Microsoft Azure is the Platform for SAP and Microsoft Dynamics AX
SAP announced this week that it will make its core enterprise business offerings, including SAP Business Suite, HANA Developer Edition, and SAP Business All-In-One, available on Microsoft Azure. The announcement wasn’t a surprise— with more than half of the Fortune 500 already using Microsoft Azure many of SAP’s customers have likely been requesting the support for Microsoft Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for some time. The announcement does however add to a growing list of questions around the future of SAP’s platform strategy that to a large part has been attributed to Vishal Sikka who recently left SAP.
At Microsoft, customers have been able to benefit from faster time to value, increased agility and reduced costs of running their solution on Azure since the release of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3. As a customer that is already running SAP, but perhaps looking for support on specific workloads like subsidiary or divisional ERP or help with specific workloads or LOB strategies, having both solutions run on Microsoft Azure makes it even easier to connect than ever before. Moreover you can expect to see incremental benefit from leveraging Microsoft Dynamics AX on Microsoft Azure IaaS.
Beyond the benefits that AX will bring around increased agility, lower TCO and improved user adoption, you can expect to benefit from management tools that allow your IT group incremental control over, and management of, multiple instances, including those in Azure data-centers around the world so you can best serve your local subsidiaries.
However, as you may expect, our use of Azure expands significantly beyond deploying the solution in the cloud. At Microsoft Dynamics we are leveraging Azure for a number of scenarios, and it’s worth noting that these are available regardless of whether the solution is deployed on premise, in the cloud or using a hybrid approach. Key cloud powered scenarios including:
- Application Lifecycle Management – utilizing Lifecycle Services (LCS) to help customers benefit from cloud powered implementation planning, deployment, management and upgrade support.
- Disaster recovery – protecting customers data from disasters with a real-time, always-on solution in the Microsoft cloud.
- Infrastructure extension – connecting customers with modern apps and devices easily and securely with Microsoft Dynamics AX via Azure Service Bus & Active Directory Federated Services.
- Powering mobile apps – increasing customers’ efficiencies utilizing purpose-built apps including Microsoft Dynamics AX Mobile Time and Expense Management as well as enabling them to easily build, securely connect and manage their own mobile apps.
With both solutions committed to Microsoft Azure there has never been a time where it has been easier to extend your SAP solution with Microsoft Dynamics AX, so why not future-proof your business by adopting the platform of the future?
