AX4B - one product, then a catalogue

AX4B was founded in Sao Paulo in 2006 by a team that chose to work exclusively with one product, Microsoft Dynamics AX - which is where the name comes from. Antonio Felix has led it as chief executive through the expansion that followed. Starting as the specialist in a single enterprise resource planning suite is how a small firm earns the right to be called at all: it cannot outbid a large integrator on breadth, so it competes on being the house that knows one thing completely.

The growth after that was bought rather than learned. In 2017 it acquired the systems integrator Gripho for four million reais, and in the same year the Porto Alegre consultancy Basis IT, which brought SAP NetWeaver and Basis skills. The SAP purchase crossed a line most Microsoft partners do not, and the stated logic at the time was convergence - SAP’s S/4 running on Microsoft’s cloud - so a firm fluent in both had somewhere to stand that neither single-vendor partner could reach. By then Dynamics AX was about a third of revenue rather than all of it.

The portfolio today reads as the accumulated result of that strategy rather than as a plan: management software and the services around it, plus cloud, backup, endpoint security and process automation. The named alliances span Huawei Cloud, Veeam, ESET, Trend Micro, Kaspersky, Adobe, Autodesk, Automation Anywhere and Hyland - a list that is deliberately not a single vendor stack, because a customer replacing one component should not have to replace the integrator.

It operates from offices in Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, Goias and the Federal District, Espirito Santo and Pernambuco. That geography is the part worth noticing for anyone studying the Brazilian channel: national coverage in this market is built city by city, usually by acquiring the firm that already had the relationships there, because enterprise software is sold by people who can be in the room.