For the interview I'd like to ask for a short introduction/biography about yourself your current role, what you do, location, etc and than to answer the following questions

I am a Dynamics Ax developer and technical consultant, and have been working with the product since Axapta version 2.1 in the Damgaard days.

I am from Perth, Western Australia and that’s where I started my career.  Before entering the world of IT I worked for several years performing various roles at a small wholesaler/retailer of industrial equipment.  Every day I entered sales and purchase orders, maintained stock levels, helped with invoicing and performed a bunch of other jobs which gave me invaluable experience of real-life business practices and the world of an ERP user.  Little did I know at the time how useful that would later be!

Once I’d moved into IT, which had always been my plan, I began programming commercially and worked for a further 5 years in Perth before moving to The Netherlands for several years.  I am now based in London, a city which I love.

Currently I am working as a technical consultant on a contract basis here.  When I moved to the UK early last year I decided to start my own company, a1x limited, specialising in Dynamics Ax technical services, which in reality mainly means programming.  As I am primarily a technical guy, this suits me fine.  Prior to the move to London I’d always been a permanent employee so it was quite a change, but has been very rewarding, despite the tribulations of the financial crisis.  If anybody is interested my website and contact details can be found at www.a1x.co.uk.

Back in Perth in 1999 I had recently started working for Globe Software, a reseller of the SunSystems ERP product, when they came to the realisation that the product had a limited future and they needed a new focus.  Axapta had not been available in Australia for very long at that point, but Globe decided to pick it up and offer it in the Perth market.  That was an exciting time, as I had not been programming commercially for very long, was full of enthusiasm for the new product, and was forced to figure everything out myself as there were no other Axapta developers for literally thousands of kilometres!

Perhaps due to this fact, I heavily used (for both reading and posting) the old Technet community. That was by far the best Axapta resource available and was a lifesaver for the still fairly small community of Axapta specialists at the time.  That site influenced me so much that even now I often still use the old Technet URL as a shortcut to redirect to the official Microsoft Dynamics Ax newsgroup.

Who has been your biggest influence/s in Microsoft Dynamics?

As during the first part of my career I was so isolated from the rest of the Axapta world, it’s hard to pick somebody as a major influence.  I would say that I owe most to the “old guard” of the Technet community.

What has been your biggest achievement/s in Microsoft Dynamics?

There are a few things of which I’m particularly proud over my Ax career to date.

The first was probably the development of Atlas xl (Microsoft Excel add-in for Dynamics Ax) while I was still in Australia.  Most people familiar with Dynamics Ax will also know of Atlas xl.  The solution was conceived by the owners at Globe Software, and as I was the only experienced Ax developer there at the time, I had to develop the entire product alone.  At the same time, I was still working on our Axapta projects doing X++ development so this was really a stretch.  However the product was very successful and by the time I left Australia in 2004 we had sold thousands of copies to countries all over the world.  It’s been a long time since I’ve been involved with Atlas xl, but it’s still nice to bump into the product regularly.  Globe Software still offers the product, albeit entirely rewritten over the years, and they now have a dedicated team working on it and a far more professional offering than when we struggled along in the old days.

Another important event, or more accurately period, for me was whilst I was working in The Netherlands for the Microsoft Gold Partner, HGH Business Consultancy.  HGH had, amongst other offerings, a couple of large vertical solutions (DycoTrade for commodity trading - www.dycotrade.com and DynaRent for the rental industry - www.dynarent.nl) which they had been offering for several years.  Both products had been written piecemeal over long periods of time and were suffering for it.  The decision was made by HGH management to invest significantly into rewriting these solutions from scratch, to bring them into Dynamics Ax 4.0 and at the same time provide new stable base products for the future.  They appointed me as manager of a newly created department to do this, and over the next year and a half (until I left for the UK) I and my team were given virtually free rein to re-write these solutions based on technical best practices in every regard possible.  With a 100% focus on creating fast, scalable, maintainable and extensible products for the future, and without any significant commercial pressure, this was a development dream and I was able to put all my experience into practice to create as close as we could manage to technically perfect products.   I can only applaud HGH for taking such a long-sighted decision and I’m glad to see the products now doing well in the marketplace and winning awards such an Innovation Award from Microsoft in 2008.

A small thing is my personal Ax website www.axaptapedia.com, which is of course a Wikipedia for Dynamics Ax.   I started this a few years ago as I thought rather than the same people writing the same thing a hundred times in newsgroup answers, they could write a full answer just once as a Wiki article, and then just post links to the article to help people out. There’s quite a base of information on there now, and I often refer to it myself to remember how to do things.

Finally, of course, the MVP status which I received in 2007.  That was a little short-lived as Microsoft rightly expects a high level of commitment from their MVPs.   I was very busy in my job at the time and felt that I could not sacrifice my job performance to do what was required to maintain the status.   However it was an honour to receive it and I am glad to have been part of the group, even for only a year.

From my own technical perspective, it would have to be: continued and exciting technical innovation, a fuller integration with the Microsoft stack and a positive and certain future pathway for the product.  They’ve also started to fix (I won’t say completed...) the serious lack of technical  documentation for the product.

Why should an end user purchase Microsoft Dynamics?

What are the biggest challenges facing Microsoft Dynamics in the ERP market today?

The fact that Dynamics Ax is often sold to smaller or mid-size customers is problematic.  These are companies which often need a fully-featured product like Dynamics but don’t really have the skills, the experience or the realistic financial view required to properly implement one.  As mentioned above, my view is that larger companies are a more desirable target market , and Microsoft is certainly pushing the product in that direction.  However the same issue of size applies to many of the resellers in the partner channel.  While many have truly excellent people, they are not always able to scale up effectively and are sometimes probably not suited to taking on real enterprise-level projects. It is only through large implementers who already have enterprise experience that we’re going to see a real breakthrough into the large-scale market, in my opinion, and this is needed.

What do you want to see happen with Microsoft Dynamics in the future?

Dynamics Ax is simply “what I do” so obviously my major priority is for it to have a long and fruitful existence!  I would very much like to see it move further towards the enterprise market.  Somewhat selfishly, this opens opportunities for – and in fact requires - a wider variety of roles for Ax specialists beyond the usual “project manager, consultant, developer” model which exists now on most projects.  I have 100% faith in the future of Dynamics Ax and that Microsoft will move it in the right direction, and see only good things in the future.