The natural extension: Sanarise in Iraq with Codeator
My relationship with the Codeator team goes back to 2012, when I joined them for a while, and its chief executive, Abdullah Alimam, was my mentor for years. Today that relationship opens a new chapter: after months of preparation and a joint pilot phase, this week we announced that Codeator has joined the Sanarise network as an independent company representing the network in Iraq.
This essay is about the reasons behind that step: what experience we built over six years, why Iraq is the natural extension, and why we enter it with a local partner rather than by opening a branch.
The experience that accumulated
Sanarise has been an Odoo partner since 2020. We started in Istanbul, we run today from our headquarters in Muscat out to the Gulf and the wider region, and we work from Damascus as well. From the first day we chose one system and mastered it, and I have written about that decision before. What I have not written about is what six years of work on one system, with one team, did.
We worked with distributors and the FMCG sector, where stock expires and moves between dozens of warehouses and several companies in the same group, and with retail, store chains, and restaurants, where the point of sale keeps working without an internet connection and inventory and accounting are updated instantly. We worked with factories, where planning starts at the bill of materials, runs through manufacturing orders and quality control, and ends in the general ledger, with real estate from brokerage and auctions to valuation and leasing, with humanitarian organisations on fund and grant accounting, and with universities and the public sector, where the system runs through direct integrations with government systems for tax and compliance.
In every one of these sectors we implemented hundreds of Odoo apps and sub-systems, the standard ones and the ones we built ourselves: accounting, purchasing, warehouses, sales, manufacturing, HR, payroll, point of sale, projects, quality, maintenance, fleet, and approval workflows. With them accumulated deep knowledge of each industry: how a product is priced in distribution, how its cost is computed in a factory, and how the monthly accounts are closed in a group of ten companies. That knowledge is built project after project, and it is what separates a partner who knows the system from a partner who knows the industry.
Six years across these sectors taught us one lesson that kept repeating: the real difficulty in every one of these projects was the structure. A holding company with a distributor, a factory, a property arm, and a retail chain needs one system in which each company works with its own books, currency, and policies, and the board then reads one consolidated figure it can trace down to the invoice. That is the work most partners avoid, and it is the work we built our reputation on: unified operating frameworks that run hundreds of millions of dollars in sales for thousands of employees, in groups with dozens of branches and entities.
Out of that accumulation came ready products for the sectors where the projects kept repeating. A product, for us, is delivery experience repeated until it can be packaged, which is why it sells with confidence.
How the network works
Sanarise is a network of independent companies, each with its own ownership, management, and books, joined by one standard and one founder. The company in Oman is the headquarters and the commercial engine, serving the Gulf and the wider region from there, the company in Türkiye is the first and the engineering hub, and the company in Syria builds the infrastructure of an economy coming back, and from it came Levant Host and WorkLink. Each company owns itself, runs itself, and records its own numbers in its own books.
What joins them is the way of working: one system we master, one delivery standard from analysis to after go-live, a professional development team and certified Odoo specialists from inside the network, and a base of partners and references that is our only sales channel. The network has never paid for a single advertisement since it was founded; every client came through a partner or through a client before them.
That is why every expansion in the network starts from two questions: can we sell in this market through what we have already built? And is there someone in it who knows it better than we do?
Why Iraq
The Iraqi economy rests on commercial groups. The large Iraqi company today is most often a holding company spanning trading, imports, contracting, property, manufacturing, retail, and head-office services, operating in more than one governorate, and keeping its accounts in dinars and dollars in the same ledger. That is exactly the shape of the projects we spent six years mastering. As for two currencies in one ledger, we have worked with them in every market we entered.
What the Codeator team sees in the market is that many of these groups run their companies on separate systems, spreadsheets, and paper, and the group figure is assembled by hand at the end of the month. That is a standing demand, and it grows with every company added to a group.
Then, Iraq is close. Close in language, since we have implemented and trained in Arabic from the first day. Close in geography, since Damascus and Baghdad are less than a thousand kilometres apart. And close in history: in Uruk, five thousand years ago, the first accounting records known to humanity were written. We are entering the market that invented accounting.
Why with Codeator
The network's rule is that every market is served by a company that belongs to it, works by its standards and regulations, and is led by people who know it. That is why the way into Iraq was an Iraqi company.
Codeator has worked in Iraq since 2009. Seventeen years of software for Iraqi companies, and a team that knows how an Iraqi group is actually run: how permissions are divided between companies, how the dollar is settled against the dinar at month end, and how an accountant in one governorate and a manager in another are trained on the same system.
What the network adds is depth: six years of delivery for holding companies in FMCG, retail, manufacturing, real estate, and organisations, hundreds of apps implemented and built in real projects, and a method that starts by understanding the group's structure before choosing apps, brings the companies into the system one after another, and stays with the finance team through the first monthly close. What Codeator adds is what cannot be imported: knowledge of the market from inside it, relationships built over seventeen years, and a team working on Baghdad time.
Codeator is led by its chief executive, Abdullah Alimam, my mentor for years and today my partner in a mission we share: to build the digital infrastructure this region runs on. And we agreed on one thing before anything else: the Iraqi client is served to the network's standard, by Iraqi hands.
The next stop
What began as an ambition in 2020 stands today as a tangible reality. Four companies in four countries (Oman, Syria, Türkiye, and Iraq), each with its own local identity, united by a rigorous method and by solutions born from delivery. We grow organically through partners: every new market is opened by local hands that know its ways, and every company that joins us starts with the weight of the whole network behind it from its first day.
Our standing principle: we do not wait for demand to lay the foundation; we build the infrastructure and let it set the pace of the market. Iraq is the fourth country on this map, and the best chapters of this journey are still unwritten.