Microsoft Dynamics AX the ERP-Ruby on Rails?
A big operational expense for a lot of enterprises today is the amendments that are done to the ERP system that is installed. You have the standard changes to reports, and information views. You have the as common additions of fields to the database and to the forms. The Forms, just think about how hard it can be in "legacy" ERP systems to add or change a field … from 10 characters to 15 characters. The time needed to change the system is in direct relation to the cost of changing the system.
With the Dynamics AX platform we have a reliable platform for developing scalable, secure, and functional rich products. The last years we have read and heard a lot about Ruby on Rails, RoR is/was perhaps the biggest change to web development this decade. I think that Microsoft Dynamics AX provides at least the same advantage over other ERP systems with its X++, Morph X and the integration to the rest of the Microsoft stack. You might have looked at the MVC (Model-View-Controller) patterns that RoR supports, and if you like that you should look at the code that is in the Microsoft Dynamics AX application, it is a joy to read the code, and it supports the most design patterns that you can find in any book.
Yes there are things that a framework like RoR will do better than AX, and the other way around, but that is not the point here, the point is to understand the advantage that products developed on a robust framework like the Microsoft Dynamics AX framework delivers compared to no framework at all or to a legacy framework that do not provide all the built in features that you get with the Microsoft Dynamics AX framework.
With a product developed for the Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP system you will for "free" get scalability, security, governance, and reliability and lower maintenance cost. That means that most of the non functional attributes of the product is already taken care of. The product vendor will have to make sure that the product is tested and made sure that the basic code is correct ;-)
ISVs like Kineticsware are building enhancements to the AX product that result in extreme ROI calculations for the customers that implements them. Will the customers need changes to the base product? Yes almost every customer wants to have some amendments made to the base product, and here is one of the big wins when going for MS Dynamics AX … they will get faster and cheaper changes! Both short term and long term.
What about future mergers or expansions or integrations? … will that be an issue to take the requirements of this into the existing system? Will it be expensive to change all the screens where the employees are working? as an CIO/CEO/CFO, take things like this into consideration …
random work related stuff, and more 