Open Source ERP Guru

I’ve just finished reading the first part of Computerworld ‘The future of ERP‘ story. It’s a long article, well written, and puts  several  good questions on the table – is the vision of ERP, as a single, central application, managing all data as well as business transactions , dead? Did the latest economic crisis, along with the advent of disruptive technologies (cloud computing and open source ERP) made CIO re-think their entire ERP strategy?

Large enterprises, deeply invested in current SAP or Oracle implementations, despite being sunk deep to their throats in yearly maintenance fees,are not likely to abandon their multi-million dollars investment for a different solution (a SaaS ERP or an open source ERP offering), according to the story. What is happening is a change in the dynamics between the megavendors – SAP and Oracle – and their customers, as large customers are able to re-negotiate maintenance fees, which have become a sour point in the ERP vendor-customer relationship.

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We wrote about hosted ERP systems a while back, and it’s getting more and more clear that the the ERP cloud is only getting denser. It’s evident in proprietery ERP solutions, where NetSuite, a cloud-only ERP offering is stealing customers away from traditional, on premise ERP vendors, and it’s evident in the open source ERP industry, as all major vendors are offering a hosted version of their ERP offering.

The latest addtition to the ever growing potroflio of on-demand ERP solutions is coming from Openbravo. OB now offers a cloud appliance, which is a pre-packed stack of everything you need to run Openbravo ERP, all easily deployed on pyshical hardware or virtual machines (did anyone say Amazon Web Services?).

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