Someone Agrees about the Dynamics AX Connector for SAP

Yesterday, I wrote about my take on the SAP moves for the bid on Sybase, and also the other moves going on, that basically points to SAP giving in on the mid market to the Leader: Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Link: Looking into SAP's bid for Sybase, and what this means for Dynamics AX

I also go on to point out that the Two Tier move by Microsoft with the Dynamics AX connector for SAP is a move into the SAP client base, with a focus on the Divisons and moving into the Larger Enterprise.

Lee Pender, of RCPMag.com, a couple of hours after posting what I did about all of this, he posted on his blog similar thought lines, in the following post.: Microsoft Seeks To Infiltrate SAP as Sapphire Begins

From the post.:
"[F]irms can implement the cheaper, simpler AX at satellite locations and let workers get used to it. And when it comes time for an SAP customer to reevaluate ERP, maybe Dynamics makes its way into the picture based on the performance and simplicity of AX in the sticks."

Now one section Lee says AX is not designed for Larger Enterprise, however Lee does not implement AX, and I believe his sources are incorrect in giving him this statement. Dynamics AX can be any companies full scale ERP package.

With that aside, it seems that Mr. Pender agrees with what I was saying, or at least is thinking along the same lines.

So here we go, Dynamics AX pushing deeper and deeper into the bread & butter of SAP's larger enterprise, where for some reason the norm for a long time was "If it's complicated and takes a legion of consultants to implement, then it must be right for larger enterprise."

And, as I stated yesterday, I believe Sybase move - while gaining some form a of mobile and cloud platform - actually is about trying to 'buy-a-stack', in order to focus in on shoring up against Microsoft threating the SAP core.

And now, lets look at the cloud offerings that come with Sybase. It's not a platform, in which Windows Azure, or even Google's AppEngine is. It's built on Amazon's EC2, which is really IaaS. Pure cloud services can't be built with this. Not the way pure cloud services can be developed on Azure and Google's AppEngine.

Therefore, though it is a move into the cloud, it's targeted more at the Infrastructe level, which turns into hosted versions of the following.:

• Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) mission-critical data management system


• SQL Anywhere embedded and mobile database


• Sybase IQ column-based analytics server


• Replication Server for data movement and synchronization

Interesting yes, but a true cloud offering? A cloud platform? No!

This is going to be something to watch for sure, and again I could be wrong in what all this means. Just reading the tea leaves, and connecting the dots, this post and the one from yesterday sum up about what I think this all really boils down too.

I will ask as Lee Pender did on his blog, what's your thoughts? Do you agree? Do you disagree? All comments are welcomed!

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