Future of Russian localization with Dynamics 365 'Tenerife'

Few words about future of Russian localization of Dynamics NAV and the future of localizations in general. There will be localized versions of Dynamics 365 ‘Tenerife’. In May of 2018 there will be released W1 version of ‘Tenerife’, with full functionality that is now available On-Prem. In addition to that, several localizations will be released, selected for the “first wave”.

As you can see from the presentation slide, several localizations, currently officially supported by Microsoft, had not been selected for “first wave”, including e.g. Russia and Norway. Russian localization, being one of the most complexed in the world, if not the most complexed, will not be released in ‘Tenerife’ in May 2018. Microsoft explained that they do not want to release all the countries simultaneously – better to test the release on a limited number of countries, to be able to respond to bug fixes more efficiently.

There has been no answer on when other localizations will be available in ‘Tenerife’ after “first wave” release in May. Microsoft told they will now focus on releasing what has been promised, and later consider the next release schedule for other localizations.

Why Russian localization has not appeared in the “first wave”? Besides localization complexity as such, the situation gets even more complicated with recent introduction of Personal Data Protection legislation in Russia, that says the personal data needs to be primary collected and processed inside country. There is no local Azure datahost inside Russia. Despite Office 365 and Azure is being actively sold in Russia nowadays, Microsoft does not want (at least without additional legal consultations) to put themselves to risk of providing SaaS solution which is hosted in a cloud outside Russian territory and thus not compatible with Russian current legislation.

The next question that immediately came up to my mind was whether Microsoft ever plans to keep Russian localization in On-Prem version. There is an idea to keep ‘Tenerife’ and On-Prem versions synchronized (as they have the same code base and the cost of keeping On-Prem version is low). Would missing Russian localization in ‘Tenerife’ mean that On-Prem Russian localization will be also abandoned? Luckily, the answer was that Microsoft is planning to keep all the On-Prem localizations that are currently available. In both Dynamics NAV 2018, with its planned release on December 01, 2017, and Dynamics NAV 2018 R2, with planned release on May Y2018, there will be all localizations that are currently available. There is no plan to exclude them from future On-Prem releases, even if there would be no possibility to launch them quickly in ‘Tenerife’ cloud.

So, what to do with the cloud version in Russia? Will it ever have its localization released? There has been no answer yet. Will the positive result depend on availability of local Azure hub on Russian territory, or Microsoft will place the localized version on other data-centers, located outside – this is a future discussion so far.

As an alternative, Awara IT had offered to deploy ‘Tenerife’ in Azure Stack inside Russia (Azure Stack is planned to be opened soon this year, in cooperation with some leading data-centers). Such configuration, perhaps, will limit the possibilities, provided by actively promoted Common Data Service model – but at least this would allow to use ‘Tenerife’ in Russia with Russian localization, under the modern “Cloud first, mobile first” digital transformation concept. “Azure Stack” idea has been considered as interesting and discussible on a higher level. We will try to push Russia as a priority market for Microsoft products.