Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a customer relationship management (CRM) software for advertisers that permits them to make and oversee marketing relationships and goals with customers.

The Marketing Cloud consolidates incorporated answers for customer venture management, email, portable, web-based media, web personalization, publicizing, content creation, content management and information analysis. The programming incorporates prescient examination to assist with settling on choices such as, what channel would be ideal for a given message. A part called Journey Builder assists advertisers with fitting efforts to customers' conduct and needs, socioeconomics and correspondence channel inclinations.

Occasion driven triggers start activities: When a customer joins a steadfastness program, Marketing Cloud may be set off to send a welcome message; different occasions could trigger information refreshes in the customer contact record. The Marketing Cloud is associated with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Service Cloud, which empowers coordination that gives a brought together encounter and keeps customers from being reached independently by advertisers from each of the three gatherings.

There are a ton of highlights and advantages that accompany Salesforce CRM. In the event that you'd like to find out about the advantages of Salesforce from one of our specialists straightforwardly, you can contact Manras Technologies today! Underneath you will find the five factors that are generally significant.

#1. Customer information

One of the biggest advantages of using Salesforce is the information it retrieves — both the quality and the quantity. When you use Salesforce, you can look at every individual account, contact, task, event, and opportunity that’s tied to a lead, which gives your company a lot of information before approaching potential customers.

There are a couple reasons this is so important.

First, it lets you easily track all of the information you need to keep your customer profiles organized. You have all the information you need in one convenient location, and you can look up any lead or client you want — even if they’re assigned to other representatives! This offers a more complete, holistic approach to managing your growing business.

In addition, shared customer information also lets you and your employees enjoy your leisure time and vacation days without worrying about personally accommodating clients, leads, or prospects. Any of your reps can easily cover for another one who’s out of the office, eliminating any gaps that you could have in your customer support model.

This digital design is a direct upgrade from physical resources and even Excel sheets. Salesforce is comprehensive, responsive, and convenient to use, so you no longer have a need for manila folders or digital files full of spreadsheets.

#2. Account planning

With all of the customer information you need right at your fingertips, you — and all of the reps at your company — can make plans for accounts independently. That gives you the hands-on approach that you need to really make a connection with clients, and it also lets your reps modify their plans to achieve better results. There’s even an option in Salesforce to create to-do items so you and your reps can use lists to stay organized throughout the day.

Along with that, you can also create reminders on calendars so you can tell anyone to follow up with your customers, account managers, or upper management about important duties. Essentially, you make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

The tools like Salesforce pardot services, you can see the amount of time that you or anyone else in the company has spent on each specific account. This is especially helpful for service-based businesses with lots of clients who subscribe to different packages or plans. If you notice that you’ve spent too much time on a client for what that client spends, your company can adjust accordingly.

With these account planning options, managing clients becomes a much simpler process.

#3. Time management

With comprehensive customer information and a wealth of planning resources at your disposal, you naturally get the benefit of outstanding time management. You have all the information you need to prioritize work for your clients, and that means you can also organize tasks for different accounts according to that same criteria.

Along with that, you can use the built-in calendar tools to better visualize your schedule for the day, week, month, or year. That means you can constantly stay on the ball through all of the steps in nurturing a potential lead.

#4. Team collaboration

Salesforce also lets you easily communicate with the other members of your team. The “Chatter” feature lets you talk with individuals or groups about work-related information, like clients, territory, and other essential details.

Chatter also lets you add different team members to accounts or opportunities that need special attention. This, in turn, makes it easier for your team to prioritize and schedule their tasks so you can work with more leads and finalize more sales.

Basically, where the previous features all kept you focused, Chatter lets you keep your whole team focused on what they need to be doing each day. That means you get better results and productivity from your team every day.

#5. Accessibility

Salesforce is a cloud product, and that means it’s available wherever you have Internet access. Salesforce has an app that you can use to stay in touch with your business and your team at all hours. This makes it a perfect match for the hands-on business owner or the marketing manager who wants to stay in constant communication with their team.

