OSCON 2008 - Chaos, Business Models And Open Source Movies

July 23, 2008 – 9:50 pm

OSCON is now into its 3rd day. xTuple is exhibiting (Booth #219, in case you are lucky enough to attend) and Openbravo’s  Chief Products Officer, Paolo Juvara, is also attending and will be blogging on Openbravo’s site.

One of the more interesting sessions was sponsored by Microsoft, of all companies. The panel discussed  general open source issues, with panel members from MySQl, Microsoft, O’Reilly Radar and Science Commons.

Order In The Chaos Of Open Source Projects

One of the questions raised was quite surprising-’what surprised you about open source’. One of the panelist,Siobhan O’Mahony, who has a background in social studies, answered brilliantly - she was surprised at how well very large open source projects are managed. I never thought of it that way. It’s truly amazing how people can collaborate on a global scale, with no funding, no formal obligation to spend time on the project, and still produce a high quality product. And although many of the projects start as a de-centralized, P2P kind of effort, as projects evolve, a core team of leaders emerges. This is happening in the most natural way, without any board meetings or stakeholder demands. Evolution at its best.

That leading core provides the energy required to decrease the level of entropy (remember the second law of thermodynamics?) in the project. That is a kind of energy you can’t buy. It’s just there, because that’s what open source is all about. And that’s why so many open source project are successful.

The Hybrid Model

Another issue that was discussed was the hybrid open source model which is becoming very popular,especially for open source business software.  MySQL is probably the best example of the model’s success. Their database software is hugely popular (the words you read now are stored on their database), and they were smart enough to build a viable business model. It was so viable,actually, that Sun acquired them for 1B$. The hybrid model is the future of open source, particularly for the enterprise, as noted by the panel. Most open source ERP vendors already realized the strength of the model and are adopting different variations of it.

Open Source Content

Another interesting subject was raised by Jon Wilbanks- open software code vs. open content. When you talk about open source, you imagine a group of hardcore programmers, sitting late at night,drinking tons of coffee and churning out amazing pieces of software code. But the open source movement did not only change how software is written-it is now influencing content.

And content is BIG. Think about all the images, videos,music,news articles, scientific research, even marketing lists, produced every day. Think of them in open source terms. Imagine an open source movie, with a quality equivalent to the Apache project, or Eclipse. Everyone volunteers - actors,producers, directors, PR guys. The movie is edited by the masses. You can download the movie for free, edit it any way you like, redistribute it. It’s a whole new way of thinking about content. I bet a hybrid model will evolve around content creation as well.

If only I knew who is going to be the ‘MySQL of Content’, I’d be the first member to join that community!

Blogging From OSCON 2008

InformationWeek On Open Source from OSCON

InfoWorld Rodrigues & Urlocker Open Source Blog From OSCON

InterenetWeeks’ Sean Michel Kerner From OSCON

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Openbravo 2.40 Beta Annouced

July 21, 2008 – 3:32 pm

A short update - Openbravo 2.40 is in Beta now. Some of the major new features include improved user experience, new Ajax functionality, improvements in global accounting requirements and several infrastructural enhancements. You can read the press release here. Openbravo 2.40 release notes can be found here.

I will download and install the 2.40 beta version to provide my own insight on the new features. Register to our RSS feed to get the latest updates.

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OSCON 2008 - Open Source, No ERP

July 20, 2008 – 7:15 pm

If you find yourself wondering, ‘am I in the right business?’, conferences are probably your best indicator. There are several large conferences focusing on open source, O’reilly Media’s OSCON is probably the largest one. It will be held in Portland, Oregon, from July 21st until July 25th, 2008. It’s also OSCON’s 10th anniversary, and we hope we will still be around to celebrate its 50th birthday. The fact that IT’s biggest names are participating, is yet another sign of the maturity of open source solutions.

None of the open source ERP vendors are sponsoring the event nor presenting in any of the related sessions. The largest event hosting just about anyone covered by open source ERP Guru is Infoworld’s OSBC, as it focuses more on open source business applications.

