I like your article. Lots of changes over the last year or so for Microsoft Dynamics resellers, but you have to keep thinking logical, not emotively. Fewer partners make other opportunities for those that are left. Microsoft also has pages within its public facing websites that position the products. At Renown we provide more that 1 Dynamics ERP product. I agree, AX is more expensive to implement, but as soon as the customer needs development (and they are looking at the other Dynamics ERP products), that price differential over the life of a system may just disappear with the out of the box functionality of AX..... I have also written a story on this at; www.renown.com.au/MicrosoftDynamics/Dynamics_AX/Dynamics_AX_vs.aspx Michael

Great article!!! Touched on some key points. However, I'm not sure where people get the numbers to say that AX is more expensive to implement than GP. Take a 50 user AX or GP implementation, and if there's any significant cost difference between the two, someone is cutting corners and putting the project at risk. E.g rushing to configure rather than investing the time and resources to first understand the business and architecting an end to end solution that makes the business run better. I've implemented about 12 GP implementations around the 20-90 user mark, and I've done about 9 AX implementations around the same user point. The cost difference between the two was insignificant. Regardless of the software, you are going to do some key tasks: Project Planning Data migration Report modifications or creation (Mmgt Reporter) hardware/software deployment Organizational change management etc.. Training Acceptance Testing Those are the stuff that cost money not the config... module for module, A good AX consultant can configure AX in much the same time as a GP consultant does. when I've got my requirements, I usually do my AX configs something over a weekend, or in a week. My experience has been that people in the GP world really do a bad job of implementing. They cheap out, and most projects end horribly. They take a 5 user GP implementation mentality into a 40 user implementation and things just head sideways. AX implementations tend to cost a little bit more because our enterprise customers are really demanding that we implement using formalized processes -- business process maps, project plans, test scripts, data migration strategy, training scripts, organizational change management strategy etc.... In the end, they do get a solution that really works for their business because we can tweek the system to meet some specific needs. Those tasks have very little to do with AX or GP, as a product, but more so with risk mitigation. Nevertheless, I think GP is a great product, it won't go away for another 5-10yrs until they can figure out a way to migrate from GP to AX over a weekend. cheers, Francis