After 19 years, Ian Grieve bids farewell to the world of Dynamics GP, says hello to Dynamics 365 Business Central

After working with Microsoft Dynamics GP for 19 years, Ian Grieve has bid a fond adieu to the ERP application, while saying bonjour to Dynamics 365 Business Central.

In a blog post on his AzureCurve website, Grieve wrote that he decided to make the change because even though he thinks that Dynamics GP is a great product, D365BC is the future of ERP for small to midsize enterprises (SME).

"While new features are introduced to Dynamics GP with the fall release each year, these are now always minor functionality and I have concerns that as technology moves on that GP will get left behind," he said in his post. "With 22 years of working life ahead of me, I don’t want to get stuck working only with older software application."

Grieve says he also considered moving outside of the Microsoft sphere; however, since most of the software he uses professionally is Microsoft, it made more sense to look for a Microsoft ERP in the SME market. And D365BC is that product. Since it's actively maintained and integrated with new technologies, Grieve says it offers him the "brightest future."

Grieve has also changed roles. He is now working as a lead consultant at 4PS UK, which specializes in D365BC for the construction, civil engineering, and related sectors. Before that Grieve was the lead ERP consultant working with GP at ISC software.

MSDW reached out to Grieve to learn more about his career change.

MSDW: Will Dynamics 365 Business Central be an appropriate solution for many Dynamics GP customers? Should they look outside Microsoft?

I think in a lot of cases, Business Central will do what GP customers need. When I worked at Perfect Image [from 2011 to 2019] and before that, everyone had a stock system with third-party add-ons. They might have some customizations, but we weren't big on the development side of things. So it will be easy then to swap out those customers into something like Business Central with a few changes to processes. But ISC had a good development team, so a lot of customers had extensive development within GP in some cases, which would make moving to any other system more difficult. So it very much depends on the business. Yes, Business Central will do what they need. But I bet most ERP systems would do most of what they need.

In a response to a comment on your Farewell blog post, you say, "There has been a stream of people I know leaving GP-space over recent years and I’ve been talking to an increasing number of customers looking to do the same over the next few years." What are some common reasons those professionals and customers have decided to leave the GP space?