By Chris Alliegro [bio]
Posted: Jul. 24, 2006

The following is a sidebar accompanying an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

Shortly following the acquisitions of Great Plains (in 2001) and Navision (in 2002), Microsoft introduced a plan to reconcile the four separate but similar enterprise resource planning (ERP) application lines products those acquisitions netted—Great Plains, Solomon (acquired with Great Plains), Navision, and Axapta (acquired with Navision). Announced in 2003 and referred to as Project Green, the plan called for a ground-up, .NET-based rewrite of the business management features in the four lines. According to that plan, the new Project Green code base would eventually replace the acquired products and their separate code bases with a single product. However, Microsoft gave no assurance that this future product would be compatible with shipping MBS products, causing many existing and prospective customers to question the wisdom of investing in those shipping products.

To ease those concerns, the company offered a reworked vision of Project Green in Mar. 2005. Instead of introducing a brand new product, Microsoft would update its existing ERP products in two "waves" of releases that would bring them "to a point that's more unified in the future," according to a keynote presentation given by Doug Burgum, then the senior vice president of MBS. Burgum also said that Microsoft would support and update its existing ERP products through at least 2013, signaling to customers that they would not be forced to migrate to the new product when it was introduced.

Along with an assortment of incremental feature updates across the ERP product lines, the two waves of releases are intended to bring greater consistency to the products' UIs, programming interfaces, and use of Microsoft technology such as SQL Server and SharePoint. Microsoft refers to these release cycles as Dynamics Wave One and Dynamics Wave Two, which span 2005 to 2007 and 2008 to at least 2009, respectively.