Open Source ERP Guru

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.