Harris Corp. Picks Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 for Development of New Advanced Advertising Agency Platform

Harris Corp. and Microsoft are working together to develop an advanced advertising agency platform powered by Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Harris plans to host the solution itself and sell it directly to customers on a per-user subscription basis. Beta testing is scheduled throughout the first half of 2012, with general availability expected in the third quarter of 2012.

"We at Harris have been providing financial agency management solutions to this vertical for about 40 years," said Joe Lampert, managing director for the Advertising Solutions Group at Harris Corp. "And Microsoft has been pursuing us as a technology partner across a variety of areas for some time."

Driven by industry consolidation

The companies decided to focus on the advertising agency market because with the consolidation in the industry over the past dozen or so years, those organizations had been looking for the ability to migrate to much more robust financial platforms-without much success.

"What we have found is these holding companies have acquired and tried to blend together various marketing services type organizations," Lampert said. "So it's no longer that you're just looking at an advertising agency. You might have under the same overall umbrella a conglomeration of a creative services firm, a media buying firm, a public relations firm, and a sports promotion; so the ability to blend together and roll up and summarize financially all the various disciplines is of key importance."

Lampert said these organizations have very deep needs in the area of resource planning on a global stage so they need to be able to track staff resources and manage the posting of time across many geographies. And they also need to be able to locate and report upon ...