Microsoft Dynamics ERP on Azure: Partners intrigued but moving forward with care

When it comes to forging new territory, no one wants to be a pioneer because the pioneers, as the saying goes, are the people with the arrows in their backs.

And that sentiment apparently applies to customers and partners who have not yet fully bought in to the idea of moving their Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics GP solutions to hosting in Windows Azure. The opportunities for Azure-hosted Dynamics ERP are out there, Dynamics experts explained to us in a range of interviews, but there are also risks for those who move too quickly.

Understanding the opportunity

At the most basic level, Windows Azure now allows Dynamics GP and NAV partners to offer another deployment method outside of the traditional on-premise deployment.  Many customers still face the traditional questions of whether to buy the hardware and infrastructure required to deploy Dynamics GP or NAV as well as licenses like SQL Server, or to look at a hosted option through a third party.

"Now partners are able to say, ‘we can give you the ability to host this environment in a Microsoft datacenter on Azure and we can make that environment as transparent as possible to your network while you consider whether you're going to go to a more hosted-type environment or go a partner solution in the future,'" explains Mariano Gomez, a Microsoft Dynamics GP MVP and EVP for middle market solutions at IntellPartners LLC..

Because the Azure environment is a Microsoft datacenter-hosted virtual infrastructure, it has some advantages if you are using the Dynamics GP 2013 web client, says Gomez. He has also