Sunrise bundles IP for Microsoft Dynamics AX with Lifecycle Services: Will more VARs follow?

As Lifecycle Services for Microsoft Dynamics AX evolves as a platform, it should become a more appealing tool for new and existing customers. And for AX partners, there is an indirect but potentially lucrative opportunity to boost sales, implementation quality, and customer engagement through LCS.

While LCS is a customer-centric tool (in that customers manage their individual LCS projects, including partner access), it is also designed to help partners adopt more repeatable practices in their pre-sales and implementation activities. LCS provides 600 business processes out of the box, and it allows for partner-specific and customer-specific templates to be added to that catalog. Custom AX processes are documented and saved, including videos of the processes being executed in AX.

Long time Dynamics AX partner Sunrise Technologies is now packaging its AX best practices in a new way that is LCS-friendly. CEO John Pence wrote yesterday that the Sunrise offering, which they call "QuickStart", collects "years of best practice workflows, design documents, configurations-all sorts of goodies, really-into one executable file that would bolt onto AX." The offering is not entirely about LCS, but it "marries Life Cycle Services and Sunrise best practice implementation methodologies together into the system." The offering is designed for use by Sunrise implementation teams and clients.

If LCS is a strong pre-sales tool on its own, as eBECS CEO Kevin Hall said it was for his team, then the opportunity to add value with a partner's own IP ought to be another strength - one that more partners will be taking advantage of. Pence notes in his blog post, the ...