What the latest funding rounds in within the Dynamics and NetSuite communities really mean
Two funding rounds crossed my desk this week that I think every Dynamics and NetSuite professional should pay attention to, even though neither company directly touches our stack.
Conduct, a two-year-old London startup, raised a $60 million Series A to ingest enterprise system code and configurations, map the business logic underneath, and generate the changes needed to modify complex IT systems. Index Ventures and Iconiq co-led the round, and here is the part I keep coming back to: SAP itself was among the investors.
Around the same time, Qorelo raised a seed round to automate SAP upgrade and migration workstreams, with the explicit goal of shortening timelines and reducing reliance on manual delivery teams.
This is something different in my opinion. These are not productivity tools that help a consultant work faster. They are aimed at the work itself; the configuration, the migration, the test scripts, the change management that has historically been billed by the hour and staffed by rooms full of people.
I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying AI is about to replace your implementation team, and I most certainly am not climbing on the fear-mongering train. What I am saying is that when the incumbents fund the thing that compresses their own ecosystem’s billable hours, that is not noise; that is a signal about where the value is moving.
So where does it move? If software can ingest a system and generate the configuration, then keystrokes themselves stop being scarce. What stays scarce is the judgment that determines whether the configuration is correct in the first place.
Someone has to know that the way you model intercompany eliminations in NetSuite has downstream consequences at consolidation. Someone has to know that a D365 Finance and Operations design decision made for one entity will quietly break a process for another. I haven’t seen a model that does that, and the ones being funded this week aren’t trying to.
This is exactly why I keep saying cross-stack fluency is the new premium. For the partner and VAR firms I work with, I think this reframes the hiring question entirely. The instinct in a tighter market is to hire cheaper hands for the routine work, and I would argue hard for the opposite. Routine work is precisely the work most exposed to automation, so the smartest investment you can make right now is in senior people whose value lies in their judgment.
If you are a Dynamics or NetSuite partner thinking about what your bench should look like two years from now, this is the conversation to have today, before market forces force it.
I would genuinely enjoy helping you think it through. Reach out and let’s map it together!
Conduct, a two-year-old London startup, raised a $60 million Series A to ingest enterprise system code and configurations, map the business logic underneath, and generate the changes needed to modify complex IT systems. Index Ventures and Iconiq co-led the round, and here is the part I keep coming back to: SAP itself was among the investors.
Around the same time, Qorelo raised a seed round to automate SAP upgrade and migration workstreams, with the explicit goal of shortening timelines and reducing reliance on manual delivery teams.
This is something different in my opinion. These are not productivity tools that help a consultant work faster. They are aimed at the work itself; the configuration, the migration, the test scripts, the change management that has historically been billed by the hour and staffed by rooms full of people.
I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying AI is about to replace your implementation team, and I most certainly am not climbing on the fear-mongering train. What I am saying is that when the incumbents fund the thing that compresses their own ecosystem’s billable hours, that is not noise; that is a signal about where the value is moving.
So where does it move? If software can ingest a system and generate the configuration, then keystrokes themselves stop being scarce. What stays scarce is the judgment that determines whether the configuration is correct in the first place.
Someone has to know that the way you model intercompany eliminations in NetSuite has downstream consequences at consolidation. Someone has to know that a D365 Finance and Operations design decision made for one entity will quietly break a process for another. I haven’t seen a model that does that, and the ones being funded this week aren’t trying to.
This is exactly why I keep saying cross-stack fluency is the new premium. For the partner and VAR firms I work with, I think this reframes the hiring question entirely. The instinct in a tighter market is to hire cheaper hands for the routine work, and I would argue hard for the opposite. Routine work is precisely the work most exposed to automation, so the smartest investment you can make right now is in senior people whose value lies in their judgment.
If you are a Dynamics or NetSuite partner thinking about what your bench should look like two years from now, this is the conversation to have today, before market forces force it.
I would genuinely enjoy helping you think it through. Reach out and let’s map it together!
Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/gxzDtUHT
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