Navigating the New Cloud Opportunities of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2

While technology progresses at a seemingly unstoppable pace and the opportunities of cloud computing and SaaS enterprise solutions seem limitless, Microsoft Dynamics NAV partners and customers have been left, to some degree, scratching their heads.  For small and mid-sized businesses, Dynamics NAV has historically offered little in terms of solutions not delivered on-premise.

But with Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2, the latest NAV release, Microsoft has taken the steps needed to not only enable unprecedented flexibility in deployment options, but also demonstrate its determination to enter the cloud market for small and mid-market ERP, if not directly, then by enabling the Dynamics partner channel.

Before the Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 release, NAV wasn't too cloud-friendly. In fact, SaaS offerings for NAV have been pretty much earthbound. Its architecture and technical capacities largely favored the on-premise deployment model. Hosting was possible, but it offered few of the benefits that SaaS software offerings typically bring to the table. If we had talked in a "pre-R2" world about compelling advantages of a SaaS Dynamics NAV solution, then it likely would have been a short conversation. NAV was simply a domestic animal - as long as you kept it on-premise, it served you well.

R2 is changing this fundamentally.

NAV over Internet

There are two primary reasons for low feasibility of SaaS NAV (I'll touch on what it means to run NAV "in the cloud" a bit later) in previous versions. In versions prior to 2009, NAV was a fat-client without any support for distributed architectures, and while 2009 resolved this issue, it brought a new one: it didn't allow non-intranet deployment due to security restrictions. R2 is now addressing both these issues, efficiently.

To put it simply, earlier releases of NAV 2009 ...