dynamicsmatters: The Dynamics Product Range PII

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Источник: http://dynamicsmatters.blogspot.com/...range-pii.html
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I concluded my previous post by stating that not a lot has changed from 2002 to today, and that is true from a market penetration perspective as well as measured by market share of each product in the various geographies that the products are sold in.

As best gleaned from the number of re-sellers and the market perception as well as gartner analysis reports that I have had access to.

However in one respect something is changing, time is moving on and the initially stated goal of powering ahead to 10 billion dollars of sales by 2011 looks increasingly hard to acheive. From page 24 of the 2006 annual report by Microsoft we can see that growth has been good, but inline with general Microsoft growth and not sufficent to accomplish the goal set at the outset.

In the 4 years since the second acquisition the turnover has doubled and more importantly the business unit is in the black by a small margin. However the plan called for more than doubling the turnover every 2 years during this 8 year period, which means that to hit the target would require almost 80% cumulated growth every year for the next 4 years.

Which is ambituous to say the least.

I perceive that in order to get closer to an interesting growth rate for the product range Microsoft does need to activate a crash program pick a horse to ride on, in other words a product.

The candidates I see are :

1. A new product the fabled "Green" that was to have seen daylight in 2004.

2. Great Plains a product with a client base of around 60 K mostly in the US and LATAM countries, with no inbuilt modification tools but with a large verticalisation base in the US market.

3. Solomon, not to be considered as a serious replace all candidate

4. Navision, a good all round product as is GP with a similar client base of around 50K clients all over the world, with an inbuilt 4GL based proprietary development language. Unfortunately it does not scale well especially on a SQL database. With a large verticalistion database which however is not very portable between country versions as these tend to be too different.

5. Axapta, a good all round product as is GP and Nav with a much smaller client base of around 6K clients again world wide, with an inbuilt development environment based on C++ / C# like development. Scales well and is natively supported only in SQL databases, has a large verticalisation base all over the world, with if done correctly easier portability between countries of the developpment. Downsides are that it is targeted only at larger customers in its current pricing schemes.

To my eyes I only see 2 viable candidates, Green which of course by far is the preferable solution and in second place Axapta.

Navision has difficulties in scaling beyond 10-15 telesales operators, the native database is operating using table locks and the SQL version has issues with some of the screen constructs that form part of the charm of Navision.

Great Plains does not offer international coverage but might be an interesting play if one only were focused on LATAM.

Solomon forget basically in this context.

However when looking at what MS should do it is of course instructive to look at what really happened. History and inertia count for a lot in MS.

So what has happened from July 2002 until today with the above.

Green:
Well a lot of talk and quite a few rumours, and if you do not factor in the MBF link in the sidebar then basically nothing has happened in 4 1/2 years. And from what I read the development work on MBF and Green started in the GP group so before 2002.

Axapta:
in September 2002 version 3 came out and then nothing until July/August this year and we are all awaiting the SP1 release which to me is the first full release as it includes the markets and all the functionality / databases. So one version in 4 1/2 years.

Navision
in September 2002 version 3 came out then 3.1 then 3.5 then 4.0 and early next year 5.0 is coming out. 3-4 major functional releases.

GP
Had 3 major releases in that time frame.

It seems that Axapta is the poor cousin in terms of attention from the product division.

Green obviously must have a lot of attention however no result is being seen concretely from the work carried out.

Are we to conclude from this that GP and Nav are the only products that we as customers should consider today ?

The official story from Microsoft is the one as stated in the previous post, all products are maintained (as we can see from the analysis not with the same level of activity however) until 2013 and all products "will be" somewhere in "Green".

The nebulous manner in which the later is stated time after time leaves me to conclude that no one, least of all Microsoft knows how they are going to achieve anywhere close to this goal in the future let alone by 2008 where wave 2 (the new green) is slated to arrive.

As this has now been discussed and presented for 4 years and it is and was presented as being 2 years away throughout that time frame I am quite sceptical until we start seeing real prototypes coming out of the lab.

