The Dynamics Product Range PII

I concluded my previous post by stating that not a lot has changed from 2002 to today, and that is true from a market penetration perspective as well as measured by market share of each product in the various geographies that the products are sold in.

As best gleaned from the number of re-sellers and the market perception as well as gartner analysis reports that I have had access to.

However in one respect something is changing, time is moving on and the initially stated goal of powering ahead to 10 billion dollars of sales by 2011 looks increasingly hard to acheive. From page 24 of the 2006 annual report by Microsoft we can see that growth has been good, but inline with general Microsoft growth and not sufficent to accomplish the goal set at the outset.

In the 4 years since the second acquisition the turnover has doubled and more importantly the business unit is in the black by a small margin. However the plan called for more than doubling the turnover every 2 years during this 8 year period, which means that to hit the target would require almost 80% cumulated growth every year for the next 4 years.

Which is ambituous to say the least.

I perceive that in order to get closer to an interesting growth rate for the product range Microsoft does need to activate a crash program pick a horse to ride on, in other words a product.

The candidates I see are :

1. A new product the fabled "Green" that was to have seen daylight in 2004.

2. Great Plains a product with a client base of around 60 K mostly in the US and LATAM countries, with no inbuilt modification tools but with a large verticalisation base in the US market.

3. Solomon, not to be considered as a serious replace all candidate

4. Navision, a good all round product as is GP with a similar client base of around 50K clients all over the world, with an inbuilt 4GL based proprietary development language. Unfortunately it does not scale well especially on a SQL database. With a large verticalistion database which however is not very portable between country versions as these tend to be too different.

5. Axapta, a good all round product as is GP and Nav with a much smaller client base of around 6K clients again world wide, with an inbuilt development environment based on C++ / C# like development. Scales well and is natively supported only in SQL databases, has a large verticalisation base all over the world, with if done correctly easier portability between countries of the developpment. Downsides are that it is targeted only at larger customers in its current pricing schemes.

To my eyes I only see 2 viable candidates, Green which of course by far is the preferable solution and in second place Axapta.

Navision has difficulties in scaling beyond 10-15 telesales operators, the native database is operating using table locks and the SQL version has issues with some of the screen constructs that form part of the charm of Navision.

Great Plains does not offer international coverage but might be an interesting play if one only were focused on LATAM.

Solomon forget basically in this context.

However when looking at what MS should do it is of course instructive to look at what really happened. History and inertia count for a lot in MS.

So what has happened from July 2002 until today with the above.

Green:
Well a lot of talk and quite a few rumours, and if you do not factor in the MBF link in the sidebar then basically nothing has happened in 4 1/2 years. And from what I read the development work on MBF and Green started in the GP group so before 2002.

Axapta:
in September 2002 version 3 came out and then nothing until July/August this year and we are all awaiting the SP1 release which to me is the first full release as it includes the markets and all the functionality / databases. So one version in 4 1/2 years.

Navision
in September 2002 version 3 came out then 3.1 then 3.5 then 4.0 and early next year 5.0 is coming out. 3-4 major functional releases.

GP
Had 3 major releases in that time frame.

It seems that Axapta is the poor cousin in terms of attention from the product division.

Green obviously must have a lot of attention however no result is being seen concretely from the work carried out.

Are we to conclude from this that GP and Nav are the only products that we as customers should consider today ?

The official story from Microsoft is the one as stated in the previous post, all products are maintained (as we can see from the analysis not with the same level of activity however) until 2013 and all products "will be" somewhere in "Green".

The nebulous manner in which the later is stated time after time leaves me to conclude that no one, least of all Microsoft knows how they are going to achieve anywhere close to this goal in the future let alone by 2008 where wave 2 (the new green) is slated to arrive.

As this has now been discussed and presented for 4 years and it is and was presented as being 2 years away throughout that time frame I am quite sceptical until we start seeing real prototypes coming out of the lab.

Again my posting is getting too lengthy so I am going to stop here and continue later.

/Sven