The reason this is such a huge advantage is that it means you don’t have a centralized location for your data. There’s no filing cabinet, local server, or anything else — it’s all kept safe and sound in the cloud where you can always access it.

In addition to the security advantages, your team can also use it to stay up-to-date on accounts and clients, regardless of where they are. That’s some of the best customer services that any client could want.

Manras Technologies offers all of these benefits and more At Manras, we understand the advantages of marketing automation companies like Salesforce. At the same time, we know that their prices are simply too high for a lot of businesses. And that’s why we developed an alternative.

Salesforce marketing cloud services is our proprietary marketing automation platform that uses similar technology and interfaces to Salesforce for both B2C and B2B companies. We offer it exclusively to our clients so they can better manage their new leads and close sales more easily without the hassle of keeping extensive spreadsheets or files on each prospect they get. With MarketingCloudFX, you have a lot of the same benefits of Salesforce centralized in a convenient location.

On top of that, you also get a dedicated representative to work with you on your goals for your company. Our team is full of experienced, knowledgeable, and talented Internet marketers who know everything from search engine optimization (SEO) to lead nurturing and even reputation management. With all of that skill and talent on your side — plus the data and features of MarketingCloud— you can get help your business steadily grow and bring in more revenue.

Do you want your company to grow without spending a bundle on Salesforce? Contact us today to start laying out a marketing strategy for your company! No matter whether it is Salesforce integration services or Salesforce implementation services, we are there to assist you.

In 4 years, more than 30% of businesses and organizations will include Edge Computing in their cloud deployments to address bandwidth bottlenecks, reduce latency, and process data for decision support in real time. Edge computing accomplishes this by bringing the businesses’ computational processes closer to the data sources, increasing the speed of these actions. Additionally, even if a single node is unreachable, the service should still be accessible to users. In this way, edge computing promises to deliver Internet of Things (IoT) reliably and speed while taking more care of security, data privacy.

What’s more, 69% of organizations say that prioritizing edge-based analytics will improve their ability to meet IoT objectives for specific use cases.

Industries including Manufacturing, Water & Wastewater, Utilities and Building, are implementing hybrid strategies to enable real-time analytics such as Machine Anomaly detection and diagnostics, Quality Analytics, Energy Analytics, and OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness). First, anomaly detection on the edge leverages Machine Learning to monitor machine health, detect anomalous data from sensors, and reduce the time it takes to get critical information. Advanced notice of anomalous machine behavior gives maintenance employees to prevent breakdowns before they occur, saving the business time, money, and resources.

Additionally, running quality analytics on the edge enable faster decision making , which is important for many industries.  This type of data analysis on the edge is important for businesses which use real-time data to improve productivity, require solutions that scale over time, or reside in a fast-paced environment full of unexpected changes. Edge computing gives you access to analytics and actionable insight on edge, right where the data is generated.

Also, energy analytics on the edge has allowed utility companies to get real-time data at remote energy production facilities such as wind turbine farms or solar farms. It is not practical for remote equipment at these locations to quickly transmit data to and from the cloud, slowing the data analytics process. However, if data is quickly processed on edge computing devices, employees have access to real-time data which reflects the current state of energy production.

Lastly, Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) measures how well a manufacturing operation is utilized compared to its full potential, measuring the percentage of manufacturing time that is truly productive. This includes measuring the speed at which the parts are produced (the performance), the quality of the parts which are being manufactured (the quality), and the number of interruptions to the manufacturing process (the availability). A perfect score of 100% indicates that all the manufactured parts are good, they were produced at maximum speed, and they were produced without interruption. Measuring these aspects is a best practice for any manufacturing operation. Bringing OEE onto the edge allows businesses to measure their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) easily and pivot their business with agility.

Edge-enabled machines provide the data to give you insight and foresight into manufacturing or the utility floor near your asset; you can take preventative corrective action, even when the opportunity to prevent problems is very small.