For OSCON 08,  information industry’s heavyweights have all lined up-Google, Sun, IBM, Yahoo, and Novell are some of the names attending. Microsoft’s absence is obvious (it would be somewhat weird to have Microsoft’s people down there). British Telecom is also a sponsor-they have recently sign a deal with SugarCRM reselling Sugar’s open source CRM solution to its huge customer base.

The conference does host a Business Track, where Open Source in the Enterprise seems to be the most promising session.

There will be plenty of live blogging and recorded sessions available online from OSCON 08, I will keep you posted during the week with the most interesting things coming out from there.

Just a reminder-If you want to get the latest news from Open Source ERP Guru, register to our RSS feed. It’s the easiest way to stay updated!

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Open Source ERP Products Editions And Price Comparison

July 12, 2008 – 9:28 pm

Visiting Openbravo’s website today I noticed a banner on their homepage referring to ‘Openbravo Network’. I might have missed it before, but clicking the banner got me to a ‘Buy Openbravo Network’. Openbravo is offering a commercial edition of their open source ERP solution, which includes support, upgrades, ERP appliance for simple deployment and advanced system administration features. This is the the classic feature set offered by similar open source offerings.

In my opinion, this is another sign to the growing maturity of open source ERP solutions. It will help increase adoption and make the solutions more reliable while increasing implementation projects success. On the product side, it will drive the projects to provide a better product with more functionality as competition with proprietary ERP solutions will become tougher.

Since many open source ERP solutions now offer some form of paid services, I would like to  take this opportunity to provide you with a summery of the different editions and prices.

Open Source ERP Product Editions and Prices

Openbravo

Openbravo provides a single paid edition (’Openbravo Network’). Prices are 5,000€ for the first 5 users and then 500€ per user, per year. They currently offer a promotion price of 10,000€ for unlimited users, which is a really good deal if you plan to run more than 20 or so users.

Openbravo Editions Comparison
Openbravo Price Comparison

Compiere

Compiere has been offering commercial editions of their ERP product for a long time now. They offer both Standard and Professional editions. The Standard edition goes for 25$/User/Month and the professional for 50$/User/Month.

Compiere Editions and Pricing

xTuple

xTuple offers 3 editions - Postbook, a free,open source edition, Standard Edition and OpenMFG, the latter 2 being enhanced, commercial ERP versions based on Postbooks.

For Postbooks, the open source edition, xTuple offers varying prices for support and services, depending on the number of users. For 5-19 users, for example, the price is 500$/User/Year,going all the way down to 100$/User/Year for 200+ users.

xTuple Pricing

OpenERP (Former TinyERP)

OpenERP does not offer different ‘editions’ of its software, but they do offer different support packages. Average price is 100€ per hour.

OpenERP Support Plans

OpenERP is also offering a SaaS ERP ( ERP On Demand). They are currently the only open source ERP vendor to offer that. They have a very flexible pricing scheme, allowing you to choose which modules you want to use and pay for. Their SaaS ERP offering is sold for 140€ per user per month.

OpenERP On Demand Pricing

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Open Source ERP Flash Dashboard Using Flex 3

July 10, 2008 – 10:47 pm

In my last post I presented the first of a series of demos that will become a flash dashboard application that can be used for business analysis of open source ERP systems.

I am currently using Openbravo as the ERP system to analyze, but since Pentaho’s Kattle ETL tool is used to extract data from Openbravo, adapting my ETL jobs to other open source ERP systems should not be too hard. At the end of the day, the flash dashboard will be able to support 3-4 open source ERP systems.

Flex For The Business User 

For the development of the dashboard, I use Flex 3. Flex is Adobe’s flash compiler. It has 3 features which I find very powerful in the context of business software:

• Flex OLAP - as I mentioned in my last post, Flex 3 provides ‘OLAP on the fly’ , enabling multidimensional analysis of data (for example, sales data). Using flex makes it much easier to run simple OLAP queries without the complexity of using an OLAP server. The problem is performance - try to OLAP more than 50K records with your browser, either your browser will choke or your users will choke you…
• Charts - flex enables you to generate very good looking flash charts with little effort. The recorded demo in this post will demonstrate this.
• Flex Web-Service Client - in my opinion, Flex’s most powerful feature is its SOAP web service client. Building business mashups with Flex is straight forward. You are only limited by your imagination, as Flex provides you with very strong web-service consumption tools as well as UI elements to hook your data to.

