Microsoft has rebranded its business applications unit.
Organizations have often found that implementing such systems can be expensive and time-consuming, and are often not keen on being forced into carrying out upgrades unless they see significant business benefits in doing so. Project Green has been in the ether for well over a year now, but there has been little to show for all the publicity so far.
This could be what has finally triggered the rebranding initiative – Project Green has now evolved to Microsoft Dynamics. This will be the main product name for any new release of the three products going forward, although each will then have a suffix that indicates the individual product (for example Microsoft Dynamics NA, and Dynamics AX). Microsoft CRM 3.0 will now be known as Dynamics CRM, and will eventually become the customer relationship management (CRM) solution shared by all the other enterprise applications.
The demonstration given at a recent conference was impressive, showing tight integration between Office applications, e-mail, and business applications such as CRM. The overall impression given by the demo was one that binds users still more tightly into the whole Microsoft architecture, by using features from still-to-be-released versions of SQL Server, Sharepoint, and Office. The benefit may come in the long term, with the second phase of the project, when deployment and changes become more straightforward by enabling model-driven design of workflows to be very quickly deployed without requiring programming. This will rely on Visual Studio flowcharts, but timescales for this phase are currently looking towards at least 2007.
Microsoft is certainly investing heavily in the business applications area, and has a solid partner network around the world that handles the actual customer interactions and deployments. The mid-market is still all to play for, and the larger enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors are probably now too tied up either fighting each other or integrating their most recent acquisitions to seriously push down into this sector. Once these developments reach the market, other mid-tier ERP vendors will need to consider Microsoft as a serious contender.
