Compiere ERP In Amazon’s Cloud
Not only is cloud computing a hot trend these days, it also makes a lot of sense in the context of the open source ERP industry. Cloud, or Software as a Service(SaaS) offerings, appeal mostly to the huge SMB market. Compiere, one of the leading open source ERP vendors, announced it will offer a version of its ERP software to be deployed in the Amazon EC2 cloud.
Compiere’s EC2 offering tries to bring the good from both worlds – traditional on-premise ERP systems and modern SaaS offerings. Most current SaaS platforms run multiple customer instances on the same server. Compiere cloud edition, based on Compiere professional edition, lets customers run their ERP instance on their own virtual, yet private, server.
I’ve worked with Amazon’s EC2 platform before. It is simple to administer and felt very robust. Deploying new images and installing software is a matter of minutes. There is a strong community which offers useful tools complementing core EC2 services, support through forums and documentation.
I believe the Compiere EC2 offering can be a true TCO reducer. Initial costs for your ERP project, in terms of hardware and IT human resources, are almost eliminated. You only pay for an Amazon instance when it is started, and you can move images around, using different ‘hardware’ configuration. That makes scaling up or down extremely cost effective.
Read more about Compiere EC2 offering.
I would have to submit 1 correction to the statement:
“Compiere’s EC2 offering tries to bring the good from both world – traditional on-premise ERP systems and modern SaaS offerings” to “…open source ERP systems and modern SaaS offerings”. Compiere is an open source ERP system, not traditional on-premise; unless I misinterpreted the intent of the sentence.
Lee-Lin, what I meant to say was that when you host a Compiere system on Amazon’s EC2 you get your own ‘private’ instance, as opposed to standard SaaS offerings where your application instance shares the operating system and other resources with other customers’ instances installed on the same OS. So the Compiere EC2 offering is similar in that sense to the traditional, on-premise ERP deployment model: a private, non-shared application instance. Hope that is more clear now.
genuine prospect (25 people / $5m turnover) looking for ERP. thanks for your great blog posts. i get the technical point of single versus multiple instances, but dont you think it is actually more imporatant that with an SaaS system, the software is automaticaly updated. Yes, losing the on premises IT infrastructure is important, but equally so is the whole notion of updating. You dont patch your electricity supply. If online ERP is supposed to be a utility, then SaaS seems to have the best approach.