AX 7 (Rainier) is fast approaching....What to expect

AX 2015, will be the outcome of the highly ambitious Project Rainier executed with a lot of commitment by the Microsoft Product Development Team that is going to be a reality any time now (Expected to be released by December-2015.)

• Web Based AX: Yes this will be a reality with Rainier. AX can be accessed on your web browser (not too sure if this is OS independent!). Those of you who have been familiar with Oracle Financials, will already know how handy Web (& JRE) based access to ERP is. The AX client may continue to co-exist. How exciting this will be if this is also OS independent and AX can be accessed even on a Linux machine. (More customers especially in retail, Mfg and services industry will be looking forward to this functionality).

• More efficient Accounting: The Traditional school believes in traceability of journal entries to the Trial Balance and they least bother of how it happens. But, the Modern school emphasizes on the transformation, connivance & complicity of accounting, rather than just the output.
  Having witnessed the differentiation followed by the Microsoft between 2009 to 2012 in terms of accounting and the more modern concerns such as Transfer Price, Cost pooling etc., we can expect many modern accounting technologies in revenue recognition, cost control, Investments to be integrated.
  The Europe is already implementing IFRS and slowly the countries around the globe are standardizing their accounting policies with either the IFRS or US GAAPs. So, we can expect a paradigm shift in the accounting function to accommodate these standards.
  Rainier-Ax may also address the industry concerns of the SOX controls, Corporate Governance and the like policies across the globe.
   
• Inter-operability between the Group Companies: The organization is one but broken down into multiple legal entities / companies for the comfort of functioning, due to legal requirements or due to the geographical constraints.
  This however is a hindrance for the business in terms of profitability, efficient functioning, resource sharing, taxation or reporting etc.
  Rainier-AX can try to bridge down this gap in many ways. Replacing the physical boundaries between the companies and imposing a virtual boundary with strong security controls could better the current situation.
   
• Cloud based and Office 365 integrated: 100% integration with the Office 365 and Microsoft Azure platform is a possibility through Rainier-Ax. ERP would be more of a service rather than a product to compete with NetSuite and the likes.
   
• Better integration to add-ons developed by ISVs: If Ax needs to compete with the likes of SAP, Microsoft needs to better integrate the add-ons developed by the ISVs with the standard AX framework to ease the delivery schedule.
  Currently, The ISV add-ons need a complete revamp whenever an update is released and this results in a lot of effort. Microsoft may come with a more sophisticated Life Cycle Services Integration Manager to remove this agony.
• Faster and simpler to implement: This would be fair to expect considering the current difficulties in Ax

Microsoft always aims at simplicity of a product and sure it will definitely plan to make Rainier-AX simpler and faster to implement than its predecessors by providing better tools to move similar data between companies and environments and modules. 
Just like the drastic changes from Ax 2009 to Ax 2012, we can expect a completely refreshed UI and functionality. The faster we adapt to these the more effective we can implement.