OSCON 2008 Over, LinuxWorld Is Next
OSCON 2008 has come and gone. I did not get a chance to attend this year but I sure hope I can be there next time around. There were some interesting announcements coming out of OSCON-Sun’s version of LAMP, Sourceforge’s Best Project contest and Ubuntu’s Server appliance.
Open Source ERP projects were represented by xTuple, who had a booth in the conference. Openbravo’s Chief Product Officer, Paolo Juvara, also attended. You can read his views on the conference in his blog post. Expect heavier participation by Open Source ERP vendors in the upcoming LinuxWorld 2008 conference.
Sun’s SAMP
Sun’s acquisition of MySQL for 1B$ was a big question mark. Many have asked why did Sun pour buckets full of $$$ for the Swedish open source database vendor. It was only a question of time until Sun would release its own version of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack, and it did.
They called it Sun Web Stack, or SAMP (=LAMP-Linux+Solaris). The business model around the stack is unsurprisingly based on paid services. There are about a billion web servers running LAMP (including the one running this blog), but official support is provided only by 3rd parties, not by the projects themselves, at least not for free. Sun will provide paid support services along with the stack itself.
Sun has a lot of work on its hand to make their shareholders happy, and offering an optimized version of LAMP for Solaris+support is their first shot at monetizing the acquisition.
Best Open Source Projects Contest
Sourceforge.com, the most popular open source development platform, held its annual best projects award. There were several categories to vote for, most interesting were Best Project, Best Project for the Enterprise, best new project and the hilarious “Most Likely to Get Users Sued by Anachronistic Industry Associations Defending Dead Business Models” (and the Oscar goes to.. Emule!!) category.
Both Best Project and Best Project for Enterprise awards went to the MS Office killer, openoffice.org. Best new project was Magento, a very good looking E-commerce platform. E-commerce is so late-90’s, though it seems like it still has some jokers up its sleeves.
I hope that next year one of the Open Source ERP projects will win the Enterprise award.
Ubuntu’s Server Appliance
Apparently, Ubuntu was making a lot of noise on the conference floor. It’s working hard toward making Ubuntu the Desktop OS of choice. Personally, I believe too much energy (and cash) are spent on trying to make Linux a viable desktop platform. If a portion of that efforts would have gone to building both Linux servers and business applications for the Enterprise, SMEs and the Cloud, open source would have been positioned much better against proprietary software.
The VAR Guy reports that Ubuntu, which is considered the best alternative to Micsrosoft’s Windows as a desktop OS, are making a push for their server platform. Ubuntu server was used for all tutorials and installation guides found on this blog.
Ubuntu will probably try to provide their own optimized version of LAMP, just like Sun does. I hope they will go even further, offering a complete business stack, based around Open Source ERP, optimized to run on Ubuntu server, bundled with support.
You can expect some big announcements from Ubuntu coming out of the next Linux World conference.
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OSCON 2008 - Chaos, Business Models And Open Source Movies
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
Openbravo 2.40 Beta Annouced
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.
OSCON 2008 - Open Source, No ERP
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.
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Open Source ERP Products Editions And Price Comparison
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$/User/Month.
xTuple
xTuple offers 3 editions - Postbook, a free,open source edition, Standard Edition and OpenMFG, the latter 2 being enhanced, commercial ERP versions based on Postbooks.
For Postbooks, the open source edition, xTuple offers varying prices for support and services, depending on the number of users. For 5-19 users, for example, the price is 500$/User/Year,going all the way down to 100$/User/Year for 200+ users.
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 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.
Open Source ERP Flash Dashboard Using Flex 3
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
Flex Client Side OLAP For Open Source ERP Openbravo
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
Meet The CEO - Openbravo’s Manel Sarasa
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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