DALLAS -- At this week's annual Convergence conference for users of its Dynamics enterprise application products, Microsoft officials said the company is on schedule with its product roadmap and that no sooner than 2009 will Microsoft's five enterprise products -- Great Plains, Axapta, Navision, Solomon, and Microsoft CRM -- be merged into a single product line.
Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) officials, however, acknowledged that boiling all of those products down to a single, common enterprise applications code base is proving to be a challenge -- one that has caused the company to alter parts of its game plan. Specifically, officials said this week, they no longer feel it is feasible to build a converged product line on top of a single, common data model.
It may be necessary, according to Mike Ehrenberg, architect for Microsoft's MBS products, for the software giant to use different data models and different tools for different implementations of the converged enterprise application product to suit customers at different-sized companies with different levels of experience.
Also, Ehrenberg said, prior to the release of a converged enterprise application product, Microsoft has decided not to spend time and resources on tightly integrating its Microsoft CRM product with the current Dynamics AX (Axapta) and Dynamics NV (Navision) ERP suites. Those products, Ehrenberg noted during a general session, already have built-in CRM functionality. Forcing current customers to switch, he said, "would be seen as a take-away."
Microsoft is still determined to get to a single, converged ERP product operating on a converged code base. "But," Ehrenberg said, "we have a significant amount of work to do."
In the meantime, MBS officials said, the business unit continues to execute on a roadmap that calls for a series of iterative upgrades of existing enterprise application products leading in 2009 or 2010 to a converged product that is based on a service-oriented architecture and can be easily changed using tools that work off of models of a company's business processes. That rollout is on schedule, Microsoft officials said, despite the recent delay until early next year of the company's next-generation operating system, Vista, on which much of the planned new functionality will be based.
The migration to that merged product will take place in two waves. Wave 1, now underway, involves adoption of consistent, role-based user interfaces that borrow from commonly used Microsoft tools such as Office; workflow supported across the products by Microsoft's Sharepoint services; integrated, easy-to-use business intelligence tools based on features in SQL Server 2005; and the exposure of Web services that can be used to build composite applications around MBS's existing ERP products.
Those Wave 1 enhancements are rolling out now, on schedule, and will continue to do so through next year, Microsoft officials said. Dynamics SL 6.5 (Solomon), Dynamics GP (Great Plains) 9.0, and Dynamics CRM 3.0 are already shipping. Microsoft plans to ship the next release, version 4.0 of Dynamics AX, in June of this year, with version 5.0 of Dynamics NV to be released in the first half of 2007.
Wave 2 enhancements to the Dynamics line will take place from 2007 to 2009 and will culminate in the migration to a single code base. Wave 2 enhancements will include further user interface improvements, incorporating many new usability concepts from Vista; new workflow functionality using Windows Workflow Foundation, another Vista component; and the increased sharing of functional modules between applications.
Wave 2 releases will include Dynamics AX 5.0 and Dynamics GP 20, both planned for 2007; Dynamics GP version 22 planned for 2008 or 2009; Dynamics NV release 6.0; Dynamics SL 7.0, due next year; and two releases of Dynamics CRM, due in 2007 and 2008.
Wave 2 enhancements, MBS officials said, will enable customers to easily create what the company calls composite applications, collections of structured and unstructured data from sources -- including ERP systems, e-mail, video, RSS feeds and maps -- presented through consistent portal interfaces. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who demonstrated examples of these composite applications, calls them "mash-ups."
Manufacturers attending Convergence generally expressed optimism about the future of composite applications presented by Microsoft and said they have little concern about future support for their existing products or about the eventual need to migrate to a converged Dynamics product.
Mark Delvecchio, IT and ERP business manager at book manufacturer Webcom (Toronto), told Managing Automation that he is confident that Microsoft will continue to support his current 4.0 release of Dynamics NV and that migrating to the new converged product will be painless. Webcom, which had to extend Dynamics NV to support needed project estimation capabilities, said he also expects those enhancements to carry over to or be supported directly in the new, converged product.
Although most manufacturers seemed satisfied with the current direction and the roadmap for the Dynamics products, Microsoft officials acknowledged there are still holes both in the current products and the roadmap.
James Utzschneider, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics marketing, said in an interview that many customers are asking for stronger multi-company and multi-site support in Dynamics AX, features that will be added over the product's next two releases.
And Ehrenberg said that Microsoft is investigating the addition of a master data management (MDM) product. While ERP competitors SAP and Oracle have pushed the master data management concept as an important piece of the evolution to SOA-based enterprise applications, Microsoft is currently without an MDM product or public strategy.
Still, despite those holes, Microsoft officials say they are committed to the enterprise software market, noting that financial results from the company's MBS group have recently been on the rise.
The MBS products, Gates said, "have more head room for growth than just about any business we're in."