Bert Verbeek's Journey: From Economics Student to MVP and His Vision for the Future of Tech and Innovation in the Netherlands

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP Show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from the Netherlands. He works as a technical solution architect at 4 PS. He was first awarded as MVP in 2023. He has been working with NavVision since 2007, where he started as a consultant with NAV 4.0. He studied economics but has always been interested in computers. You can find links to his bio and social media in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Bert.

Bert Verbeek: 1:32
Thanks for having me, mark. It's a pleasure to have you all here. The introduction is good. I'm Bert, 40 years old, from the Netherlands, a very small town, barnveld. It's in the centre of the Netherlands. I live there with my wife and three kids. My oldest son is nine and two daughters from six and three.

Mark Smith: 2:00
Wow, isn't that region you live in famous for chickens?

Bert Verbeek: 2:04
Yeah, the contents of chicken farms are quite condensed in Barnveld. That's the famous about it. We've got also the museum about all the chickens. Maybe all other guys say, okay, that's crazy, a museum only for chicken. But it's coming quite a lot of people in there, so that's really crazy and nice to have it.

Mark Smith: 2:35
Nice. Now tell me, what do you do for fun?

Bert Verbeek: 2:39
Well, what I do for fun mostly is working at my house reconstructing everything, Because a couple of months ago, three months ago, I've moved from one house to another house and we have to renovate all our living home. So right now, that's what I'm doing for fun right now.

Mark Smith: 3:04
Nice, nice, and let me see if I can get. No, I'm not going to try and guess, but what's your favourite food, or what food do you recommend when people visit the Netherlands that they should eat?

Bert Verbeek: 3:16
Well, it's mostly that's quite difficult. I like in the winter. That's mostly that, the heavy costs. It's quite heavy food but we call it burkel, a circle that's with potatoes and sauerkraut and that's quite nice to eat in the winter times.

Mark Smith: 3:43
And just before we jump into your career path and whatnot and what you've done as an MVP, the Netherlands always stands out as one of those countries that are very advanced in like renewable energy, the adoption of solar One of the things like I'm growing plants, vegetables and stuff on my property all the time One of the things that was in the Netherlands. They invented this idea of growing plants vertically, so therefore, per square meter, you could get a much higher yield. And then I know that there's either paths or roads that are all solar panels and they charge, and I have a feeling I'm not sure if I'm right but something by like 2030 you'll have no fossil fuel vehicles or something like that is one of the goals.

Bert Verbeek: 4:34
That is indeed one of the goals, indeed, and that is also typical Dutch. We want to always the first in the classroom with the best degrees and stuff like that. So we have set the goal in 2030 with no only electrical cars, but that's also typical Dutch is from the history. We are a trading company, so we trade a lot of with all other companies sorry, all other countries and that's quite. Also had our speaking. We speak more English, german, french and Spanish. Then the Netherlands, and we adopt very fast with it and because it's also a small country, yeah, we have to innovate from what is the best way to do it. Also have with with plants growing indeed what you said, vertical but also with our water. Netherlands is below sea level and six years ago we have quite a lot of six years it was just a food coming from from sea lands, so all is drowning, so we had to prevent that for it. So that's, yeah, we are a little bit quite innovative.

Mark Smith: 6:07
And, of course, great explorers, my, my country is called New Zealand, and that's a Dutch name, isn't it? That's been given to our country?

Bert Verbeek: 6:16
Yeah, yeah, indeed, we have in province also called sea lands so and that they were selling from sea lands and then discovered new sea lands and give it a name Same as New York. It's called New Amsterdam, but fortunately they have to sell it.

Mark Smith: 6:39
Yeah, tell me a bit about your company for PS, if I've got it right in the translations, and whatnot. Is it use specializing? Is it construction? Is that the area of where you operate?

Bert Verbeek: 6:57
Yeah, we do only companies in the construction industry. 20 years ago we did it only in the Netherlands and we said, ok, we want one product and that's that's Microsoft. We buy it from them and from back then it was a new vision because it's really customizable and we said, ok, how we do one product, we are one ISV only doing it in the construction market and that was growing and now we also have an international spread partnerships to other companies in there.

Mark Smith: 7:44
So I take it you've created a vertical overlay for business central for the construction sector. Is that right?

Bert Verbeek: 7:51
Yeah, yeah indeed.

Mark Smith: 7:55
Is there much you have to do from country to country? Is there any kind of? Is there many nuances between how construction is reported on, quantified etc. In BC? Does it differ from country to country much or it's negligible?

Bert Verbeek: 8:11
Well, the base is almost in the same. You have a project and you have to control on that and your administration. But indeed there are suspicious country versions, for example, uk you have cuts with separate contractors. Germany is slightly different again. So indeed we built a W1 based on W1 of Microsoft and we have also country versions like the same model as Microsoft does.

Mark Smith: 8:50
Yeah, yeah. And are you seeing much need to also use the Power Platform and things like Power Automate, power BI, power Pages? Are you starting to see that integrated power apps etc more, or is it still quite separate, or are you locking that into part of your ISV story as well?

Bert Verbeek: 9:12
Yeah, in a couple of years. And the construction industry is very conservative, so the innovation are going there very slow, but in a couple of two years ago we saw an immense grow of people that said, okay, we want to automate things and you can do it with the Power Platform. So that's also that we acquire another company specialized only in the Power Platform so they can consult our customers on that one, because there wasn't growing demand on, indeed, power Apps, power BI, power Automate, and had just to, not from an ISV standpoint, but only for customizations, because a company is always special, they said, and they want always some nice features that we don't build in our product and therefore the Power Platform is very strong for that one.

Mark Smith: 10:18
In the solutions that you've done in business central. Let's say, where do you see the role of AI playing in the next two or three years in the actual product?

