Microsoft Plans to Launch Dynamics AX 7 on Azure in Q1 2016

Microsoft has narrowed down its timeframe for a Dynamics AX 7 release to the first quarter of calendar year 2016. That news comes from Dynamics AX general manager Dan Brown at a keynote presentation at AXUG Summit 2015 today.

AX 7 has been in preview since September, and general availability in early 2016 will open it up for Azure-based deployments. Six months later, Microsoft will provide the software for use in on-premise and hybrid environments. At that time they will also add many more localizations and a data migration toolkit. Upgrades will be supported from AX 2012 at that time and migrations from AX 2009. 

AX 7's functional scope will be on par with the upcoming AX 2012 R3 CU 10 release, which is due in December 2015. But AX 7 will also differ from 2012 R3 in a range of ways, as Microsoft has previously explained, including the new web-based user experience, Power BI integration and content pack, use of in-memory SQL Server capabilities, and a "substantially improved" integration platform.

But the cloud-focused efforts for AX are not limited to AX 7. Through Lifecycle Services (LCS) and Azure-based instances of AX 2012, Microsoft believes it has gained momentum in the cloud in the last year. There are more than 20,000 registered users for LCS working in 13,400 projects. And there are now more than 12,500 instances of Dynamics AX  running on Azure virtual machine architectures, from demo to dev/test to production.

Microsoft GM Sri Srinivasan told the AXUG Summit audience that his ...