Axapta is Microsoft’s flagship ERP system, originally developed by Damgaard Data A/S in Denmark before being bought by Navision then ultimately Microsoft. It was initially released in March 1998 in the Danish and U.S. markets. Today, it is available and supported in 45 languages in most of the world, with a rapidly expanding customer, partner and solutions base and is rapidly becoming one of the major players in the ERP global market. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) is the worlds largest software company, with over 50,000 employees in various countries as of May 2004. ... A flagship is the ship used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships. ... Enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) are management information systems that integrate and automate many of the business practices associated with the operations or production aspects of a company. ... 1998 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... ...

Its primary strengths are ease of use and customization, internationalization and leading edge technology. All of the re-sellers are partners of Microsoft Business Solutions. Some of the leading companies dealing with the reselling of Axapta software are Junction Solutions, Ultimate Software, Watermark, Columbus IT Partner, AX Software, Tectura, Aston (now part of Tectura), EDB Gruppen, Pulse, Edan Business Software and Global IT Professional Services. Columbus IT Partner is a Danish IT company that resells and provides consultancy services for XAL and Axapta, ERP systems from Microsoft. ...

Recently, Microsoft launched a new program through which it will offer front-line customer support for the applications of select partners - ISVs (independent software vendors) - building add-ons and verticals for Axapta such as Targit or To-Increase's E-Con.

Custom Axapta development and modification is done via it's own IDE MorphX that contains various tools such as a debugger, code analyzer, and query interface. This devlopment environment resides in the same client application that a normal day-to-day user would access to thus allowing development to take place on any instance of the client. The development language used in Axapta is x++. An integrated development environment (IDE) (also known as an integrated design environment and integrated debugging environment) is computer software to help computer programmers develop software. ... A debugger is a computer program that is used to debug (and sometimes test or optimize) other programs. ... In computing, a client is a system that accesses a (remote) service on another computer by some kind of network. ... In computing, a client is a system that accesses a (remote) service on another computer by some kind of network. ... X++ is the proprietary high-level development language used in customization of the Microsoft ERP, Axapta. ...

Simply put, Axapta is primarily a Tier II product with the functionalitites of Tier I products such as SAP, PeopleSoft, etc.