Open Source ERP Guru

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.

A couple of important updates:

Free ERP Training

As we announced earlier this week, we will be conducting live, online, free ERP introductory sessions. The first one is coming up next week, Tuesday, March 3rd (not Monday, as was stated in the earlier announcement).
There are still a few sits left (we can have as many as 20 participants in each session). These sessions are great for anyone interested in ERP, and wants to learn the basics. Whether you are a collage student looking for an interesting career, a small business owner considering an ERP project or an IT professional looking for a new, exciting area of expertise, our free, live, online ERP courses can help you make the right decision.

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In case you were wondering what the Flash Comparator page is – it’s a collection of recorded flash demos of several open source ERP applications, created by us.
Many visitors are interested in getting a quick look at the different applications, and the Flash Comparator provides just that – short, 1-2 minutes recordings of basic operations (create product, create customer etc.) in 3 open source ERP solutions – Openbravo, Compiere and Apache OFBiz.

The Comparator also demonstrated an integration between Openbravo and SugarCRM using Pentaho BI, as well as a Business Dashboard, which is currently under ongoing development.

Using the Flash Comparator is simple – just select any flash demo from the drop down menus and the demo will start playing in the bottom part of the page.

Click image to open the Open Source ERP Flash Comparator

I’ve been ‘preaching’ for some time now on the importance of the partner ecosystem to the success of open source ERP solutions. All vendors have been working hard on expanding their respective networks.
I feel it is time to build a global open source ERP partners directory. The directory will be displayed on a  Google map. The purpose of the directory is, first of all, to provide a unified resource, easily accessible by the community, for those who are looking for partners in their geography.
Other than been a useful resource for the community, I believe the partners map will visually demonstrate how strong the entire open source ERP ecosystem is becoming and how widespread it is.
I will not just copy-and-paste existing lists from the different vendors’ site (I am not sure I am even allowed to do that..). Rather than that, I ask that the different partners contact Open Source ERP Guru and provide some details (location,solution they are implementing etc.). I hope that I can get as many partners as possible into the virtual partners directory.

If you are a partner, please contact us through the contact form. If you are a customer or a member of one of the projects, it would be great if you could refer partner(s) you worked with to this post, so they may add themselves to the directory. I believe everyone – the community, the partners and the project – will benefit from the open source ERP partners directory.
The page will be up and running as soon as the first partners are added.

During the past 24 hours we have been working on upgrading our publishing platform (Wordpress) to the latest available version. We have also enhanced the user interface, hopefully making open source ERP Guru a better place to learn about open source ERP.
There are still a couple of features we need to re-enable (Related posts, Share-it for sharing posts through social networks) but the open source ERP-related content is all here.
You can use the search box or categories (can be found on the right-hand menu) to find content which you find interesting.
You will also find ‘Resources For You’ (Right-Hand menu) useful – whether you are a small or medium business owner or IT manager, an ERP beginner or an IT Professional, you will find posts relevant to you by clicking the relevant link.
We also strongly recommend you to register to our RSS feed – it’s the easiest way to get all the latest updates on open source ERP.

We are very happy to announce that Open Source ERP Guru will hold a series of interviews with the CEOs of the leading Open Source ERP vendors. We will discuss business,technology and community and how to make them work together. The interviews will be recorded and posted on Open Source ERP Guru along with a summery and the most interesting answers we get. I am sure the Open Source ERP industry leaders will provide us with valuable insight into the current state and future trends of open source business software.

If you have any questions you always wanted to ask the CEO of your favorite Open Source ERP solution, let me know – if it’s interesting enough, I’ll pass your question to the CEO.

A couple of days ago I wrote about my intentions to work on integrating Pentaho, an open source BI solution and Openbravo, one of the leading open source ERP products. Implementing a BI solution on top of your ERP system can provide a lot of added value for your ERP project.

After I wrote about my Pentaho-Openbravo integration plans,I got some positive feedback about the idea, as it seems a natural fit for existing Openbravo customers.