In this posts’ recorded demo, you will see 2 of the 3 features in action. The flash dashboard contains the OLAP analysis components along with some basic charts. What is badly missing in the dashboard is choice - currently, users cannot decide which data they want to chart, for example. I will continue adding more features to the open source ERP Dashboard - if you find it useful or have ideas on how to further develop it, let us know.

open source ERP Dashboard Charts Using Flex

Read Complete Article »»

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Flex Client Side OLAP For Open Source ERP Openbravo

July 6, 2008 – 10:07 pm

In the last few weeks I have been working on integrating BI functionality with open source ERP. I have mostly worked with Pentaho, an open source BI suite.

What Is OLAP?

One of the major components of every BI solution is OLAP. OLAP lets you run multidimensional analysis on your operational data. The idea behind OLAP is to enable very fast multidimensional queries. These queries will answer questions such as what was my revenue in the past 12 months,grouped by region and by product group, for example. This type of queries are very intensive and resource consuming for standard operational information systems (such as E.R.P.) and can bring it to a complete halt (no shipments, no invoicing, no order entry…).

Flex, The Flash Compiler, and OLAP

I was surprised to see that Adobe Flex has OLAP functionality embedded in Flex 3. I used Flex as graphical web-services consuming client (upcoming posts will show you Flex’s strength as a SOAP client) and thought I’d give their OLAP a chance.

Flex is a very elegant and powerful flash compiler,which provides client side OLAP - that means that the actual parsing of the OLAP query,data aggregation and OLAP cube display is handled by the browser running the flash application compiled by Flex. This limits the number of rows of data you can OLAP to about 50K records. However, you can do some of the aggregation  pre-processing and let Flex worry about the actual rendering of the data on the screen. Another possibility is to connect Flex to an OLAP server and let the OLAP sever do all the hard work. I’ll try to connect Flex to Pentaho’s OLAP server (Mondrian) and I’ll let you know how it went. I think it can be a great combo.

The recorded demo (which can be found inside the post, click on “Read Complete Article »»” below) shows a flash application with two OLAP views-sales by region over a period of 8 months and sales by product line over the same period. The dataset used as the source for these views was extracted from Openbravo’s database (they provide a set of sample data) using Kattle, Pentaho’s ETL tool. Since my ETL job is completely flexible, I can run the exact same multidimensional analysis on data coming from other open source ERP systems, such as Compiere,Apache OFBiz,Postbooks or Adempiere.

OLAP Sales Data Cube Flash Application Built Using Flex 3

Read Complete Article »»

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Meet The CEO - Openbravo’s Manel Sarasa

July 2, 2008 – 7:48 pm

In our second Meet The CEO series we interviewed  Manel Sarasa, CEO of open source ERP vendor Openbravo.

First, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Manel and the entire Openbravo team for winning the European football (or soccer..) championship. It was truly an amazing tournament and I believe the best, most fun to watch team, won.

As for Openbravo, I see good things happening there. The recent 12M$ they raised injected a lot of positive energy into the project. Although raising money is always a good thing, it does bring a certain amount pressure, but I feel Openbravo is taking it the right way.

Opnebravo  started back in 2001, as a  project-based ERP solution. Having realized there is a demand for a professional, open source ERP solutions for the mid-market, the team continued to develop the web-based ERP offering, releasing it on sourceforge.

Openbravo boasts more than 1,000 downloads a day, has about 80 partners in over 30 countries and has around 1,000 live customers.

Manel also pointed to the Openbravo manifesto (I strongly recommend you read it) - a commitment by the project to continue supporting and further developing the Openbravo community and remaining a true open source offering. I believe that maintain the community and openness of the product was something agreed by the VCs  and was accepted to be part of the deal.

