Microsoft has taken the wraps off the new Dynamics AX, which will be generally available on its Azure cloud platform early next year. That's right—on Azure first, and not immediately on-premises. I spoke with Mike Ehrenberg, Microsoft technical fellow for Dynamics, prior to the launch and our discussion was eye-opening.
Customers Are Live
Microsoft is in production with the first wave of customers on the new AX, and is now widening the availability to a public preview, with general availability planned for the first quarter of 2016. “We really wanted to make sure we’ve got a set of customers live and running their businesses on the new AX before we declare GA.”
UX and Mobility
Featured in the new AX is an HTML5-based user interface that will be "great" running on Microsoft's Edge browser but also supports all other modern browsers, Ehrenberg says. A Windows 10 Universal App as well as iOS and Android support is also going to be available at launch.
The UI looks and feels like Office365 and is integrated with the collaboration suite as well as Dynamics CRM.
Of course, a more consumer-like user experience has become tablestakes for all new enterprise applications, ERP included. While customers will be the ultimate judge, Ehrenberg says Microsoft has made major strides with AX's UI. “We usually don’t get to use the word beautiful UI and ERP in the same paragraph but I think we do here.”
An Emphasis on User Adoption
The new AX will include a number of capabilities aimed at helping users be more productive, and more quickly, with the system.
Task Guides, a built-in training mode, helps users move through the system and has support for voice commands through an integration with Cortana.
Microsoft has also built out a series of role-tailored application scenarios it calls Workspaces. For example, for finance employees there's a Workspace oriented around period close. More than 20 Workspaces will be delivered out of the box with the new AX, Ehrenberg says. It's also possible for AX partners to create new ones for their clients.
In combination, Task Guides and Workspaces could help drive down the cost of training users and grow adoption simply by making AX easier to use.
“I think there will still be opportunities for formal training," Ehrenberg says. "But we’re really, really looking for the things that create friction in someone’s deployment, and training new users has always been difficult.”
Embedded Analytics
The new AX addresses another increasingly important area for ERP in the form of embedded analytics delivered by Microsoft's in-memory PowerBI tool and Azure Machine Learning. AX users will get a "highly visual" and, of course, informative analytics experience, Ehrenberg says. “If you’re on a page and looking up sales orders you should be able to look up and say, how valuable is this customer to me?"
Cloud First, But On-Premises Lives On
Microsoft will deliver the new AX in on-premises form next year, Ehrenberg stresses. "We're not going to drop on-prem for the cloud," he says. "We still see places where on-prem matters."
There are cost advantages to running AX on Azure thanks to work Microsoft has done on elastic workload management for the application. Ehrenberg declined to provide pricing information at this time, but says Microsoft "is very proud" of what it's accomplished with pricing for AX on Azure.
Customers running AX 2012 now can consider a hybrid deployment, adopting components of AX on Azure while keeping others on-premises.
Microsoft had another reason for putting the new AX on Azure first, namely to help further prove out the platform's ability to run mission-critical apps like ERP. “We’re pushing the envelope more on how we use Azure with AX. That’s why we took the cloud-first approach,” Ehrenberg says.
POV: On paper, Microsoft is set to deliver the features AX customers want and which competitors such as Oracle, SAP and Infor are also pursuing, namely a refreshed user experience, improved productivity, a cloud deployment option and embedded analytics.
Coupled with the built-in advantage Dynamics has through tight integration with Office, non-customers considering a switch off other platforms, or two-tier ERP scenarios, may add the new AX to their short lists.