The changing face of Project Green

As Kermit the TV frog puppet was wont to lament, "It's not easy being green," something Microsoft continues to find out in relation to its Project Green program to bring its four acquired Dynamics ERP and its homegrown CRM application product families closer together.

When the vendor first started talking about Project Green in 2003, the initiative focused on bringing the disparate products, then known as Axapta, Great Plains, Navision, Solomon, and CRM together into a single code base. Then, in May 2005, Microsoft began to talk more about having two distinct waves of the projects. Wave one committed Microsoft to bringing out major new releases of each of its business offerings, while wave two, due to start occurring in 2008, was when the company would begin releasing elements of the converged code base.

By September 2005, Microsoft brought its back-end applications together under a single brand name, Dynamics, resulting in the rechristening of its business applications as Dynamics AX, GP, NAV, SL, and CRM. At that point, the vendor announced that "Dynamics" would also refer to the ongoing Project Green research and development road map, but the old name has refused to die and still persists among the company's executives, partners, and customers.

Fast forward to this week's Convergence show in San Diego, and the natural question is what's happening with Project Green? Is a converged product or platform still on Microsoft's agenda?

"We don't have the goal of just convergence for convergence's sake," said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Business Solutions group. "We've delivered on Wave 1, and, with each sharing of technology, we're increasing the level of convergence, but it's not a front and central goal. We now have a common portal, a common UI, and common Web services infrastructure. Perhaps the news here is that Green's done," he added.

As Microsoft has come out with new versions of its business applications, it's been gradually replacing technologies proprietary to individual offerings with its own software so all the Dynamics families share more and more infrastructure. For instance, Microsoft's SQL Server is their common database, SharePoint is becoming their common portal, and the vendor's working on having all the products tightly integrate with its PerformancePoint business intelligence software, which is due out later this year.

At Convergence, Microsoft also showed off its new RoleTailored UI, which gives a Windows Vista and Office 2007 look and feel to Dynamics. The company intends RoleTailored to become the common user interface for Dynamics.

One way of thinking about what the Project Green concept will represent is a converged product that has four different flavors, according to Nadella.