Azure-hosted instances of Microsoft Dynamics AX top 5,000 as partners, customers explore possibilities

Microsoft is putting a clear message out to Dynamics AX partners this week at Convergence 2015: if you want to be ready for the next major release, AX 7, be ready to get your clients using Lifecycle Services (LCS) and be ready to talk cloud.

LCS now has more than 20,000 registered users and 13,000 projects, including 2,000 that are active AX 2012 R3 customer projects. 92% of partners have used the product in some way.

Microsoft also says it is seeing momentum in Azure usage for AX, (which LCS also helps to accelerate), with over 5,000 known Azure-based deployments of AX 2012 R3 worldwide. These are AX instances focused on "business support", Microsoft says, primarily for development, test, demo, and disaster recovery.

While some Dynamics AX customers are already on Azure in production with partner support, Microsoft's Pepijn Richter says the AX team will await Azure's full support of premium storage before they will more widely promote the idea of AX on Azure in production. Premium storage guarantees certain level of transaction speed and capacity to ensure that enough pipe is accessible to AX at all times. Transaction-heavy business applications like Dynamics AX rely on this level of performance, and Richter says Microsoft strongly recommends customers use it when it becomes available in production for Azure VMs (it's currently in public preview).

"Customers are just testing the waters [for now]- it's safe and comfortable to do that with Azure," he says. "We are working with customers to test out Azure and when [premium storage] opens up, we will see a lot of production environments coming online."