Hamza Hussain
I think awareness of that deadline varies quite wildly across different companies. Some businesses have already scoped out the migration, some have started engaging partners, and others are still treating 2029 like a distant problem, or something they want someone else to deal with later. Everyone knows the date, and everyone knows 2029 is the cut-off, but the biggest pattern I’m seeing right now is the gap between that awareness and what’s actually being resourced. Far fewer businesses have translated the deadline into an actual plan with people and budget attached to it.
The businesses taking it seriously now tend to be the ones that have already felt the pain somewhere else in their technology stack. They’ve had the same experience of scrambling before, and they don’t want to repeat that process again.
A Platform Change, Not A Version Upgrade
GP to Business Central isn’t just a version upgrade - it’s a platform change. GP and Business Central are built differently under the hood, so this is closer to a full reimplementation than a lift-and-shift.
Every customisation, integration and report someone built two, three or five years ago needs to be assessed, rebuilt or replaced, especially when people now depend on it without really knowing how it works. On top of that, businesses are dealing with huge amounts of historical data, some of which may never have been cleaned, and processes that have drifted away.
I think people underestimate it because, on the surface, it looks like Microsoft GP moving to another Microsoft product: same vendor, newer system. In practice, it’s a full transformation to a new ERP system.
The Talent Risk Sits In The Overlap
It’s a mix, and that’s the problem. There are plenty of people in the market who know Great Plains, and plenty of people who know Business Central, but there are fewer people who know both deeply enough to translate one into the other.
That means understanding the data model differences between Business Central and GP. It means knowing which GP customisations have a clean Business Central equivalent, and which ones need to be rethought entirely. When you add Power Platform, integrations and everything else around the migration, the candidate pool gets a lot smaller.
So the real risk isn’t finding a Business Central consultant. It’s finding someone who has actually lived through a GP to BC migration and knows where the landmines are. With this migration, it’s not like there’s a shortcut you can just take.
The Best Specialists Are Already Being Booked
The consultants who have done multiple GP to BC migrations, and who understand them properly, are being booked further and further in advance. I couldn’t stress that enough. Every client wants the same small group of people.
For businesses leaving it late, the honest reality is that they’ll end up paying a premium for whoever is left, or they’ll pay for someone to learn on the job at their expense. Neither is a good position to be in on a project of this scale.
The businesses moving forward now are the ones de-risking the deadline and dealing with the resourcing challenge before it catches up with them later.
Senior Ownership Makes The Difference
When these programmes go well, there’s usually a senior person close to the business who has a good understanding of the platform. They’re not just executing tasks from a project plan, they’re actively flagging risks before they become problems. There’s also stronger internal ownership, with someone on the client side who understands the why behind the decisions, not just the what.
When these programmes go badly, it’s almost always a resourcing gap. That can mean a junior-level consultant being placed where a senior-level consultant was needed, or not enough senior oversight holding the technical decisions together. It can also mean the internal team doesn’t have the right bandwidth to properly validate what’s being built.
It’s rarely the technology’s fault, to be honest. It’s usually a people and capacity problem.
Summit NA Comes At The Right Time
I’m heading to Community Summit North America in Nashville in October 2026, and from my end I think the two biggest conversations will be AI and the 2029 migration. I expect a lot of conversations with partners who are trying to resource multiple migrations across different clients, and end clients who are starting to realise that the timelines are going to be tighter than they thought.
AI, Copilot and AI Agent capabilities inside Business Central and Power Platform are going to come up consistently as well, because businesses are increasingly asking a bigger question. It’s not just how do we migrate to the next platform, but how do we migrate in a way that sets us up properly for what’s coming next?
So I think AI, Business Central and GP migration will be the biggest topics on site.
Resourcing Needs To Start Earlier
Pretty straightforward: start the resourcing conversation now. Start that conversation before you start the project. Don’t wait until you’ve picked a partner, and don’t wait until you’ve signed a statement of work before thinking about who’s actually going to be in the room doing the work.
Talk to the people who specialise in this specific migration. Understand what good looks like, and get a sense of what senior capacity is available now versus what you’re going to be competing for later.
The businesses I see handling this best are the ones treating resourcing as part of the planning phase, not something they figure out once they’ve decided to move to Business Central and the contract is signed.
Planning A GP To Business Central Move?
One of the biggest themes here is that the 2029 deadline is not only a technical migration date. It’s also a resourcing question.
If you’re still running GP, my advice is to start the resourcing conversation before the project begins: who needs to be in the room, what good looks like and what senior capacity is available now versus what you’ll be competing for later.
If you’re planning a move from GP to Business Central, or want to understand the talent market around these migrations before the deadline gets closer, connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamza-hussain-29434815a/
You can also book a call with the team here: https://landing.empiric.com/em...
