Article InsideSAP - Issue13 March/April 2011

Alisdair Templeton

Alisdair Templeton made a splash in the SAP world in 2010 when he, together with Mart Harding, took out the Demojam at SAP TechEd in Las Vegas with their Super Generic Mobile App. Templeton was already active as an SAP Community Network contributor and conference speaker, but this achievement was not only a highlight for Templeton - it gave his status as an influencer a leg up.

"The Demojam win has generated a lot of interest inHTML5 mobile apps. I've had many conversations since with people who have been influenced by this approach and who are now putting together their own mobility solutions based On this," Templeton says.

He began the year as the integration architect at AustraliaPost, and worked on two successful projects there - a large Event Management implementation and an HR rollout to 30,000 employees. Templeton was keen to return to consulting so then tookan opportunity to join Acclimation as a solution architect. He says this role has given him the freedom to pursue different directions in terms of development, such as projects combining WebDynpro and Adobe Forms to facilitate online and offline customer requirements, as well as some more unusual proof of concept work such as integrating Solution Manager and EventManagement with Twitter."I've been able to get away from some of the structure youget in a large organisation, and be able to freely innovatewithout being constrained," he says.The nature of innovation means choosing the right directioncan be tough, and so to generate project ideas.

Templeton says he spends time looking at trends in the Java and the .NET spaces, which tend to be ahead of SAP, as well as talking to people in different organisations and industries to find out what their struggles and pain points are ."For example, there's a lot of talk at the moment aboutweb 3.0 and semantics, and you think, how would that workfor SAP? Then you talk to people about building proof of concepts and then projects, and it goes from there,"

Templeton says, adding that clients now seem more interested in what they might be able to build in SAP. "Once upon a time, SAP was very much about putting itin and configuring it. Now it's a much more sophisticated platform. If you take away the Business Suite side and just look at the NetWeaver stack underneath, a lot of the problems you may not have been able to answer once with SAP, you certainly can do now."

It's a little difficult sometimes to convince people who are still on the cost of ownership side, but at the end of the day, well-written software is not going to cost you any more than a badly implemented ERP suite. So people are more willing to get into that conversation now, especially when they realise what they can get out of it."Templetons approach stems from bis original introduction to SAP, as a consultant in the utilities market.

"I was using SAP as a tool to build software with, rather than looking at it as a black box that you configure and driveby tables. Coming into it that way has given me a totally different perspective to what other people have. Having built a lot of stuff with it, you know what the system is capable of, and it has a very robust core," he says.

He believes the common view of the most significant developments in the next 12-18 months will be mobility, Gateway and analytics products.

"For me, the most importanr development is going to be that people will recognise those tools are there, but arguably they don't need to use them. For example, if you want to domobility, you don't need the Sybase product. The toolset is sophisticated enough for people to do things themselves, as they understand the capability of the platform without the add-ons," Templeton says.

He advocates the use of domain driven design as an entirely different way of thinking about software."By bringing those types of concepts into your development, people in the SAP community could really drive it forward, asopposed to just being driven by what SAP is doing."It's about really understanding the problems, and then building great software to solve them by embracing a software architecture in its purest form."