Five Years In the Making: How The New Dynamics AX Reflects Microsoft's Cloud Evolution

The new release of Microsoft Dynamics AX was officially unveiled recently and enters public preview in December. It takes Microsoft's flagship ERP offering in a new direction, if not a surprising one. While the multi-year wait for the "new AX" might look like any other major release, it could offer a true stepping off point for the product.

The new release is interesting for a range of reasons, like its curious name (for now, we are using "new AX" while the situation evolves), its promise of a single codebase and architecture for both Azure and on-premise with frequent cloud updates, and its new pricing model (details coming soon, perhaps as early as this week's Convergence 2015 EMEA event). And it brings together ideals of enterprise cloud computing that leaders like Microsoft Technical Fellow Mike Ehrenberg have been discussing, evangelizing, and (to some extent) waiting on since enterprise cloud started gathering momentum (and hype).

As Ehrenberg told MSDynamicsWorld.com in a recent interview, only in the past year has Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise team brought together some of the final pieces that R&D needed in order to build the new AX to its intended specifications.

One early way to assess the new AX as a milestone is to look back at past planning and positioning by Microsoft and compare it to what we know about the new product. MSDynamicsWorld.com's own coverage of Dynamics AX, GP, and NAV product announcements and interviews stretching back more than five years help explain how Microsoft has been lining up its cloud ERP strategy over several years, starting with broad goals of five to six years ago and, over time, ...