Open Source ERP Guru

Meet The CEO is a series of interviews with open source ERP industry leaders.  Compiere’s CEO, Don Klaiss, is our latest guest.

According to Don, Compiere is the ‘oldest’ open source ERP project, with over 1.4 million downloads. They boast a community of 50,000 members – developers, users and partners. Paying customers are in the thousands. Most of the revenue generated through subscription goes into engineering – improving product and supporting partners. This is the beauty of the open source model – the emphasis is on development  rather than marketing.

Traditionally,many of Compiere’s customers have come from the distribution industry, making Compiere focus their  development on supply chain, distribution and global financials. Next month, Compiere will announce further enhancements of its ERP product in the distribution areas-warehouse management and manufacturing, amongst other.

Don also mentioned Compiere’s second round of funding. He did not disclose further details, but I expect this round to be over 10M$ (their first round was 6M, Openbravo raised 12M in round 2).

Meet The CEO – Interview With Compiere’s Don Klaiss

In our second Meet The CEO series we interviewed  Manel Sarasa, CEO of open source ERP vendor Openbravo.

First, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Manel and the entire Openbravo team for winning the European football (or soccer..) championship. It was truly an amazing tournament and I believe the best, most fun to watch team, won.

As for Openbravo, I see good things happening there. The recent 12M$ they raised injected a lot of positive energy into the project. Although raising money is always a good thing, it does bring a certain amount pressure, but I feel Openbravo is taking it the right way.

Opnebravo  started back in 2001, as a  project-based ERP solution. Having realized there is a demand for a professional, open source ERP solutions for the mid-market, the team continued to develop the web-based ERP offering, releasing it on sourceforge.

Openbravo boasts more than 1,000 downloads a day, has about 80 partners in over 30 countries and has around 1,000 live customers.

Manel also pointed to the Openbravo manifesto (I strongly recommend you read it) – a commitment by the project to continue supporting and further developing the Openbravo community and remaining a true open source offering. I believe that maintain the community and openness of the product was something agreed by the VCs  and was accepted to be part of the deal.

Listen to Meet The CEO – Openbravo’s Manel Sarasa Podcast

Meet The CEO – Interview with Openbravo’s CEO, Manel Sarasa

BTW-there is a short glitch at the beginning of the interview, I decided to leave it unedited, for your amusement.

Our first Meet The CEO podcast featured Ned Lilly, the CEO of open source ERP vendor XTuple. XTuple works in a hybrid model, offering a free,open source product (Postbooks) as well as a commercial version (OpenMFG). XTuple also added a third offering, Standard edition.

XTuple is an example of the ‘reverse’ open source business model-it used to sell only a commercial version of its ERP product(OpenMFG), but then decided to release a free,open source, yet somewhat limited version in Postbooks, which focuses on accounting, purchasing,CRM and inventory management but lacks the depth of the manufacturing functionality OpenMFG is well-know for.

The company has never raised money and built a solid business around its OpenMFG’s  strong manufacturing capabilities. They have close to 100 customers, which was a pleasant surprise. Most of the customers are in the U.S where the company is located and most of its partners are.

Listen to Meet The CEO – Xtuple’s Ned Lilly Podcast

Meet The CEO – XTuple’s Ned Lilly