Compiere Secures Second Round Of Funding
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.
Open Source ERP Vendors Win Product Awards
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.
And The BOSSIE Goes To..Compiere
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.
Openbravo POS Tickets, Customer Common View Prototyped, LinuxWorld KicksOff
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.
Compiere To Announce A Major Release
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.
OSCON 2008 Over, LinuxWorld Is Next
OSCON 2008 has come and gone. I did not get a chance to attend this year but I sure hope I can be there next time around. There were some interesting announcements coming out of OSCON-Sun’s version of LAMP, Sourceforge’s Best Project contest and Ubuntu’s Server appliance.
Open Source ERP projects were represented by xTuple, who had a booth in the conference. Openbravo’s Chief Product Officer, Paolo Juvara, also attended. You can read his views on the conference in his blog post. Expect heavier participation by Open Source ERP vendors in the upcoming LinuxWorld 2008 conference.
Sun’s SAMP
Sun’s acquisition of MySQL for 1B$ was a big question mark. Many have asked why did Sun pour buckets full of $$$ for the Swedish open source database vendor. It was only a question of time until Sun would release its own version of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack, and it did.
They called it Sun Web Stack, or SAMP (=LAMP-Linux+Solaris). The business model around the stack is unsurprisingly based on paid services. There are about a billion web servers running LAMP (including the one running this blog), but official support is provided only by 3rd parties, not by the projects themselves, at least not for free. Sun will provide paid support services along with the stack itself.
Sun has a lot of work on its hand to make their shareholders happy, and offering an optimized version of LAMP for Solaris+support is their first shot at monetizing the acquisition.
Best Open Source Projects Contest
Sourceforge.com, the most popular open source development platform, held its annual best projects award. There were several categories to vote for, most interesting were Best Project, Best Project for the Enterprise, best new project and the hilarious “Most Likely to Get Users Sued by Anachronistic Industry Associations Defending Dead Business Models” (and the Oscar goes to.. Emule!!) category.
Both Best Project and Best Project for Enterprise awards went to the MS Office killer, openoffice.org. Best new project was Magento, a very good looking E-commerce platform. E-commerce is so late-90’s, though it seems like it still has some jokers up its sleeves.
I hope that next year one of the Open Source ERP projects will win the Enterprise award.
Ubuntu’s Server Appliance
Apparently, Ubuntu was making a lot of noise on the conference floor. It’s working hard toward making Ubuntu the Desktop OS of choice. Personally, I believe too much energy (and cash) are spent on trying to make Linux a viable desktop platform. If a portion of that efforts would have gone to building both Linux servers and business applications for the Enterprise, SMEs and the Cloud, open source would have been positioned much better against proprietary software.
The VAR Guy reports that Ubuntu, which is considered the best alternative to Micsrosoft’s Windows as a desktop OS, are making a push for their server platform. Ubuntu server was used for all tutorials and installation guides found on this blog.
Ubuntu will probably try to provide their own optimized version of LAMP, just like Sun does. I hope they will go even further, offering a complete business stack, based around Open Source ERP, optimized to run on Ubuntu server, bundled with support.
You can expect some big announcements from Ubuntu coming out of the next Linux World conference.
To get the latest news from Linux World and Open Source ERP, register to our RSS feed.
OSCON 2008 - Chaos, Business Models And Open Source Movies
OSCON is now into its 3rd day. xTuple is exhibiting (Booth #219, in case you are lucky enough to attend) and Openbravo’s Chief Products Officer, Paolo Juvara, is also attending and will be blogging on Openbravo’s site.
One of the more interesting sessions was sponsored by Microsoft, of all companies. The panel discussed general open source issues, with panel members from MySQl, Microsoft, O’Reilly Radar and Science Commons.
Order In The Chaos Of Open Source Projects
One of the questions raised was quite surprising-’what surprised you about open source’. One of the panelist,Siobhan O’Mahony, who has a background in social studies, answered brilliantly - she was surprised at how well very large open source projects are managed. I never thought of it that way. It’s truly amazing how people can collaborate on a global scale, with no funding, no formal obligation to spend time on the project, and still produce a high quality product. And although many of the projects start as a de-centralized, P2P kind of effort, as projects evolve, a core team of leaders emerges. This is happening in the most natural way, without any board meetings or stakeholder demands. Evolution at its best.
That leading core provides the energy required to decrease the level of entropy (remember the second law of thermodynamics?) in the project. That is a kind of energy you can’t buy. It’s just there, because that’s what open source is all about. And that’s why so many open source project are successful.
The Hybrid Model
Another issue that was discussed was the hybrid open source model which is becoming very popular,especially for open source business software. MySQL is probably the best example of the model’s success. Their database software is hugely popular (the words you read now are stored on their database), and they were smart enough to build a viable business model. It was so viable,actually, that Sun acquired them for 1B$. The hybrid model is the future of open source, particularly for the enterprise, as noted by the panel. Most open source ERP vendors already realized the strength of the model and are adopting different variations of it.
