In September 2009 we announced the acceleration of our industry strategy for Microsoft Dynamics AX with completing 4 acquisitions across the process manufacturing, professional services and retail industries, on top of an already strong product capability for discrete manufacturing and wholesale/distribution. These acquisitions were an important step for us to provide common industry functionality as part of our ERP offering.

Today we announced the General Availability of the new solution retail, Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail, which was announced in September. In this blog post on The Edge, Michael Griffiths does a good job explaining some of the key customer pain points that this solution addresses and how this new solution fits in the overall Retail strategy within Microsoft.

To provide some background on our industry strategy for Dynamics AX; for us, an important focus with this strategy is to engineer “business process integrity” out-of-the-box for the key business process in our focus industries within one ERP architecture, this I believe has several benefits:

• It enables our partners to accelerate the development of robust vertical solutions for our customers. A great example of this is the recent announcement of Retail ERP specialist Aldata. Aldata will start providing vertical applications for home electronics, do-it-yourself, and sports & fashion retailers;
• Providing these different types of Industry processes into one ERP system, allows our customers to pursue business process innovation, picking the process they require to support their business. For example, a manufacturing organization wants to add retail operations in a vertical integration business strategy. With other ERP solutions, customers often need to deploy multiple solutions to support these specific processes and are forced to extensively use ‘consultancy intensive’ middleware to secure the integration between these business processes;
• A more predictable product roadmap which allows us to drive more innovation across the different industries at a faster rate. For example, innovation we drive around BI, Workflow and User Experiences, will directly be available for customers across different industries;
• And lastly, I found through continued discussion with some of our large enterprise customers that they are often looking to standardize on one ERP solution in their Two-Tier ERP deployment strategy. They found great benefit of being able to standardize on 1 common ERP solution for all the, often diverse, ERP requirements of their subsidiaries/divisions. 

I hope this helps provide some additional perspective to understand our industry strategy for MS Dynamics AX. More specific information on our new Retail solution can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/en/us/products/ax-retail.aspx 

/Kees