CENTRALIZED CLOUD ANALYTICS STUMBLE IN CRITICAL MANUFACTURING AREAS

Many enterprises have adopted cloud first strategies. They have married their workflows to cloud platforms to connect low cost, elastic global infrastructure with rich device data. Initially, this approach allowed these organizations to accelerate deployment of connected products and industrial internet efforts. However, as they scale their digital transformation efforts, cloud-only approaches limit growth because of delays to transmit data from devices to the cloud and to transmit analytics from the cloud back to devices. IoT use cases on the manufacturing floor often have unique, real-time data analysis needs. It is not always practical, economical, or even lawful to move, store, and analyze IoT data on a core cloud infrastructure. Many manufacturing professionals recognize these limitations. They cite security concerns, the high costs of repeatedly accessing data, reduced data accessibility, and the subsequently reduced ability to make real-time decisions as the top downfalls of analyzing IoT data in the cloud. The solution to these latency issues is to continue to scale businesses using edge computing.

Edge computing solutions, which converge hardware and software into increasingly smaller devices which run smarter analytics onboard, enable real-time decisions and insights. Momentum for edge IoT solution deployment is increasing at a faster rate in the manufacturing, utility, and building use cases.

Edge computing often incorporates Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. These techniques make the calculations performed on the edge even more efficient. That way, the system does not require the help of human operators to identify data irregularities which may point to a potential problem developing with a machine or system. The AI can flag anomalies in an actionable way so that machine breakdown can be prevented. Another use case for AI on the edge is the detection of defective parts in a manufacturing operation. This technology can be used to guide part inspectors or to identify patterns which may lead to the production of defective parts.

However, the accuracy of the models which AI uses for these purposes may degrade over time—this is where Machine Learning (ML) becomes important. ML is incorporated into the process to create a closed loop in which the computer contains supervisory programming which observes the accuracy of the AI model over time by analyzing data drifts within the AI model.

All these technologies are available through CIMCON’s versatile iEdge 360 Edge Computing Platform. This system is designed to integrate both wireless and wired sensors into the IoT network. The iEdge 360 platform compiles, validates, quality-checks, and processes the data. It efficiently uses bandwidth to store and forward data, creating a sensor data lake. The data collected is also used to nimbly detect anomalies in machine operation on the edge.

CIMCON iEdge 360 Edge Computing Platform enables multiple use cases:

The platform gives users insights into machine operation and process data which would otherwise be unavailable. This includes automated KPI calculation, derived statistical data, and long-term trend analysis. This gives operators the process visibility they need for situational awareness, energy analytics, and real-time detection of anomalies. This helps you stay on top of your operational goals, efficiency objectives, and machine health status in a simple package which keeps your business running smoothly,

When an anomaly is detected, the iEdge 360 platform provides machine operators with the tools to determine the cause. Drill-down widgets and rule-based alerts couple with Machine Learning technology to enable easy machine diagnostics. Key Performance Indicator (KPI) calculations and machine fault mode diagnosis take the raw data collected by the system and turn it into actionable intelligence. Rather than allowing you to get lost in the sea of big data, the iEdge 360 platform pinpoints the important nuggets of information and presents it to you in an easy-to-understand manner. This allows operators to quickly fix the issue and get critical processes running again. Overall, these features reduce operational downtime, repair costs, and labor costs while increasing energy efficiency and production output.

In addition to the other actionable, useful features, CIMCON’s iEdge 360 Edge Computing Platform contains built-in video analytics capabilities. plug and play architecture is included out of the box which makes including video analytics into your system simple. AI and ML technologies built into the platform use video data to detect equipment failure conditions, triggering one of several custom workflows based on the events in the video. This feature allows you to monitor your business for production line efficiency, item counting on a conveyor belt, and even theft prevention. 

The iEdge 360 IoT Platform is designed for collecting sensor data at scale and transforming that data into actionable intelligence using its powerful on-board processor as well as its high-level, general-purpose programming language; it uses Python and Flowchart programming, among other easy-to-use features. In this way, the platform is extremely user-friendly—it is not designed to be difficult to understand or obscure like some of its competitors. Rather, it is streamlined to make your business operate at peak efficiency. Its powerful quad core processor with modern microservice based architecture allows Edge AI/ML Algorithms to transform data into actionable insight at the edge.

