in AX 2009 and for the first time, I considered AX to live up to the promise of beeing a true, international solution. Add even tighter integration to other Microsoft products and technologies, and a Web Application "bringing BI to everyone" through a role based Enterprise Portal, and AX 2009 was positioned to compete with the other 2 main rivals also in the Enterprise Market.
I don't regret returning to AX and I'm rest assured that AX 2009 and later releases, will move further up and to the right in the Magic Quadrant "cementing" it's position as the most agile and TCO effective ERP solution on the market. SAP Business One is of course a serious player and it will be interesting to see how the competition evolves the next years.
So what's my point here? Given the history of AX and the fact that Microsoft now has done the necessary and required changes with regards to the architecture (not a small task), the product enters a new era. Companies looking for a new ERP solution, should indeed evaluate AX 2009 in line with both SAP and Oracle. And existing AX customers running on a version prior to AX 4, should work through their exisiting solution either aiming at eliminating as many customizations as possible or in fact re implement AX 2009 with a clear strategy around utilizing standard functionality to lower TCO over time and keep in pace with new/added functionality. It's in my oppinion all about positioning for a very exiting product cycle where I expect a lot of new functionality to be introduced (both horizontal and vertical) and less architectural changes!
Some information about the next release of AX (6) is already available (AOD files moved from file system to the database, increased range for ObjectId etc.). Some will probably argue that this is architectural changes, but as I see it yet not ground ground breaking compared to the changes already implemented in AX 4 and AX 2009. If you have access to the Product Roadmap, you can read what Microsoft is planning for the future and my final word, is the fact that Gartner concludes that Microsoft is delivering on their vision and that this is one of the key reasons for Gartners conclusion!
Happy reading.
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