Openbravo And Compiere Expand Global Network
On March - 18 - 20082 COMMENTS
Openbravo and Compiere, arguably the most popular open source ERP solutions, are both expanding their activities globally.
- Compiere announced a new partnership in Spain with local software company,Directive Soft. I believe that beyond the importance of the Spanish open source ERP market, Compiere is trying to make a point by establishing partnership in the country where Openbravo is created. In any competitive situation, making grounds in your competitors own country is always important and often given special attention. It’s like you are saying “I am so much better than my competition that even in his own country he is loosing customer to me”.
- Openbravo, after announcing a business oriented tour in Latin America,are now holding two technical workshops-one in Miami,Florida and the other one in Barcelona, their hometown. Best of all, at least according to the press release, participation is free of charge! That’s a great way to expand and build trust with the community around your open source project. It also increases the level of knowledge around the product which is crucial to the success of production implementation of any ERP software.
- Openbravo will participate in this year’s Open Source Business Conference. The conference looks really promising with participant such as HP, Microsoft, RedHat, Novell, SugarCRM, Pentaho and XTuple, the company behind OpenBooks open source ERPopen source ERP. This year’s conference will focus on ‘Putting Open Source To Work’. I’d love to be there, maybe next year..
Good analysis about the movement of Compiere in Spain. They need to cover a long journey before they have a Spanish compliant version but the important thing is they have started. It seems that OpenSource companies are becoming quite similar to proprietary ones regarding the strategy to increase market share. Good news then,
I completely agree that it is a good idea from OpenBravo to provide for free the workshops – It is imperative to attain a critical mass of developers, consultants and implementators to get the trust of the market. But unfortunately the training is not free. The only free are two half-days generic seminars in between the training sessions (during the week end)
Just a comment – OpeBravo is based not in Barcelona but in Pamplona, also in Spain. Some of the management team comes from Barcelona that’s true as well.
> Openbravo and Compiere, arguably the most popular open source ERP solutions
I wouldn’t confuse having a lot VC $ to spend on marketing with popularity! It’s important to recognize that at the end of the day that just builds communities of customers (so they can eventually pay back the VC). I’m not convinced this is what is required for a successful & popular Open Source project in the long term. Can you really buy a community?