Additionally, edge hardware moves the computing resources closer to the data source. Therefore, it compiles and filters data rapidly, alleviating bandwidth challenges. The platform pushes intelligence, data processing, analytics, and communication capabilities close to the locations of the sensors which gather the data.

Do you want to improve your bandwidth utilization while simultaneously generating insights into machine health, operational efficiency, and Key Performance Indicators? Are you ready to move into the world of the Internet of Things? We can walk your business through its digital transformation smoothly and efficiently. We will enable you to meet your KPIs while reducing operational downtime and utilizing the data you generate.

Would you like to know more about CIMCON iEdge 360 Platform solutions? Just send a message to our IoT application engineering team, and we will be happy to answer all your questions and provide product demonstrations. 

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iData Platform Providers

IoT Edge Platform

Smart Manufacturing Industry 4.0

iCloud Software Solutions

What is a Smart Factory?

A Smart factory uses technology to automatically share information digitally across the operation, including data from materials, people, and machines. Smart manufacturing relies on an integrated system consisting of simulation technologies, connected equipment, and collaboration tools.

There is no single technology that turns an analog factory into a Smart factory. However, there are many common technologies and traits that Smart factories share, and manufacturers that blend multiple technologies are the ones most likely to be considered “Smart factories.”

What are the benefits of a Smart Factory?

One of the most obvious benefits of a Smart factory is a major boost to efficiency. By removing inefficient human decision-making processes that can be not only slow, but also biased or simply incorrect, factories can produce more with less – less time, less material resources, fewer breakdowns, and scrap parts, etc.

Although many manufacturing employees worry that the influx of automation and other Smart technologies will put them out of the job, Smart manufacturing opens up opportunities for more, new, higher paying jobs that many people find more engaging and fulfilling. These highe rpaying jobs also attract young, new talent to the field with new insights and concepts to better the facility.

In the same context, Smart factories are breeding grounds for innovation. Because of the agility filled into the system by way of real-time analytics, there is more room to experiment, be creative, find solutions to new problems within the market, and test ideas at scale without spending unnecessary resources. Smart factories even see an uptick in customer satisfaction, because costs can go down, shipping times can go down, all the while quality and consistency go up.

Technology in a Smart Factory includes:

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)

This consists of small sensors and other hardware that are connected and communicate with one another. They might be used for asset management, energy reduction and lighting, or machine data collection, although there is a nearly unlimited number of use cases for IIoT in manufacturing.

Edge Computing Technology

Edge computing takes data coming from the factory floor and processes it close by, removing the wait time it can take to upload to the cloud, analyse, and redistribute info to the factory floor. Edge computing enables real-time analytics and ultra-fast decision-making using data, and is perfect for safety mechanisms, predictive maintenance, and similarly time-sensitive computing tasks.

Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning

In regards to manufacturing, as well as other businesses, machine learning and predictive analytics are one such use case for the collected data mentioned above. Data can be combined and used to fuel machine learning models that offer decision making insights from sets of information that can be too complex for humans to derive value from alone. Machine learning and predictive analytics can be

used to forecast demand, perform predictive and prescriptive maintenance on machines, spot openings and opportunities in the market, and much, much more. This is a very powerful feature of a Smart factory.

Automation

With smart, connected machines comes the opportunity for humans to step outside of the circle, and allow automation to step in. In many cases, machines are better able to handle tasks faster and more accurately than their human counterparts. Industrial automation releases these humans to focus on other complex cognitive tasks that are better suited for human minds than machine minds.

Big Data

When IIoT devices collect data, it has to go somewhere. Same for other data that manufacturers commonly collect like customer data, production data, supplier data, etc. Big data simply refers to these massive stores of information that manufacturers can pull from as well as ways to sort and manage this information for use with other tools and analytics software.

What else do Smart factories have in common?

Paperless: Because processes are digitised, there is no need for paper in a Smart factory. Everything is stored on the cloud or locally, in Smart format.

