Open Source ERP Guru

Open Source ERP Guru has just learned that Compiere, one of the leading open source ERP vendors, has closed a second round of funding!
Further details were not yet disclosed, but this round 2 funding, following Openbravo’s round 2 from a couple of months ago, is the best answer for anyone who questioned the viability of open source ERP as mainstream alternative to proprietary ERP.
We will keep you posted as more details become available. Register to our RSS feed to get the earliest news from the open source ERP industry.

In case you were wondering what the Flash Comparator page is – it’s a collection of recorded flash demos of several open source ERP applications, created by us.
Many visitors are interested in getting a quick look at the different applications, and the Flash Comparator provides just that – short, 1-2 minutes recordings of basic operations (create product, create customer etc.) in 3 open source ERP solutions – Openbravo, Compiere and Apache OFBiz.

The Comparator also demonstrated an integration between Openbravo and SugarCRM using Pentaho BI, as well as a Business Dashboard, which is currently under ongoing development.

Using the Flash Comparator is simple – just select any flash demo from the drop down menus and the demo will start playing in the bottom part of the page.

Click image to open the Open Source ERP Flash Comparator

I’ve been ‘preaching’ for some time now on the importance of the partner ecosystem to the success of open source ERP solutions. All vendors have been working hard on expanding their respective networks.
I feel it is time to build a global open source ERP partners directory. The directory will be displayed on a  Google map. The purpose of the directory is, first of all, to provide a unified resource, easily accessible by the community, for those who are looking for partners in their geography.
Other than been a useful resource for the community, I believe the partners map will visually demonstrate how strong the entire open source ERP ecosystem is becoming and how widespread it is.
I will not just copy-and-paste existing lists from the different vendors’ site (I am not sure I am even allowed to do that..). Rather than that, I ask that the different partners contact Open Source ERP Guru and provide some details (location,solution they are implementing etc.). I hope that I can get as many partners as possible into the virtual partners directory.

If you are a partner, please contact us through the contact form. If you are a customer or a member of one of the projects, it would be great if you could refer partner(s) you worked with to this post, so they may add themselves to the directory. I believe everyone – the community, the partners and the project – will benefit from the open source ERP partners directory.
The page will be up and running as soon as the first partners are added.

During the past 24 hours we have been working on upgrading our publishing platform (Wordpress) to the latest available version. We have also enhanced the user interface, hopefully making open source ERP Guru a better place to learn about open source ERP.
There are still a couple of features we need to re-enable (Related posts, Share-it for sharing posts through social networks) but the open source ERP-related content is all here.
You can use the search box or categories (can be found on the right-hand menu) to find content which you find interesting.
You will also find ‘Resources For You’ (Right-Hand menu) useful – whether you are a small or medium business owner or IT manager, an ERP beginner or an IT Professional, you will find posts relevant to you by clicking the relevant link.
We also strongly recommend you to register to our RSS feed – it’s the easiest way to get all the latest updates on open source ERP.

Open source software awards season is upon us and open source ERP vendors are taking home some important awards. A few weeks ago, during OSCON 2008, Sourceforge announced its 2008 Community Choice Award winners. Then, Infoworld awarded open source projects with its BOSSIE, followed by Linuxworld 2008 Product Excellence Awards.

Several open source ERP projects were declared winners in this years’ LinuxWorld contest. xTuple won Best Business Application (nominated along with Concursive CRM and Drupal content management). Congratulation to Ned and the rest of the xTuple team for winning the award!.

Openbravo won in the Best Integration Solution category for its up and coming Openbravo Network Edition, the companies’ latest ERP offering. We hope to be able to provide you with some insight into Oepnbravo Network soon. Stay tuned to our updated on Openbravo Network Edition by registering to our RSS feed.

One thing I found to be odd was SugarCRM, the most popular open source CRM solution, to be a nominee in the Best Desktop Solution, along with Ubuntu, the Linux distribution. Ubuntu is the obvious winner of that category, but Sugar is no desktop solution- it’s just a very good CRM solution.

Flex is an RIA (Rich Internet Application) development environment that provides several useful business capabilities – consuming XML files and web services and displaying data grids and charts. I have been working with Flex to provide a business dashboard application that will allow Openbravo business users to gain insight into their operational data in a simple, intuitive way.

The demo below (click the image to play flash demo) shows an early version of the dashboard. The data in the dashboard is read from XML files, which were created using Pentaho’s ETL tool (Kettle). I made the dashboard as generic as possible so that it would be straight-forward to use it with other open source ERP applications.

I plan to further develop the dashboard to cover business areas such as finance, manufacturing, procurement and inventory management. If you have any suggestions regarding the dashboard feel free to contact us.

Openbravo Flex Analytical DashBoard – recorded flash demo

(click image to play demo)

If you would like to stay updated on the development of the dashboard, we recommend you to register to our RSS feed.

A couple of weeks ago open source ERPvendor Openbravo announced the beta release of the 2.40 version of its ERP product. There were quite a few enhancement released as part of 2.40, most notably in the financial module.

I decided to test-drive 2.40 on my Ubuntu Linux machine (it’s a 3-years old AMD Sempron machine with 512MB of RAM).

