Microsoft Believes Dynamics ERP Drives, and Benefits From, Azure Advances

As interesting as the upcoming Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and NAV 2013 releases may be for their Azure hosting options, they represent more for Microsoft than just a way to expand their ERP solutions.  At Convergence 2012, Microsoft Technical Fellow Mike Ehrenberg shared his latest views on how the investment in Azure is paying off for both the Dynamics and Azure teams.

Dynamics drives Azure

"Dynamics helps drive the requirements on the Azure platform," says Ehrenberg with regard to the journey to realizing his cloud vision. 

He recounted a conversation with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last year where he proposed two options for getting Dynamics ERP into the cloud.  "One was to do something very similar to what we did with CRM and put servers in a Microsoft data center.  The second option was to go direct to Azure and optimize for the Azure platform as a service.  And it took Steve about a nanosecond to come back and say that he knew the Azure approach would take us longer but it was more important to have a large, complex Microsoft-built application driving the requirements of the platform."

Updated Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capabilities of Azure have been "critical for getting NAV and GP onto Azure," says Ehrenberg.  Similarly, SQL Azure advances will enable multi-tenancy support for GP and NAV "at a platform level" rather than at an application level, something that Ehrenberg sees as "critically important" and dramatically different from competitors. 

And the third unique factor, Ehrenberg believes, is that Microsoft is embracing the assumption that hybrid solutions will remain for the foreseeable future. "There is ...