Real-Time Metrics: To operate with the type of efficiency expected from a Smart factory, manufacturers must have access to real-time metrics that let them adjust on the fly to ensure production goals and other company creativities are continuing to be met – no surprises.

Big Data Analytics: Having tonnes of data does no good unless it is processed and analysed. This type of analysis helps Smart factories make more informed decisions that are based on the numbers,

allowing them to spot trends, opportunities, problems, and areas to increase efficiencies.

Linked Stack: As mentioned, it’s less about having one technology or another and more about having a system of integrated technologies. This can include PLC info from the floor, merged with ERP data, merged with MES and SCADA data, etc. This exchange of information between

machines allows for quick, data-driven, machine-led decision making at all levels of the manufacturing process.

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IoT Edge Platform for Industries

iCloud Smart Manufacturing

Smart Manufacturing Process US

Smart Water Management Using IoT

Just like you visit the doctor, your industrial equipment needs a system to monitor its health.

Last week, I visited a doctor for a throat infection. The doctor checked my body temperature, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation level. Then he asked me to open my mouth to see the severity of the infection in my throat. The doctor also asked me few questions to get more contexts about the infection: When did you consume any cold drinks or ice cream last week? Did you notice this infection after consuming them? Do you smoke? Also, the doctor looked through my medical history on his iPad. Finally, he was able to prescribe the right medicine to help me heal quickly.

After I left his clinic, I could not help but think about the analogy between how the doctor diagnosed my throat infection and how service engineers in an industrial environment analyse the health of industrial equipment and evaluate their performance. After all, I am an engineer to the core!

Here, my question to Industrial Engineers (our machine doctors) working at Original Machine Manufactures and industrial facilities is this: when your plant is talking, are you listening? Your plant, be it machines, pumps, motors, or any other equipment, continuously generates critical data that could provide an in-depth understanding of its health. This data could alert you to potential failures down the line. Data comes in various forms. It could be as simple as the sound or vibrations coming from your motors, the status of multiple lamps on your machines, or the amount of power consumed.

Doctors need sensor readings, such as body temperature, blood pressure, pulse, and oxygen saturation to observe human health. You also need a 360° view of your plant and equipment. After all, you are responsible for the health of hundreds of complex machines in your plant. You also need machine sensor data history in various contexts: mechanical health, efficiency, and motor health to diagnose machine faults. With many sensors already installed on the machine, your machine “patient” can provide feedback about its health in real-time 24/7 if it is connected to intelligent anomaly detection and diagnostics platform. Indeed, you can prevent machine breakdown. Repairs can also be less expensive if you prescribe work orders with the correct actionable information.

CIMCON’s digital end-to-end solution uses iEdge 360 intelligent platforms for machine health monitoring, fault detection, and diagnostics, providing you with actionable insight on machine health and performance in 3 simple steps.

How the solution works:

Outcome: Machine Health Key Performance Monitoring (KPI’s)

iEdge provides role-based and KPI-based visualization of data in the enterprise and machine hierarchy view. This mode of data visualization enables fast, accessible analysis. That way, there is more time for the diagnosis and repair of machine faults.

Just like with your health, early, specific, and precise detection of issues is required to keep your plant healthy.

Don’t you think real-time actionable information is vital? Implementation of a Predictive Maintenance solution is secure and straightforward with CIMCON’s iEdge 360 platform. Our engineers can get you monitoring your machine’s health on your computer or mobile device within a few hours. Comment below or email us for a detailed demonstration.

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Digital Transformation

IoT Edge Platform

Smart Manufacturing

Microsoft Dynamics AX is a top tier ERP solution that we have been implementing for our customers. The new release of Microsoft DynamicsAX (AX 7) on March 9, 2016 brought numerous updates that put the ERP solution at the very top of the industry. Gartner Magic Quadrant (updated as of December 2015) indicated Dynamics AX in the visionary moving to leader category along with SAP. Mobile-first, Cloud-first strategy puts Dynamics AX as one of the top ERP systems.

