After the Microsoft Dynamics Technical Conference: What AX and CRM professionals should know about the roadmap, cloud planning, and Power BI

The Microsoft Dynamics Technical conference evolved this year, evolving into a destination for both Dynamics AX and CRM technical professionals. While the product roadmaps move at different speeds, one of the primary goals seems clear: preparing technical professionals to adopt the latest product releases quickly and help keep partner and customer organizatns moving forward with Microsoft's business solutions.

Some of this year's event material was communicated under NDA, especially, it seems, on the Dynamics CRM side of the event. Some of that information could come to light at Convergence 2015 in March. We tracked several AX and CRM experts who were at the event via their tweets, where they shared some specific points of information, as well as larger themes and roadmap plans through 2015.

For another perspective, we talked to Andrew Snodgrass, research vice president at Directions on Microsoft, who covers Microsoft Dynamics, Power BI, SQL (on-premises and Cloud), Lync, Skype, and Yammer. He was on site at the Dynamics Technical event, which he says met many of his expectations.

Most broadly, Azure and Power BI are going to play a significant role in both products' futures, Snodgrass said - for both cloud and on-premise customers.

"The quote I liked was ‘customers should get comfortable with Azure,'" he says. "Really, this makes a lot of sense. Azure has a huge array of impressive components that currently benefit CRM and could benefit AX as well - Power BI, Machine Learning, Azure Storage, Azure SQL Database, and Social Listening, among others.  Microsoft is only deploying these in the cloud where they ...