Monday, November 3, 2014
Whether Dynamics NAV solution you’re selling will run on Microsoft Azure or in the customer’s datacenter, you should think about doing the proof of concept on Microsoft Azure. Keep in mind, there are specific characteristics that make some custom development projects an especially good fit for Microsoft Azure.
I was inspired by David Chappell’s speech held during the local Microsoft Partner Days. In this speech and whitepapers he shared a simple checklist that each sales person could use to easily recognize potential Azure projects. There are the high level checkpoints…
YOUR CUSTOMER IS LOOKING FOR LOWER COST.
Most often, running a new application on Microsoft Azure today will be cheaper than running it in your customer’s datacenter. As the price of public cloud computing continues to drop, this will almost certainly be true at some point. As David says, I promise you, it will be cheaper tomorrow.
There are 3 primary players in the Cloud market now – Microsoft, Google and Amazon. They sell commoditizes services in a massive scale with no requirement of massive capital investment. What happens – prices massively drop down to almost cost. In the short term, no one datacenter is going to get the scale required to compete pricewise with these market giants.
THE APPLICATION NEEDS FAST ACCESS TO RESOURCES WITH NO COMMITMENT.
When a Microsoft Azure user requests new computing resources, those resources are available in just a few minutes. When the user gives up those resources, the user stops paying almost immediately. This is a good fit for situations where your customer doesn’t know exactly how many resources are needed or for how long.
THE APPLICATION NEEDS MASSIVE SCALE.
Microsoft Azure datacenters are huge, much bigger than those of a typical enterprise. Because of this, they can run applications with lots of simultaneous users.
LIMIT THE TECHNICAL TALK AND TECHNICAL ISSUES.
As Pekka Niva, an eCraft Consultant and an outstanding 1ClickFactory Partner, states: “Each time we onboard a new customer using new ERP, the highest priority for the customer is not the technical provisioning, but the speed in human level learning. Customers want to speak the business language, not technical language and don’t want to be deeply involved in technical issues, it should happen somewhere in the background.”
Deploying Microsoft Dynamics NAV solutions on Microsoft Azure provisioned by 1ClickFactory enables Dynamics Partners and their customers to minimize technology issues and focus on areas where customers need most help (like human learning on how to best use the solution).
THE APPLICATION NEEDS TO SUPPORT USERS AROUND THE WORLD.
Microsoft Azure datacenters are scattered across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. An application can run in one or more of these, letting it offer fast access to users in many countries. For example, an international business application used by a large enterprise might need to provide good response time to this company’s employees wherever they might be.
THE APPLICATION WILL HAVE SPIKY OR UNPREDICTABLE USAGE.
Because Microsoft Azure makes it easy to get and release computing resources, supporting applications with widely varying usage is straightforward. This elasticity makes applications with large spikes a good fit for this cloud platform. Think about a website selling tickets to online sporting events, for example, an accounting application that gets heavily used only at the end of each quarter, or a government website for first responders to an emergency. Rather than paying for lots of computing resources that often go unused, your customer can pay only for the extra power needed to handle the spikes in usage.
Following this simple checklist that David Chappell has provided for Microsoft Azure projects, you should be able to quickly identify the best projects for the Azure environment. If you are undecided, remember you can always build a proof of concept in Microsoft Azure to verify the suitability and performance.