Winning Strategies for Surviving a Dynamics AX 2012 Project: An Interview with AX Veteran Nima Bakhtiary

The origins of southern California's Arbela Technologies mirror, or perhaps foreshadow, the evolution of  Microsoft Dynamics AX toward the enterprise space over the last decade.  Founded by a group enterprise ERP consultants and Dynamics AX veterans, the company has been pushing AX toward global and complex upper mid-market and enterprise businesses for years.

And with the Dynamics AX 2012 R2 release ready for launch, Arbela's AX focus has perhaps never been more aligned to Microsoft's. We sat down for a conversation with Nima Bakhtiary, Arbela's president and CEO for a discussion about the costly project missteps that Dynamics AX customers can avoid, three winning upgrade strategies for AX 2012, and the company's long AX history.

MSDW: What are Arbela's roots?

Nima Bakhtiary: Myself and other founders came from the SAP, Oracle, and QAD world - the upper end ERP market. Other founders came from the Axapta world - they were actually the original developers from back in 1994.   After Microsoft acquired Axapta, we ran into each other for an implementation in Canada in 2003 for Axapta.  Axapta, as it was called at the time, was not an upper market ERP solution, so we brought our expertise [in enterprise] and their expertise for Axapta and morphed Axapta into a solution for upper mid-market and larger companies. When we were successful in that endeavor we formed Arbela. We founded the company with four people and then began hiring in 2005 with a growth path of 40 to 50%.

We noticed that AX had a huge potential because of its flexible architecture ...