I also got an interesting comment from the Openbravo community director. I understand that Openbravo already got a request from some of its customers to add BI functionality to the Openbravo Suite, and are working on providing the integration themselves. From reading their functional specification document, it seems like they are still considering which open source BI to integrate with. I believe the decision will be to integrate Pentaho.

Obviously, this is great news. I have no plans of developing anything in parallel to Openbravo. I will try to get more details about the scope and timeline of the Openbravo-Pentaho connector. I am going to continue to work on my own connectivity,hoping I can contribute with my knowledge to Openbravo’s ‘official’ efforts, but my connector will not be released to the community as I thought I might do.

Commercial BI-ERP Connectivity Ownership

An interesting thing to note is that in commercial enterprise software, the BI vendor is always in charge of the connectivity to the ERP (or any other backend) system. The BI vendor writes an ETL connectors or adapters that can consume data from major ERP systems. No additional efforts are required on behalf of the ERP vendor. In our case, it seems like the ERP vendor (e.g. Openbravo) is going to be in charge of developing the integration-writing code, publishing documentation and supporting the solution. I think it must be a cooperation between the two project, and the ownership of the connector should be on the BI side (Pentaho). We’ll have to see how it goes.

Funny Pentaho Clip

Pentaho Installation

The next post will be an open source BI Pentaho installation walkthrough on an Ubunu 8.04 Linux Machine. Stay tuned.

A while ago I presented Pentaho – an open source BI solution. Like many other open source ‘commercial’ projects, Pentaho provides a free to download version from sourceforge. They also offer a version of their BI suite that comes with support,enhanced security features and better administration tools.

BI projects are complicated. A real BI solution provides much more than simple reporting. The large,commercial BI solutions are typically made of a large set of tools, in many cases from different software vendors that were added through acquisitions, facilitating the process of extracting data from the source systems (ERP or CRM, for example), updating a dedicated database with the extracted data (a data warehouse) and providing flexible,powerful tools to analyze the data in the data warehouse. Pentaho is no different.

In the coming weeks, I will provide a complete end-to-end guide on how to install, configure and connect Pentaho to Openbravo open source ERP. I hope Openbravo (and other open source ERP) customers will find this integration useful. Using BI on top of your existing ERP solution provides a lot of added value for your investment into the ERP project.

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As you might remember I have announced that I will be holding free, live online sessions aimed at ERP beginners and those interested in getting to know open source ERP in more details. The sessions will cover basic ERP concepts, processes, together with live demonstration of these concepts in one of the leading open source ERP solutions, probably OpenBravo.

I got so far more than 10 requests for participation. Once I hit the 20 participants mark (this is the limit imposed by DimDim, the open source,free online conferencing service I will be using), I will provide with date, time and agenda. Everyone is more than welcomed to contact me and ask to participate or tell others about the sessions.

After a short period of little updates of Open Source ERP Guru, I am back and happy to announce that I will be holding live session for ERP beginners. The series of sessions will make up an online ERP course.

These sessions will include an overview of ERP systems, basic concepts and hands-on sessions with one of the Open Source ERP solutions.

I believe that the combination of basic theoretical background along with hands-on exercise with an Open Source ERP system can provide a lot of value to anyone who is looking to get started in the great world of Enterprise Resource Planning.

I am considering using either Openbravo or OFBiz for the hands-on sessions. Both are web-based solutions and can provide a very good base for ERP beginners.

I will be using DimDim to host the live sessions. DimDim is a free,open source, online conferencing software, similar to Webex. Since DimDim’s free edition is limited to 20 members, the number of participants is limited. The live session are free,of course, so you don’t have to pay anything for participating.

If you are interested in taking part in one of live session, drop me a message and I will send you some more details.

As for schedules and detailed agenda of the online sessions, stay tuned-I will publish more information soon. You could also register to my RSS feed to get the latest updates from Open Source ERP Guru.