After three decades building and scaling Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Business Central partners, Ian Humphries has joined the BC4 leadership team. Here is what those years taught him about where Business Central is heading next.
I joined BC4 at what most people would call semi-retirement. Sid and I have known each other a long time, and I spoke to him in the early days about focusing his business on sports as a vertical. I have followed his progress ever since, and spend five minutes around the business and you can see why.
BC4 reminds me a great deal of my own two start-ups, Alpha Landstar in the mid-1990s and, later, the NAV people. It is a small company with some genuinely skilled people, close relationships with its customers, and a CEO who is a techie at heart rather than a suit. There is a lot here that mirrors my own career, and that is exactly why I wanted to help build what comes next.
When I started in retail technology there was a dizzying range of till systems, then a wave of competing web platforms, then an endless list of back office and ERP systems to choose between. Most of that has fallen away. Business Central itself was a relatively unknown Danish product thirty years ago, and now it is one of a handful of systems that dominate the market, the same consolidation is happening with platforms like Shopify on the web side. Fewer choices sounds like less competition, but for customers it means tighter integration, because a platform like Business Central can cover everything from retail through to accounting and warehouse management without ten different possibilities to account for.
I have never been a technologist for the sake of it. What has kept me in this industry for thirty years is the variety, working with retailers, then manufacturers, then completely different businesses again, each with their own problems to work through. I came into IT just before the internet changed everything, watched what became possible once it arrived, and now we are living through the AI moment. The thread running through all of it is the same, the technology only earns its keep by what it lets a business solve.
You can buy from the best supplier in the market and still get it wrong if your own team is not given the time or the authority to make decisions, or if too many people are involved and everyone is trying to solve everything at once. I am not a fan of too much democracy in an implementation. Concentrating on the big issues instead of every edge case, with the right team empowered to make calls, is what separates the projects that go well from the ones that do not.
Three things stand out to me.
The first is AI, which by now is almost a cliche to mention, but it is the real one. Business Central is already good at helping run a business, but once you add Microsoft Copilot into an ERP system, a huge amount of work that people have always done manually starts to become automated. So much of what runs through Business Central every day is the same repeated transaction, replenishment reports, purchase orders, payment reminders, worked through by hand. Over the next decade I expect a lot more of that to become agents talking to agents rather than people doing it themselves, one agent deciding stock needs ordering, another on the supplier side picking it up, with the efficiency gains that come from taking people out of repetitive work.
The second is less exciting but just as important, governance. Individuals across every department are starting to build their own tools with Claude and ChatGPT, which echoes exactly what happened in the nineties with someone in accounts building a complicated Access database, and again a decade ago with Power BI and Power Apps. Those were always hard to manage once the person who built them moved on. I think we are about to see the same pattern again, except faster and with far more capability attached. My concern is what happens when somebody leaves and the AI agent they built is sitting under their own personal login rather than anything corporate IT ever signed off. Managing AI as part of the corporate IT structure, rather than letting it grow wild around the edges, is going to matter a great deal.
The third is sector specialisation, and this is where I think BC4 has a genuine opportunity in sports and events as well as retail. The more a business concentrates on a specific sector, the more domain knowledge it builds up, and the more experience it can carry over from similar businesses elsewhere. Sport in particular has not had heavy IT investment over the years, despite being surprisingly complex. A normal rugby club is running hospitality tills, catering, events booking, a shop, an online store and stock control, on top of the usual accounting, often without the scale or the people to manage it all separately. Bring all of that together in one application instead of a patchwork of systems stitched together with interfaces, and there is a great deal still to go after in that space.
My advice has not changed in thirty years. The outcome depends on both teams, not just on buying from the best supplier. Give your own team the time to work on the project and the authority to make decisions, and resist the urge to involve too many people with too many opinions all trying to solve everything at once. Concentrate on solving the big issues rather than perfecting every edge case. And increasingly, start thinking now about how you will govern the AI tools your own people will inevitably start using, rather than finding out after someone has already built something corporate IT never knew existed. Get those things right and the technology itself becomes the easier part of the conversation.
I did not join BC4 because I needed another job. I joined because I recognised something in it, a small company with great people, close customer relationships, and a leadership team that still thinks like builders rather than managers. What I would like BC4 to be known for in a few years' time is exactly that, great, innovative people giving great customer service.
There is nothing complicated about that ambition, you just need good, smart people who make customers feel like there is somebody at the end of the line who will help them