By Richard Thompson

Large corporates which have a turnover in the billions of dollars must be slow ships to turn.
At TVision we’ve looked at the AX product since AX v2 and for the market we’re in (Small to Medium sized businesses who want a completely integrated ERP) and identified that as a product it wasn’t for us.
One just can’t escape the fact that implementing AX will cost at least 40% more in Licence, Implementation and Maintenance Costs and take at least 40% longer to get working.

If AX has the functionality that I need for my 250+ user business then it’s a strong candidate. But otherwise the NAV ERP Platform provides a far more lightweight, agile, robust, high-performing ERP. So if I want something beyond the ‘out of the box’ then the NAV ERP Platform which NAV 2013 represents is going to be hard to beat from a Return on Investment perspective.
However CEOs / CFOs need to watch out for all the siren voices both within their organisation and without who want the 40% ‘uplift’ for costs on their CVs and in their pockets. All that does is reduce the RoI for your business; not what you want (I hope!)

5 years ago a study was undertaken around AX in which the results in the UK showed that more than 50% of the customers using or implementing AX were both unhappy with the product and with their AX partner.
Microsoft reacted by throwing money at both the product and the partners, buying in a range of AX functionality which had been previously developed by AX Partners and building it into the product to cope with complaints about the how the base functionality fell well short of what was promised during the Sales process.

The partner channel was severely pruned both by Microsoft and by economic conditions. In the year to June 2013 only 5 new AX licences were sold in the UK shared amongst 11 partners. Yes; at least 6 partners made no new licence sales. More if the 5 weren’t spread evenly.

Has that made a difference?

Not according to the numbers recently announced in USA for worldwide performance which shows that NAV is currently outselling both AX and CRM at the rate of 8 to 1. That’s 8 new NAV sites for every 1 AX or CRM site. It outsells GP at 2 to 1.

And Microsoft almost certainly understands RoI.

So you’re the new CEO / Management Team. Your brief is to turn Microsoft from a decade of fabulous innovation and botched products into something which understands the future of IT. But you need to get the best RoI that you can out of everywhere to give you the muscle you need to compete with Google and Google Aps, Apple and iOS, Samsung and Android.
And when you’re talking to the Dynamics team and they produce the figures about licences and sites that I’ve just discussed, where are you going to invest your money going forward? At 8 times the rate at which you’re selling AX and CRM and twice the rate for GP are you going to continue sinking more money in, in the hope of getting the volumes of AX and CRM up?

Or are you going to follow the wisdom of crowds and start really getting behind your market leader?

Yes; that’s what the figures say. NAV is Microsoft’s Market Leader in the Dynamics ERP world.
So if you’re the new CEO what do you do?

And it feels like the penny is starting to drop.

In Seattle they do care. We are seeing a ‘resurgence’ around NAV going forward with NAV 2015 / ‘Crete’ slated for release in early 2015 while it’s still AX 2012 R3 for the ‘high end’ product.

Despite the efforts of some at Microsoft to pigeonhole NAV in the mid-market, NAV users have continued to exploit the flexibility of the product from 2 user cloud based startups to 8000+ user global implementations. NAV’s ‘resurgence’ is as close as Microsoft is coming to admitting it was wrong. NAV’s popularity in the market has never waned.