Bert Verbeek: 10:29
Well, that's mostly how in with AI. In an ERP system that's a little bit hard because in an ERP system when you want your figures you want to do it right and that's mostly the problem of not the problem with AI. But yeah, it is percentage of right, it's only 90% right and in an ERP system you want to have fully figured, 100% right. But I can see there is some needs from finance figures how you see your cash flow is growing over the years and all that kind of finance or stuff. But also I think there is a need in not only the cash flow but also in your prognosis on your project. And especially we have some companies that has quite a large of projects and that's a little special company. For them they want to do a prognosis for the coming years and that is doable with AI, I think.

Mark Smith: 11:50
Interesting. Do you think AI is going to impact the construction industry?

Bert Verbeek: 11:55
It certainly does indeed, Just for recognition and all the automation and stuff like that.

Mark Smith: 12:03
Yeah, interesting. I was involved in a project in Hong Kong for a construction company. One of the biggest things as we engage on this project was artifact storage. So you know, inspect site manager, whatever goes out, and they take photos of lots of stuff. And so, as cameras have advanced, those photos have got larger. The document collection, or artifact collection, let's call it, has grown exponentially and they were even finding SharePoint was really limiting where they could go. How do you handle, you know, the aggregate of documents that are generated on a big construction project?

Bert Verbeek: 12:47
There are indeed a lot of documents on that and also when you're offering stuff, there are a lot of details on that and it's quite large because you have also growing and indeed we see SharePoint has some needs. But SharePoint is also quite good in collaboration, so that you see, also in consulting companies there's a lot of subcontracting involved in one project and that's where you need SharePoint. But what we see also is indeed what you said that there's a limit storage on that and therefore we use Azure Data Lake or file storage Just to store all the files around there and if the project is finished, we are moving to that store.

Mark Smith: 13:47
Yeah, yeah, smart move. When I was doing that job, which was many moons ago, that didn't exist from Microsoft at that time and, of course, the limitations on SharePoint were much higher. It had an advance to where it's got to now. Interesting. How did you become an MVP? What was that journey for you?

Bert Verbeek: 14:05
Well, it wasn't for me in tenets to be coming on MVP and mostly what we see in my company, fop yes, I'm working there for 10 years we were always a little bit back from the versions. But when transforming from Dynamics and in V2Base Central, I said to myself, oh, we need to be four on the latest versions always and investigate stuff, new features that Microsoft bring out, because when we're moving also to the cloud, you've got a lot of more features on that. And that's why I started investigating in the community on Jammer Also, we got a little bit more collaboration with Microsoft and so you learn people, you take advice from people. And then I realized, ok, hey, I'm getting a lot of from that community and why shouldn't I give it back? So in a corona time someone asked me OK, I bet you can tell something about telemetry inside this central on that event. And I said, yeah, ok, sure, it is safe behind your computer, not with 40 people in the room. And that's why I started from OK, that was quite fun. Then last year a colleague of mine joined me. He's also an MVP. I said, ok, why don't we do a session together on tech days? So yeah, ok, I said OK, let's do that. When I said that a couple of weeks, I said why I'm doing this? Because there were 200 people in the room, so that was a little bit scary for me for the first time, but that was quite fun. And then you learn a lot of more. People share your knowledge, and that's my main goal just to share knowledge about what you have learned. And that's, I think, also the greatest. When you see, in the business world there's a really dense community and you know each other, you see each other at events and from just people you know they become friends Just to share other things than business. And that's why I said, ok, have a good session. Someone said, okay, I will recognize you as an MVP. And then I said, oh shit, now it becomes a stress to recognize it.

Mark Smith: 17:18
Indeed, Wow, in your observation of coming from NAV and now in Business Central, what do you miss? That was an NAV that you don't have anymore, and it might have been a way of working. It might have been the fact that you could touch the hardware, any number of things. And then, what excites you, the flip side of the question, what excites you about working with Business Central?

Bert Verbeek: 17:48
The most downside is, yeah, you have in the central the short curbs keys and working. Now you are working in a browser and that's a little bit slower than you have gotten a Windows application just running on your local machine and we see that it is a little bit slower down, but right now, you see also, microsoft is picking that up and working on that. That's a little bit what I miss, but that's the only thing, because there are a lot of new opportunities in there and that's what I see is from CAL to AL language, microsoft investing a lot of new features in the language. We have a lot of objects in there. So, yeah, it's starting a real comprehensive language, but also moving to the cloud, and that is one thing we see that we thought, ok, constructions have what I said, they are a little bit conservative, but when they move into the cloud, there are a lot of opportunities out there. You can do stuff with Azure, with the BOW platform and all the connections are there and that's something what we said. Ok, that's a huge benefit of Business Central in the cloud and that's very interesting.

Mark Smith: 19:29
Yeah, and is it nice not having all your customers on different versions as an all upgrade pubs that you had in the NAV time frame. You'd have that a lot less now in cloud right.

Bert Verbeek: 19:41
Yeah, yeah indeed, and we have some customers that are on NAV 2009, on prem still, and last year, because we are on a modified base app yet. So last year we went 130 customers from one version to another version and that went very smooth and we said, ok, if we do it for 300 customers, that will be amazing. That's just in one month that we migrate 130 customers for one person to another.

Mark Smith: 20:24
Wow, that's incredible.

Bert Verbeek: 20:26
That was a really good feeling in that and we had to pressure that because there was some security issue from OO2. So we said, OK, we must. And that was a really great feeling when the job was finished and we take a beer to really tell her and said, OK, give us a really great, good project with no issues at all.

Mark Smith: 20:57
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host Business Application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash NZ365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time.