The installation files are available for download from Sourceforge. I decided to use the Bitrock installer. One thing to remember when you install O – you need to setup your machines’ local environment first( Java, Tomcat, PostgreSQL). Make sure you follow the instructions here.

Once you have the environment setup, using the Bitrock installer is easy as installing any windows application (just Next,Next,Next, supplying some parameters of your Java and DBMS environment). The installer spent more of the time on building the Opnebravo database objects.

Read the rest of this entry »

Infoworld held its annual ‘Best of Open Source Software Awards’ (aka BOSSIES). The winners are elected by a panel of Infoworld editors (not by the masses). There were some very interesting categories, such as platform and middleware, networking and enterprise applications.

The open source software award for enterprise applications were subdivided to even more interesting categories-ERP, CRM, BI and Content Management, to name a few.

The big winner of the open source ERP category this year is Compiere. Compeire has been around longer than any other open source ERP project and some of its code still lives inside other projects. They were probably the earliest adopters of the hybrid open source model, offering paid services on top of its free, open source ERP application.

This couldn’t have come at a better timing for Compiere, as they will be shortly announcing a new release with over 400 new enhancements.

Inforworld explains why it chose Compiere as the winner in open source ERP category:

Compiere delivers a good, general-purpose ERP package along with basic CRM functionality. You get financials, HR/payroll services, procurement and inventory management, as well as general sales and good reporting. Compiere recently improved both security — now showing data-level granularity — and the user experience, with a browser-based UI and stronger search facilities…

Other notable winners in the open source enterprise category are Pentaho for BI, SugarCRM for..well..CRM and Jasper Reports for reporting.

Congratulations to Compiere and to all the other winners. It’s great to see how mature the open source enterprise application industry is becoming.

Today’s news roundup – Openbravo’s POS runs Portland’s public transportaion ticketing, OSA builds a central customer view and LinuxWorld 2008 starts tommorow.

 Openbravo POS Manages Portlands’ Public Transportation

Matt Asay, a true open source Guru, VP of business development at Alfresco, points out that Portland’s public transportation authority chose Openbravo’s POS solution, after closely evaluating it against the largest commercial POS (Point Of Sale) solutions. Last weeks’ OSCON 2008 conference was held in Portland, and although the place was buzzing with hordes open source practitioners, I doubt many knew the public transportation tickets they bought were issued by an open source POS application.

Open Source Single Customer View

ERP systems (and the businesses using them) are built around two main objects – customers and products (or services). These two objects are being analyzed on a daily basis by different business users. It can be argued that the real ROI on an ERP project revolves around the ability to centrally manage these two objects and to provide a coherent view of the states of these objects in real-time.

In the modern business application landscape, customers require special treatment. The competitive environment is so unforgiving that dedicated software was written to manage customers lifecycle – CRM. When a company manages its customers using ( at least) two separate business applications (ERP and CRM), integration is a must.

An that is exactly what the guys at OSA (Open Solutions Alliance) are doing. From a business user perspective, being able to view all relevant customer information from a single screen is a must-have. OSA have been working on a prototype integration between Openbravo ERP, Concursive CRM, Adaptive Planning ( open source financial planning ) and Jasper BI server.

You can download a recorded demo of the prototype here.

LinuxWorld 2008 Starts Tomorrow, August 4th

A reminder – The annual LinuxWorld conference will kick off tomorrow in the beautiful city of San Francisco. Open source ERP vendors xTuple and Opnebravo will exhibit. The Open Solution Alliance will demo its CCV (Customer Central View) demo during the conference.

If you are located in the Bay area, this conference is definitely worth a visit. And if you attend, I’d love to get some freebies – Linux conferences tend to yield the most innovative freebies of all conferences.

Sources within Compiere, one of the leading open source ERP vendors, tell us that a major release  will be announced next week. Compiere have been working closely with customers to enhance its popular open source ERP offering.

The new release will include over 400 new enhancements (guess the Compiere QA team have been  pretty busy..). A new Business View Layer will be shipped – this layer will provide simple and secure access to Compiere’s operational data, to be consumed by reporting and analysis tools.

Compiere’s decision to release the Business View Layer means it will focus entirely on developing ERP functionality, enabling business users to use  their favorite reporting and analysis tools (Excel, Crystal Reports etc.) to analyze the relevant operational data.

Reporting and The Business User

Business users love reports. They want to be able to easily design,test and run the reports by themselves. Many of them are very familiar with office productivity tools and want to leverage that knowledge to analyze their ERP data.

From an ERP project perceptive, it is always a challenge to decide which approach to take – one approach is  to provide an access layer to the ERP’s data and invest zero time and energy into developing a dedicated reporting engine within the ERP application. The other approach would be to develop reporting tools integrated into the ERP application itself. That would make it more simple for the user, as he needs to access only a single application (the ERP) to design and generate reports. The problem here is that users have so many requirements from a reporting tool that too often, too much development horsepower goes into reporting, at the expanse of core ERP functionality.

Compiere decided to forgo development of its own reporting and analysis tool and focus on core ERP functionality enhancement. We will testdrive the new Business View Layer and let you know what we think.

Stay tuned for the official announcement and our test by registering to our RSS feed.