Barbara Gengler | April 08, 2008
MICROSOFT has previewed its newest enterprise resource planning application and its chief executive says the company is a serious player in business applications.
"This is mission-critical for us," Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told the audience at Microsoft's Convergence user conference.Microsoft was the leading provider of enterprise software by dollar volume, he said.
Mr Ballmer, who previewed the next version of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, scheduled to ship in the first half of this year, said the company was investing heavily in its Dynamics products.
"Dynamics AX 2009 will get a speed boost," he said, adding the software "shows about a 70 per cent performance improvement when it runs on top of the new Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008".
He insisted Project Green was dead and there were no plans to converge the company's four ERP products.
Microsoft also announced the availability of online services such as PayPal and Chase Paymentech Solutions as well as integration of its Dynamics applications with eBay.
The new Microsoft Dynamics AX 2008 enterprise resource planning suite has been developed in collaboration with students at the IT University of Copenhagen based on "desirability studies" that assess how useable (or how desirable) the full range of Dynamics ERP and customer relationship management applications screens would be to users.
This process, which Microsoft also calls Feel IT, added more than 30 user interfaces, called Role Centres, that Dynamics AX 2009 users can work with.
This approach, called RoleTrailored, provides access to data, reports and alerts.
Feel IT was very interesting, Enderle Group analyst Rob Enderle said.
The Feel It effort actually is on an Apple-like path in that it is focused not just on making the products easy to use but desired, he says.
This sets the goal of trying to make tasks related to these products interesting enough that people actually look forward to doing them. "How they measure themselves against this goal will be interesting and I think that were this goal universal Microsoft would be much better thought of and its products much more highly valued than either now are," he said.
"Most of us would gladly pay more for a tool we will enjoy using."
In a separate announcement at the conference, Paccess, a global supply chain integrator, said it had selected Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 as its enterprise resource planning system, replacing an Oracle 11.0.3 system that had become very expensive to maintain.
The company expects it will save $US1 million over the next five years.
Paccess, a 300-person company, focuses on helping customers improve their packaging, materials sourcing and supply chain operations. "We tried to add five users to the Oracle system, but we would have had to pay Oracle $365,000 because of a licence-model change," Paccess IT vice president Nina Palludan said. "The five-year total cost of ownership for Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 was more than $US1 million ($1.1 million) less than Oracle's, even though we already owned the Oracle software."
According to Palludan, training costs for employees were far lower with Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 that they would have been with the Oracle system.
A more intuitive user interface, improved reporting, support for growth and close integration with Excel were also named as reasons for choosing Microsoft's product.
"The overall lower cost of ownership with Microsoft Dynamics AX will allow us to focus our resources," Palludan said.