Microsoft’s Dynamics ERP Cloud Plans Depend on Continued R&D Collaboration

With last week's Convergence 2011 announcement that Microsoft plans to start supporting and, to some extent, deploying cloud versions of its Dynamics ERP solutions starting with NAV "7", the company made it clear that Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and the other foundational Microsoft products on which Dynamics relies must also be ready to do the job.

"I have not [before] seen the amount of collaboration with different R&D departments that I've seen today" inside of Microsoft, Kirill Tatarinov, corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions, told an audience at Convergence.

According to Dynamics ERP director of product marketing Guy Weismantel, the recent work between the Microsoft Dynamics ERP teams and other groups like the Windows Azure team have been "very collaborative and we've been in very close consultation with those groups to understand their development plans. [Other departments in Microsoft] are doing real-time development too as they see requirements change, as they figure out what they're going to land."

But Weismantel concedes that dependence on other groups in Microsoft can have drawbacks as well. "Microsoft Dynamics is the beneficiary of these investments [in other departments], but there's a flipside and that's that we're reliant on these investments as well." 

While the Convergence announcement indicates that Microsoft has a degree of confidence in the shared goals of the various Dynamics and Azure groups, representatives repeatedly stressed that more detail on Azure support will be revealed in the coming months as dependencies are met and  product release schedules become more certain.

According to Hal Howard, corporate vice president for Microsoft Dynamics R&D, uptake of Azure is a main point of collaboration for his team. "...