Open Source ERP Guru

Open source ERP vendor Openbravo yesterday announced the release of Openbravo 2.50 – you can download it from here. From a product perspective, the most important feature of this release is Modules. Openbravo now provides the platform required to extend its ERP offering, but it’s up to the community and partners to take Openbravo to the next level of ERP by building industry solutions and other generic extensions on top of OB’s modular architecture. An extensive modules library should make OB a more attractive ERP offering and a better competition to proprietary ERP solution, by further cutting costs of implementation projects (modules cut the costs of customization).

From a service prospective, Openbravo redesigned their service offering and renamed it Openbravo Professional Subscription. OB services now target two markets – SMB and the enterprise. The main difference (other than the price , of course) is support for clustering, which is often a necessary (yet not sufficient) condition for critical information systems in the enterprise. The service repackaging lines up Openbravo with other enterprise software vendors, cutting prices and simplifying price structures in times of recession.

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We started Open Source ERP Guru over a year ago recognizing two things: adoption of open source ERP solutions is going to grow exponentially, and a huge knowledge gap exists around these solutions. Since then, it’s been nothing but good news for the industry. Multiple vendors reported double and triple digit growth, venture money was injected and perhaps most importantly, global partners have lined up and joined forces with the different vendors to provide local implementation services to small-medium businesses.

Obviously, in parallel to the commercial success of the projects, product development have been key to the success of open source ERP offerings. Support for additional business scenarios have been developed, integration with 3rd party software and user experience have improved, and the move toward ease of customization and the development of vertical solutions put these solutions on par with their proprietary, licensed counterparts.

We often get emails from our blog visitors asking questions about a particular solution or needing advice on which open source ERP application should they use. I believe most, if not all of them are using a proprietary ERP solution and are looking to convert, from the obvious reasons.

We would like put our own knowledge around open source ERP solutions to good use, so we will be offering consulting services to companies who consider buying these solutions. Just like in proprietary ERP, it’s never  question of which solutions is the best – the real question is which solutions best fits your requirements. With all the knowledge reflected in the pages of this blog, together with our experience in implementing ERP applications, we believe we could help you make a smarter decision in regards to which open source ERP solution is best for you. This is crucial not only for your success, but for the success of the entire open source ERP industry.

We will soon be adding a ’service’ section to this blog with additinal information regarding the consulting services we offer. If you are interested in more information, please contact us by email: consulting@opensourceerpguru.com.

One of our favorite open source ERP solutions is Apache OfBiz. Apache projects are ‘notorius’ for being of very high quality. The Apache web server literally powers the Internet and is considered one of the best applications ever written. OfBiz is Apache’s take on business management software, and can either be used as an out of the box ERP solution, or as a robust framework for building new ERP solutions on top of.

One of Ofbiz’s main areas for improvement was its user interface. Much attention have been put into the underline data structure, business logic and services layer, while the look and feel of the application was somewhat neglected. A few months ago Ofbiz released a themes engine, enabling developers to build and share their own themes with the community. Themes has the potential of making Ofbiz a much more compelling ERP solution, but it really depends on the community’s contribution. A couple of themes releasedby the community can be found here.

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