It’s exciting that Microsoft is launching an Enterprise level ERP in their own maintained cloud (Azure) which Microsoft has named as AX 7 or AX 2015. We have seen in the past, some articles and YouTube videos, to get a sneak peek into how it looks. The following are the brief features of AX 7:
  1. Access on Cloud,
  2. Enterprise Mobile & Access,
  3. Web browser based interface,
  4. Enhanced Life Cycle Management,
  5. New Reporting features and dashboards,
  6. Better integration with other Microsoft Products,
  7. Incremental Updates, and
  8. Subscription based Licensing
 There are certain challenges which needs to be well considered before taking the decision of going to AX 7. They are as follows:
  • There are shortage of skills in the market for technical professionals who have appropriate experience in maintaining servers and infrastructure in Azure.
  • From Functional point of view the features of AX 7 may not change significantly and they will be very close to AX 2012 R3 CU9, but from technical point of view there will be lot of challenge.
  • The developers need to learn programming in HTML 5 in conjunction with Visual studio, which will mark a big challenge on their part to learn and build new skills.
 In such situation, there will be either some poor quality deployments, developments and less availability of technical resources in the market in early release period of AX 7.



Furthermore, existing and prospective customers seems equally excited to gauge Microsoft Dynamics AX 7 or AX 2015 and relevant aspects are discussed in the following:
  1. Whether an organization want to become an early adopter of the latest version of Microsoft Dynamics or they want to wait.
  2. Being early adopter brings a lot of questions in terms of stability of the product.
  3. Availability of sufficiently skilled resources and partners to execute the implementation.
  4. How many success stories with successful implementations of AX 7 will effect an organization’s decision of opting into AX 7.Whether the organization is internally ready to go into Azure cloud and adopt ‘Pay As You Use’ model or they want to wait for the onsite deployment option of AX 7 which is scheduled to be released 6 months after cloud based version.
Of course going into Azure cloud will lead a lot of Financial savings in infrastructure, hardware and relevant IT personnel, but for medium sized organizations, Azure may still be an expensive option. A good comparison can be made on Azure website in terms of estimated ongoing cost of maintaining servers, hardware and infrastructure Vs. Azure and the savings it will bring.
Whatever decision an end user make for upgrading or implementing AX 7, it should be carefully discussed and considered with full cost benefits analysis in terms of financial and non-financial factors.
If you have any other factors, questions, comments, please feel free to add them in the comments.

Thanks
Shivam