There has in my 10 year ERP career been any number of new fashions, and yes I have been as guilty as the rest of jumping on the “next best thing” hence my leap from Lawson to Dynamics AX 8 years ago, and my leap from permanent employment to contracting (I promise it wasn’t the money!!) But the most fashion crazed or possible fashion obsessed decision has been what to do about 'the cloud' or is it 'The Cloud'?

 

The cloud is the answer to a number of issues that any business faces, data storage is one that springs to mind immediately and the opportunity to access any number of services which are more and more finding themselves appearing in the cloud.

 

But what is the cloud?

 

Is it not just a combination of SaaS and the internet, a system that most of us have been using for many years and that includes Microsoft Dynamics AX VARs, I understand that we are now being asked to visit the on-premise or off-premise question as driven by Microsoft, but is this just not clever marketing? I have recently been working with a VAR who has been asked by the client to deliver a “cloud based option” especially for their sales function, many of whom are not office based.

 

Our process was to maintain the AX2009 as the core and leave that as on-premise, then through some intelligent architecture and using AIF generated .Net Services in order to expand the number of business processes that can be reported on and subsequently have the data usable in any number of ways. By using a combination of Business Intelligence and through development of our own cubes and SSIS to allow reporting functions, it was then possible to take advantage of SQLAzure.

 

This proved to be fantastic as it then allowed us to sit the SQLAzure database in the cloud so that we could upload information or download information from the SQLAzure database. So Windows Azure allows us to stay ahead of the latest fashions. It does strike me as an advance and something that is going to become more prominent, but I hope that the desire to follow fashion does not become something which is done at the expense of what is right for the client.

 

Not every client will benefit from such a potential open database environment and that surely has to be taken into consideration before the desire to follow the herd.