The following are a few advantages of the new Dynamics AX

Cloud-based Infrastructure

As innovative Microsoft partners and ERP solutions consultants, we have utilized cloud infrastructure to host Dynamics AX to save our client headache of maintaining physical servers. Hosting previous versions of AX over cloud was not a very straightforward task. With the new release, Microsoft took that challenge away. The new AX is available on public and private cloud (Azure – Microsoft’s cloud service). This lowers the total cost of ERP ownership especially advantageous to small and mid-sized business. So no need to worry about disaster recovery, unavailability of the ERP system caused by server issues, buy expensive server/infrastructure, and maintain security. Azure does it all for you at a much lower cost.

User Experience

With the mobile first approach, the new AX is one of the very few ERP solutions that offers mobile and web browser access. HTML5 user experience makes it very easy to access from anywhere, anytime. With the new fully web based user interface, the user experience will remain consistent regardless of the browser, operating system and device you are using. It resolves for compatibility issues that many on premise ERP systems face. The Web based user interface feels more dynamic and intuitive.

Training Made Easy

The new task recorder functionality allows trainers to record each business process and create step by step guidelines for appropriate business users. Instead of referencing training manuals, business users can play the training and the system will auto navigate users through the sequence of steps with visual indicators. This makes the overall training exercise and user adoption very easy.

Integration with Business Intelligence (Power BI), CRM, and office productivity suites

Integration with Microsoft Power BI, Cortona Analytics, allows you to pin analytic dashboards, designed in Power BI, right into your work spaces. The new system easily integrates with Office 365, SharePoint, and Microsoft CRM. Such improvements are important for overall data engagement and strategy.

Lifecycle Services (LCS)

Lifecycle Services (LCS) is an application that helps you manage your ERP-AX implementation from start to finish. The new LCS is a fully cloud based and integral part of the AX 7 deployment and consumption experience, and plays a key role at every step of the Implementation process, from Discovery to Go-Live support. Utilizing the new LCS will help implementation much more streamlined.

Subscription Licensing

Although we are still waiting for more information regarding subscription licensing, Microsoft has indicated availability of subscription based licensing. This new subscription licenses will enable your company to buy or cancel additional licenses according to your variable needs.

As of now, the New Microsoft DynamicsAX (a.k.a AX 7) is still ONLY available through volume licensing, and requires purchase of at least 50 user licenses. Many companies are asking as how they can move their existing version of Dynamics AX from on-premise infrastructure to public cloud, to reap benefits of cloud computing/hosting.

In this article, I will explain the following:

A. Advantages of deploying Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012R2/R3 versions on Azure Cloud to help companies reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase return on investment (ROI) for new implementation.

B. High level architecture and steps to deploy Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Benefits of Dynamics AX on Azure Cloud:

Agility

Azure quickly and easily responds to the changing needs of organizations. Whether a business seeks a new development or test environment to help with the rollout of software or systems, a platform for rapidly developing and deploying mobile apps to customers or employees, or quickly provisioning systems to support new acquisitions – Azure can handle a virtually unlimited number of configurations that help organizations thrive and succeed.

Elasticity and flexibility

Azure allows companies to dynamically scale up (or scale down) infrastructure in order to meet changing business needs. Companies never have to worry about running out of resources or paying for exceeded capacity. Do you need to scale up your systems to support an increase in demand as the result of a successful marketing campaign? Do you need to scale up (and then down) your infrastructure during peak usage times such as the holiday shopping season or for your month-end or year-end close? Do you need to scale down a system as you consolidate applications or scale up a development environment to test a new mobile app at scale? As companies adjust to the unpredictable ebbs and flows of the market, Azure can adjust alongside them.

Reduce cost

Companies can replace infrastructure, hardware, and IT management costs with highly efficient automated processes in Azure to help refocus IT resourcesfrom managing infrastructure to working on strategic projects. Companies can also stay on top of expenses by receiving detailed usage reports and paying only for the necessary computing resources.

Since companies also don’t have to build out or manage infrastructure with Azure IaaS, they may greatly reduce their IT costs by maximizing efficiency of resource use. This is because Azure allows companies to easily scale up (or scale down) various environments to help them quickly and easily expand operations, whether through organic growth or acquisitions.