Again my posting is getting too lengthy so I am going to stop here and continue later.

/Sven

Источник: http://dynamicsmatters.blogspot.com/...range-pii.html

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Источник: http://dynamicsmatters.blogspot.com/...ange-piii.html
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I ended my previous post on this subject by reviewing several facts, basically Ax has had one new version in 4 years under MS, Nav has had 4 new versions, GP has had 3 new versions.

Inspite of the above facts I concluded that MS had two options as regards choice of "The" product with which to replace the others, one is "Green" the other is Ax.

Let me explain my reasoning for this.

MS have a general policy of moving everything to .NET, imminently we will have .NET3 or formerly WinFX, I will not comment that here as others have already done so on the web just do a search on the subject in your favourite search tool.

The language in which you develop in Navision C/AL is a 4GL giving very compact code, but also it is very hard to see how you could translate it too C#.
Dexterity the language you develop GP in is closer to C++ but still it is unwieldy http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...ools_dexterity, take a look for yourself on MSDN.

From a pure elegance point of view Ax to me is the closest thing MS has today in it's arsenal to a C# language with an ERP solution built in. That does not mean that I believe that this will necessarily be the platform / solution that is necessarily chosen for the future, but I believe it is the one that comes the closest to being it.

If I were a customer today and I had to plunk down real money on a project that I knew was going to be for a life expectancy of at least 10 years, I believe that buying Ax will give me the smallest ongoing costs over any of the other Dynamics products.

Unless of course I would be willing not to follow MS and upgrade my platform when the time comes and MS gives us "The Dynamics product".

There are as always caveats in the above, because Ax is not globally distributed to the same level (there are markets with no or few experienced partners), because the pricing remains a sore point, because overall Ax has the smallest installed base (the latest sales pitch I saw from MS states 6,500 Ax, 45,000 Nav, and 60,000 GP). You may reconsider or consider otherwise, and of course given that MS want to carry on selling all products in the interim they will never state the above, let alone confirm it.

All MS statements in this regard carry what I would call marketing language, stating we will build a new product that envelops all the existing products. Now from a marketing standpoint I can see that is a desirable goal, but how from concrete standpoint are you going to merge code unit 13 from Nav with the SalesFormLetter_Invoice class from Ax, and whatever the equivalent is in GP / Dexterity.

Further to this once MS have managed this internally, how about the dealer channel and the users, bringing everyone on to the next platform is going to be one gigantic challenge, and the real challenge facing MS with these purchases.

It is sometimes instructive to look back at history / current events elsewhere. Oracle has made similar big bets on purchasing other products. Initially there were combative words from Oracle itself stating the customers would be given incentives to move and the existing platforms would be encouraged to die.

Very soon after these initial scary announcements that SAP, Lawson and others were not tardy in reacting to the above announcement by offering competitive upgrades in order to lock down the customers, and using the confusion generated by the initial Oracle pronouncements about support and the future to gain marketshare.

Oracle very quickly changed the above and adopted what to me is a mirror image of MS's policy statements, stipulating continued development through at least 2013 etc etc. Funny as I repeat myself in stating that they chose exactly this date ;-).

However inspite of the above in the 2 years following the purchase (done in dec 2004) my echos from colleagues in the industry is that the Peoplesoft and JD Edwards consultants are fleeing, at least in the country offices in Europe. Cannot speak for the US market as I am not active in it. Microsoft seems to be of the same opinion as they have in this time frame come out with specialised training programmes that are designed to cross train consultants specifically from these products onto Ax.

Being an Ax expert right now is a golden time frame to be one, however I believe that MS is going to change many things in the product over the next few years. V4 is only a beginning, no more 2 tier clients, enforced link to an AD server, much improved AOS, etc. And as an Ax person you have to be awake and follow these things closely, also of course you have to be willing to jump ship accross to "Green" when and if it is wheeled out the advantage will be yours.

/Sven

Источник: http://dynamicsmatters.blogspot.com/...ange-piii.html