Listen to Meet The CEO - Openbravo’s Manel Sarasa Podcast

Meet The CEO - Interview with Openbravo’s CEO, Manel Sarasa

BTW-there is a short glitch at the beginning of the interview, I decided to leave it unedited, for your amusement.

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Openbravo Head-Hunts, OpenERP(Tiny) Communes, Compiere Wikis

June 25, 2008 – 5:39 am

I’ve been covering open source ERP for the past six month. I can really feel that a lot is going on. That is a clear indication to where the industry is heading - a great alternative to commercial,proprietary solutions.

The industry news update will cover OpenERP’s community days,coming up this weekend, Compiere’s release of a Community Wiki site and Openbravo’s hunt for the brains of Europe.

Openbravo

Openbravo recently raised 12M$ in funding. During my ‘Meet The CEO’ interview with Manel Sarasa,Openbravo’s CEO (to be published soon), he stated that Openbravo will continue to invest heavily into the development of the product. Their current recruiting round is a step in that direction and a great move on their part, if you ask me.

They are going after European students in their final year. The students will get 3 weeks of training, followed by an opportunity to join Openbravo as employees, depending on the successful completion of the course.

So if you are a bright student, studying in one of Europe’s top-tier universities and looking for a job in open source ERP, Openbravo is a great place for you.

OpenERP

26th-27th of June (Tomorrow and the day after) are OpenERP’s (former Tiny) Community Days. The purpose of the community day is to work together toward ‘Preparing the next stable version of OpenERP’.

The gathering participants (with an emphasis on participants as oppose to audience) are ERP professionals,users of the software,partners and developers. They are going to discuss short and long term strategy, review working processes and have several workshops. I know that TinERP has an enthusiastic, proud community that will make this days a success.

This kind of community days is one of the things that differentiate open source ERP projects from commercial ones - everyone can have a say on where the product is going. You don’t have to be a customer that pays a gazillion $$$ to the vendor in order to be heard, development is not detached from customers (which include free-downloading users).

I hope the community days will be successful. If you attend the OpenERP community day, I’d love to hear what’s going on.

Compiere

Compiere released a Community Wiki, which provieds tons of valuable, well-organized documentation related to the Compiere’s open source ERP offering.

I hope Compiere (as well as other open source ERP projects) will continue to develop the Wiki and provide more free documentation. The successful adoption of open source ERP solutions is a function of the amount of knowledge that exists in the community. The greater the knowledge, the more success stories.

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Service Enabling Openbravo

June 24, 2008 – 5:07 am

If you are serious about integration, you need to talk SOA. SOA stand for Service Oriented Architecture. I’m sure 99% of my visitors have heard that buzzword.  A good explanation about what SOA and what are its benefits is can be found here.

The foundations of SOA are web services, and although SOA is all about standards (e.g. standard method of exposing business functions through web-services), which business functions are exposed is not standard at all. It is left to the software vendor to decide what he wants to expose.

Openbravo Web-Services

Since my last few posts are about integration, I decided to explore Openbravo’s  web-srvices. According to the web-service guide in Openbravo’s Wiki, you just need to run:

#ant installWebServic

That did not work initially. I found that you have to update the correct URL of your Openbrabo installation for the deployment of the web services to work. In my installation, Tomcat is listening on a port other than the regular one and I do not use ‘localhost’ as the server name.  If this is the case for you, you have to change the file:

build.xml  -  which is located under the root directory of your Openbravo installation.

The property that needs to be changed is:

<property name=”context.url” value=”http://localhost:8880/openbravo”/>

You should change ‘localhost’ to the hostname you are using for your tomcat installation, and the port 8880 to the port your tomcat is listening on (usually 8080, but really depends on your configuration).

Now run

#ant installWebService

Your Openbravo is now SOA ready! , or almost. I hope that Openbravo will expose many more business functions through web services. This is on the roadmap of every major business software vendor and I believe this is where Openbravo should go. Also, Openbravo uses Axis 1.4 as a web service generator, while the current development project is Axis2, which has better performance,lower memory footprint and a host of other features that make it a better choice than Axis 1.4.

Openbravo WSDL File