Security and privacy

While the adoption of cloud services worldwide continues to accelerate, many organizations are wary of trusting third party vendors with their data, applications, and infrastructure. This is why Azure takes pride in delivering a trusted foundation on which companies can design, build, and manage their own secure cloud applications and infrastructure, which includes running Dynamics AX 2012 R3 on Microsoft’s Cloud. Azure helps organizations achieve the economic benefits of cloud services while furthering security and compliance using key industry standards such as ISO/IEC 27001:2005. With Azure, companies can benefit from Microsoft’s industry-leading approach to security, privacy, and compliance while minimizing cost and complexity. Also, MFA is possible using Azure.

Rapid development convenience

Companies can spin up the development of testing environments and scale to almost any size to test real-world scenarios while only paying for the resources they need and use. You can build a VM (Virtual Machine) on premise, move it to the cloud for testing on Azure at scale, and then simply move it back on premise for further development work. Unlike other cloud providers, with Azure there is no conversion necessary. You can build native cloud applications, test existing applications in virtual machines, and create hybrid applications such as mobile apps that span your data center with Azure offering all of your organization’s departments and divisions the ultimate in ease, flexibility and power.

Enterprise-grade infrastructure and support

Companies can take advantage of 99.9% and higher availability guarantees when they group multiple VMs inside availability sets in Azure. These sets are similar to clusters in on-premises deployments where failure of one node automatically moves the processing to a node in a cluster that is still operating. Utilizing availability sets ensures that different applications or services are available during network or hardware failures, as well as planned downtime such as maintenance. In the case of a single-instance VM or when a number of VMs are not deployed into an availability set, the Azure Service Level Agreements do not apply. To learn more about Azure Service Level Agreements, please visit http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/.

Dynamics AX 2012 is deployed to your Azure subscription using Azure IaaS. This means that Azure provides the virtual machines, storage, and networking capabilities to support implementation while still giving you the control you want of your systems. Just as the case for on-premises deployments, companies are still required to manage, secure, and license the operating systems, applications, and data installed on the virtual machines involved in implementations.

Azure Backup System

Microsoft Azure Backup is a key component of Microsoft’s Azure cloudservices. It is a multi-faceted cloud service which enables data to be backed up to the Azure cloud. Azure replaces on premise or other offsite backup solutions and offers world-class reliability, security and competitiveness. As is to be expected of a world class company, Azure Backup is built on Microsoft’s enterprise infrastructure and is scalable, resilient and highly functional.

Extend on-premise domain to Azure Cloud

Integrating your on-premises directories with Azure AD makes your users more productive by providing a common identity for accessing both cloud and on-premises resources. So, there is no need to worry about creating a new domain on the cloud and losing all the changes of the existing domain of an organization. This helps in integration of a pre-existing applications to the new applications deployed on Azure, Dynamics AX 2012 as an example, without any hassles.

Much before New Dynamics AX (AX 7) release was announced, we have been deploying Dynamics AX over private and public cloud, so our clients do not have to manage their on-premise infrastructure. To give you an idea, the following infographic demonstrates one of our basis architectures. This subject requires a separate post, but I will just provide some high level steps to setup Dynamics AX 2012 R3 as Infrastructure as a service over Azure.

Steps to deploy Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 as Infrastructure-as- a-Service (IaaS)

1. Setup your Windows Azure Subscription account

2. Setup all the below prerequisite on Azure to install VM (Virtual Machine)

a. Cloud services

b. Storage account

c. Virtual Network

3. Install the Required VMs from Azure portal. In this scenario, we created 4 VMs

4. Promote domain controller on VM

5. Create an another VM from Azure and attached to domain controller

6. Install SQL server on VM and Install all the prerequisite for Dynamic AX

7. Start install Dynamic AX on VM

8. Install Dynamic AX client

9. Setup RDS session on server and promote all session

a. RD Connection Broker

b. RD Web Access

c. RD Session Host

10. Publish Dynamic AX client on publisher application

11. Work Resources: RemoteApp and Desktop