Open Source Content
Another interesting subject was raised by Jon Wilbanks- open software code vs. open content. When you talk about open source, you imagine a group of hardcore programmers, sitting late at night,drinking tons of coffee and churning out amazing pieces of software code. But the open source movement did not only change how software is written-it is now influencing content.
And content is BIG. Think about all the images, videos,music,news articles, scientific research, even marketing lists, produced every day. Think of them in open source terms. Imagine an open source movie, with a quality equivalent to the Apache project, or Eclipse. Everyone volunteers - actors,producers, directors, PR guys. The movie is edited by the masses. You can download the movie for free, edit it any way you like, redistribute it. It’s a whole new way of thinking about content. I bet a hybrid model will evolve around content creation as well.
If only I knew who is going to be the ‘MySQL of Content’, I’d be the first member to join that community!
Blogging From OSCON 2008
InformationWeek On Open Source from OSCON
InfoWorld Rodrigues & Urlocker Open Source Blog From OSCON
InterenetWeeks’ Sean Michel Kerner From OSCON
Openbravo 2.40 Beta Annouced
A short update - Openbravo 2.40 is in Beta now. Some of the major new features include improved user experience, new Ajax functionality, improvements in global accounting requirements and several infrastructural enhancements. You can read the press release here. Openbravo 2.40 release notes can be found here.
I will download and install the 2.40 beta version to provide my own insight on the new features. Register to our RSS feed to get the latest updates.
OSCON 2008 - Open Source, No ERP
If you find yourself wondering, ‘am I in the right business?’, conferences are probably your best indicator. There are several large conferences focusing on open source, O’reilly Media’s OSCON is probably the largest one. It will be held in Portland, Oregon, from July 21st until July 25th, 2008. It’s also OSCON’s 10th anniversary, and we hope we will still be around to celebrate its 50th birthday. The fact that IT’s biggest names are participating, is yet another sign of the maturity of open source solutions.
None of the open source ERP vendors are sponsoring the event nor presenting in any of the related sessions. The largest event hosting just about anyone covered by open source ERP Guru is Infoworld’s OSBC, as it focuses more on open source business applications.
For OSCON 08, information industry’s heavyweights have all lined up-Google, Sun, IBM, Yahoo, and Novell are some of the names attending. Microsoft’s absence is obvious (it would be somewhat weird to have Microsoft’s people down there). British Telecom is also a sponsor-they have recently sign a deal with SugarCRM reselling Sugar’s open source CRM solution to its huge customer base.
The conference does host a Business Track, where Open Source in the Enterprise seems to be the most promising session.
There will be plenty of live blogging and recorded sessions available online from OSCON 08, I will keep you posted during the week with the most interesting things coming out from there.
Just a reminder-If you want to get the latest news from Open Source ERP Guru, register to our RSS feed. It’s the easiest way to stay updated!
Open Source ERP Products Editions And Price Comparison
Visiting Openbravo’s website today I noticed a banner on their homepage referring to ‘Openbravo Network’. I might have missed it before, but clicking the banner got me to a ‘Buy Openbravo Network’. Openbravo is offering a commercial edition of their open source ERP solution, which includes support, upgrades, ERP appliance for simple deployment and advanced system administration features. This is the the classic feature set offered by similar open source offerings.
In my opinion, this is another sign to the growing maturity of open source ERP solutions. It will help increase adoption and make the solutions more reliable while increasing implementation projects success. On the product side, it will drive the projects to provide a better product with more functionality as competition with proprietary ERP solutions will become tougher.
Since many open source ERP solutions now offer some form of paid services, I would like to take this opportunity to provide you with a summery of the different editions and prices.
Open Source ERP Product Editions and Prices
Openbravo
Openbravo provides a single paid edition (’Openbravo Network’). Prices are 5,000€ for the first 5 users and then 500€ per user, per year. They currently offer a promotion price of 10,000€ for unlimited users, which is a really good deal if you plan to run more than 20 or so users.
Openbravo Editions Comparison
Openbravo Price Comparison
Compiere
Compiere has been offering commercial editions of their ERP product for a long time now. They offer both Standard and Professional editions. The Standard edition goes for 25$/User/Month and the professional for 50$/User/Month.
xTuple
xTuple offers 3 editions - Postbook, a free,open source edition, Standard Edition and OpenMFG, the latter 2 being enhanced, commercial ERP versions based on Postbooks.
For Postbooks, the open source edition, xTuple offers varying prices for support and services, depending on the number of users. For 5-19 users, for example, the price is 500$/User/Year,going all the way down to 100$/User/Year for 200+ users.
OpenERP (Former TinyERP)
OpenERP does not offer different ‘editions’ of its software, but they do offer different support packages. Average price is 100€ per hour.
OpenERP is also offering a SaaS ERP ( ERP On Demand). They are currently the only open source ERP vendor to offer that. They have a very flexible pricing scheme, allowing you to choose which modules you want to use and pay for. Their SaaS ERP offering is sold for 140€ per user per month.
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