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.
Great interview, hopefully with companies like this we will see the increased use of Open Source ERP (and business software in general). As you discussed there are many countries where Open Source could be better supported and used. Although there are a few countries in Europe that are adopting and encouraging the use of Open Source, I feel that some countries like the United Kingdom are lagging behind. Hopefully over the next few years we will see all countries taking advantage of these fantastic technologies.
Keep up the good work on a great site. Many thanks.
Philip
Hi Philip,
) so we have to be optimistic about the U.K. adoption of open source business software.
Thank you for the feedback. U.K is ranked 3rd in terms of visitors to my blog (unless you visited me 391 times in the past 3 weeks
I agree that for some countries the idea of open source software is more ‘natural’, but I have no doubt that businesses world-wide are already realizing the huge benefits open source software provides. We just need to keep working hard and it will happen.