Convergence 2008 in Copenhagen

After attending the annual Convergence conference for the first time, I feel even more energic about the future for AX and Microsoft is clearly ramping up the fight against SAP and Oracle. The product is ready to grow both horizontally and vertically (broader and deeper functionality) and Microsoft has done a lot with the product since they bought Navision back in 2002 (USD 1.55 billion in cash and share).

One good example is the Enterprise Portal that has been part of the product since version 2.x. In my opinion it's more a revolution than en evolution despite the fact that SharePoint was introduced as the framework in AX 4. The really big change is the introduction of the Role Centers and the rather bold ambition to build a true portal solution from the ERP perspective. And it's really about role tailored "Business Intelligence to everyone". Some deep changes in the runtime and a much better developer experience in the crossing between MorphX and Visual Studio, opens up for a lot of interesting possibilities. I really hope to get started with some serious implementations pretty soon, because I'm convinced that the Enterprise Portal framework will bring much value to the customers.

The second top news for me was the announcement of the AX Data Management framework (ADM). If you attended the conference and missed this session, you really missed one exiting and excellent session given by Mr. Sri Srinivasan! I attended 6 AX technical sessions, but this was by far the best one in every aspect. And what's it all about? Finally customers and partners will have a framework to clean up the database schema, to categorize the data and to move data out of the primary production database. This maybe doesn't seem like something important to most people, but if you think about customers running the product for 8-10 years doing every main upgrade, you will probably recognize the fact that not all changes in the database schema has been high quality. Combined with different developers not always (seldom?) paying attention to the impact of their adjustments on the database back end, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the database schema grows into a jungle of different objects with broad (many columns) and deep (many million rows) tables with a lot of indexes hurting the performance big time. The Data Management framework also addresses this dilemma. Add the fact that 5-10% percent of the tables contributes to 80-85% of the total database size and you probably see the need for some serious clean up work. The roadmap for the ADM consists of 3 phases starting with a stand alone toolset and ending as an integrated part of AX. Microsoft also said that they would utilize the management functionality in SQL Server even more in the future. The final area of functionality also covers index maintenance with alerts being raised on given fragmentation thresholds. So all in all rules for archiving fiscal years still making the figures available through SSRS and special forms in AX for handling online and archive data, should really sound like good news to both existing and new customers. And this is in my opinion another sign of Microsoft ramping up the battle against SAP and Oracle by filling the administration and management gap to lower the TCO. Studies and analysis of existing customers, was reported to give effects in the 40+% range and I find it hard to questioning this numbers after attending the session - Sri is clearly an expert within this topic.

The last of my top 3 take a ways, was actually not related to AX and technology, but it was taken from the Business Leadership track. Session BL01 "A Macro view of Business Trends" was lead by Mr. Thomas Mendel from Forrester and supported by a representative from both HP - EDS and Microsoft. It was arranged like a prepared discussion session with Forrester giving their thoughts about what they considers to be the three megatrends that will change the IT business over the next years and ending up with the view as seen from HP - EDS and Microsoft. It was really both exiting and refreshing to listen to them and to get some confirmations about my own opinions. And the tree megatrends are Globalization 2.0, Invisible IT and how the consumer marked influences the Enterprise IT. A lot of dimensions and elements was brought into the discussion ranging from the CHINDIA effects via Cloud computing (did you know that Microsoft buys 10 000 servers every month to power their Azure platform from data centers all over the world?) to innovation driven from the consumer market. They all agreed on that the traditional office space was history and that the y generation will bring a totally new set of requirements to the Enterprise IT departments.

So all in all I returned with a great feeling abut the future for DAX and it will be very interesting to see how the battle on the ERP arena develops in the rather turbulent world economic situation we are facing right now. I think a lot of new businesses will discover that the Dynamics branding really is more than yet another market initiative. Finally the announcement of DAX SP1 didn't come as a suprise at all...