Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations will offer an on-premise option, GM announces

Microsoft will extend the deployment options for Dynamics 365 for Operations (formerly AX 7) to solutions running on-premise or in partner-hosted environments, fully outside of Azure, beginning around the summer of 2017. The announcement of the added approach, along with new details on federated solution plans, came in a new blog post last night from Microsoft GM Sri Srinivasan.

He wrote:

"[S]ome organizations simply are not ready to store their company's mission critical data in the cloud. This requirement, in many cases, is due to industry regulations, country or geographic cloud adoption, recent data center investments, or an organization's enterprise standards. For these customers, we are excited to announce a new deployment option that will not require their business data to be stored in the cloud."

Whereas earlier guidance had allowed for some offline business processes while still requiring a cloud-based instance to act as the "single view of the business across distributed on-premise environments", the new option will give customers the ability to turn off cloud synchronization, keeping all transactions and the systems that enable them, in a local or partner hosted data center.

The new change by Microsoft comes after some very direct criticism from partners and existing AX customers related to the originally announced plans in late 2016, which included hybrid scenarios but not a full on-premise option.

The new announcement also identifies the limitations of choosing the on-premise option, namely the absence of a range of improvements to ERP that Microsoft has engineered specifically ...