Dynamics ERP Licensing for Hosters

A new licensing plan will make Microsoft’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, Dynamics AX, GP, NAV, and SL, available on a subscription basis. The new Service Provider License Agreement for those products, effective Jan. 2007, lets partners “rent” the products from Microsoft rather than pay for them up-front, which could encourage new hosted solutions by reducing partners’ initial costs. However, Microsoft has not said when its ERP products will support “multitenancy,” which allows service providers to securely support multiple customers on shared servers and is a key to making the hosting model financially attractive for small customers.

Following CRM’s Lead

The Service Provider License Agreements (SPLAs) for the Dynamics ERP products follow a similar move for the Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) application, which was made available on a subscription basis with the release of CRM 3.0 in Dec. 2005.

As that program did for CRM, the new Dynamics ERP licensing program removes a barrier that service providers confront when planning hosted services-it reduces those partners’ startup costs by eliminating the need to purchase the products up-front. Furthermore, the subscription model is not limited to the Dynamics ERP products; all Microsoft products that the Dynamics line require (Windows and SQL Server, for instance) are also available via SPLAs.