Microsoft Wednesday renamed its suite of next-generation business applications for the mid-market and reiterated its plans to tie them together with Office on the front end and bundles of infrastructure software on the back end.
The company will be unveiling Microsoft Dynamics, the evolution of Microsoft’s ambitious Project Green, which was reorganized in March from a rip-and-replace strategy to one of the incremental upgrades to integrate its suite of business applications.
Each of the five Microsoft business applications will be re-branded with the Dynamics name as the products are upgraded on their regular release cycles.
The first two will be Great Plains 9.0 and Microsoft CRM 3.0. The two will ship by year-end as Dynamics GP and Dynamics CRM.
The rest of the release cycle will happen in 2006, with Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta 4.0) set for release before July 1, and Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision 5.0) and Dynamics SL (formerly Solomon 7.0) slated for release before year-end.
Observers say Microsoft is playing catch-up with SAP and Oracle to provide business software to the mid-market that is designed around XML and the Web services concept of reusable network services as part business process automation.
“Customers are going to look at Project Green, Fusion from Oracle and NetWeaver from SAP and are gong to judge not only who is going to give me the best set of platform functionality, but actual functional business processes that are encapsulated in Web services that let me do this plug-and-play, mix-and-match applications environment,” says Joshua Greenbaum, principal with Enterprise Applications Consulting. “This is where Microsoft is going to have to go. But it needs to specify what is the schedule and timeline for getting all those services Web-services enabled and for turning Project Green into something that is actually functional from a user standpoint.”
Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chief software architect, Wednesday will unveil Dynamics in Redmond, Wash., during the company’s first ever Business Summit for mid-market companies (50 to 1,000 employees). Nearly 500 customers and partners are slated to attend.
Gates also will announce a future server bundle codenamed Centro that will be targeted at mid-market companies and made up of Windows Server Longhorn, which is expected to ship in 2007; the next version of Exchange, the next release of security software including Internet Security and Acceleration Server and next generation System Center management technology. Microsoft will integrate those servers and tools into a single bundle.
The bundle is a follow-on to the July launch of the Windows Server System for Midsize Business promotion, a specially priced bundle of Windows Server, Exchange Server and Microsoft Operations Manager Workgroup Edition.
In March, Microsoft re-plotted its Project Green strategy, which was originally designed to converge the myriad of business applications Microsoft had acquired or developed in-house onto a single code base. That plan was not well received by users and resellers alike. Microsoft said it would instead deliver Project Green in two waves, the first being integration around Office as client software and the second being around server infrastructure.
“The big idea is to accelerate the delivery of some of the core concepts behind Green such as enhanced user interfaces, embedded analytics, and tighter Office/Outlook integration and make them part of current products rather than rewriting everything from scratch, which is a long and arduous process,” says Bruce Richardson, an analyst with AMR Research. “This is a smart move. It should help push new upgrades and first-time sales for Great Plains. The Office/Outlook integration is a big deal because it merges the utility of the classic desktop with ERP functionality.”
The Microsoft Dynamics applications represent the first wave of Microsoft’s plan and will integrate the business applications around Office as the common interface. In June, Microsoft said the forthcoming Office 12 would introduce Office Open XML formats with the goal of using XML for exposing the data created within Office applications to back-end systems, such as ERP and CRM, and to inject the data into business process workflows.
With Dynamics, Microsoft will release up to 50 role-based interfaces for Office applications such as Outlook, Excel and Word tailored for specific workers from sales executives to warehouse managers. Dynamics GP will include 25 role-based interfaces that can be configured and automatically pushed out from the server to desktops.
The role-based business software also will be integrated with Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server Reporting Services. Dynamics will build Web services integration first using Microsoft’s Web services framework known as ASMX before migrating to the Windows Communications Foundation (Indigo) with Longhorn Server.
“The key theme is we are transitioning our approach to the category from broad areas like accounting software to this role-based approach where you get a customized tailored desktop,” says James Utzschneider, general manager of Microsoft’s Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partner group.
Microsoft also announced the Windows Server System Assessment and Deployment Solution for Midsize Businesses, which includes tools and prescriptive guidance for assessment, migration and deployment of Windows infrastructure. The company also is launching a Midsize Business Center to help companies discover the IT capabilities they need and find Microsoft-centric systems integrators and partners to support their efforts.
Microsoft also has developed a streamlined licensing program called Open Value, introduced in July, that is targeted at midsize companies and focused on simplifying license tracking, upgrade cycles and management of software costs.
