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  • Raphael Bauduin 11:03 am on November 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: adempiere, compiere, erp, , , openbravo,   

    Open Source ERP, a growing market 

    Today’s Open Source software maturity is confirmed by its offering of ERP software. Not only do Open Source ERP solutions bring solid and broad features sets, they do so at a lower cost of implementation as mentioned at a Business Meets IT seminar in Belgium today.

    ERPERP by xcode

    Interviews from speakers at the formerly mentioned ERP event organised by Profoss on 18 November and 2 December show however this is still is a market to take. If most ERP project have regular contacts (the only apparent exception being the absence of contacts between Adempiere and Compiere), those contacts are not due to competition. Competition for Free and Open Source ERP software is found in the big companies like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM. Demand for OpenERP is so big, that it’s sometimes hard for them to follow the demand.

    The origin of the ERP solutions covered are multiple: a local initiative for OpenERP, development in the academic world for Openbravo, a fork from another project (Compiere) for Adempiere. These different development paths show the diversity of ways to create Free and Open Source Software. OpenERP and Openbravo development are backed by a company, whereas Adempiere has taken the collaborative approach, where all companies or individuals interested are able to contribute easily according to a process put in place.

    Companies or organisations targeted vary in size and market and in the end cover most of the spectrum of the market: from wholesale to public administrations, from 10 to 2000 users. If two years ago OpenERP had a lot of request from SMBs, today they get a lot more request from bigger companies.

    Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

     

  • Roberto Galoppini 3:28 pm on September 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Skills: How frequent is Open Source Self-Sufficiency? 

    Bernard Golden, Navica CEO and known open source expert, in his recent report “Open Source in the Enterprise” dedicates a section to open source skills, returning interesting evidence of actual use of open source within enterprises.

    In the last Open Source Census Newsletter, Bernard Golden says (bold emphasis is mine):

    We did this to harvest evidence of actual use of open source within enterprises, reasoning that they would not hire for skills absent real use of the products named in the job postings. While not perfect evidence of actual use, we calculated that open source jobs account for approximately 10% of all IT jobs: certainly a reflection of significant open source use within enterprises.

    The open source jobs boom reflect enterprises’ needs, but also public tenders tell a lot about open source usage within enterprises and public institutions. Beyond the possible impact of the Dutch study on the acquisition of open source software, the importance of open source skills has been already recognized years ago. After four years, nothing changed, and open source skill development business is still coming from a small in number of companies (LPI, Red Hat, MySQL and few others).

    Banca d’Italia – the bank of Italy – recently published a public tender requiring some certified open source skills, basically related to above mentioned strong brands. What matter most here is to highlight the abudance of open source packages they plan to use, ranging from OpenLDAP, Nagios, Cacti, rsyslog, Puppet and Trac.

    Open source self-sufficiency is here? May be Gartner is right..

    Technorati Tags: commercial open source, open source skills, bernardgolden, open source jobs, gartner

     

    • Red1 6:17 pm on September 12, 2008 Permalink

      Market forces will drive the supply of more Open Source expertise to the hunting ground. But one has to determine the health of a market not on its lack of supply but its strength in demand first. In it you will find a breeding ground and its not money but a thriving community that may be critical to funding.

      This may explains the slow commercialization of Open Source projects. Not that they cannot turn a profit. Its just that their owners are not in a position to sell their nurturing grounds. Its an odd couple to mark as either commercial open source or community open source. Hopefully this upcoming Profoss in Brussels can address such dynamics, but we are concerned if too much commercialization interest come into play.

      red1
      The ADempiere Bazaar

  • Raphael Bauduin 8:53 am on July 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Conference: Profoss Open Source ERP events 

    ERP software is at the core of a business’ operations, from stock management to accounting, from efficiency measurement to activity planning.

    Few other applications could be more crucial to a company’s continued operations. So it’s not a surprise that ERP is the subject of a Profoss event. It fits perfectly Profoss‘ goal to inform professional ICT people of the possibility to use Free and Open Source Software in the most critical operations of a company.

    ERPERP by xcode

    And Free and Open Source Software clearly has demonstrated its ability to stand in critical environments: from space exploration to SME.

    This central position of ERP software often makes it a challenge to deploy it: it is a complex project that needs the commitment of multiple teams in a company. Proprietary ERP solutions are available but the software itself often makes it difficult to deploy (some even say it’s done on purpose). And these deployment costs come on top of the hefty license costs. Moreover, lots of companies don’t need the whole range of features brought by these ERP solutions, and would be served well by choosing simpler solution better fitting their needs.

    Luckily, there are viable Free and Open Source solutions available. The hardest part might be to identify the best solution. And that’s where Profoss wants to help you. We’ll bring specialist of the field to share their experience and help you decide what’s the best solution for you. We’ll even have a talk titled ‘How to choose my Open Source ERP system’!

    As this subject is very broad, the event will be split in two sessions: one on 18 November focusing on the ERP applications themselves, and on session on 2 December focusing on peripheral applications and integrating ERP systems in your current infrastructure.

    No speaker has been officially announced, but you may expect to have leading figures from at least OpenERP, Adempiere, OpenBravo and Compiere.To stay up to date with the advancement of the event organisation, you can subscribe to the Profoss Newsletter or the Profoss Feed.

    This event will take place in Brussels, but we’re looking to possibly organise it in other locations throughout Europe. If you want to see such a Profoss event take place near you, be sure to contact us!

    About Profoss.
    Profoss is in the process of being established as an Belgian non-profit association, with the goal to provide independent and objective information on the use of Free and Open Source technologies in professional environments.

    Technorati Tags: Open Source ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning, Profoss, Open Source Conference, Adempiere, Compiere OpenBravo, OpenERP, open source applications

     

  • Carlo Daffara 3:38 pm on May 29, 2007 Permalink | Reply  

    Open Source Firms: What is an OS company, anyway? 

    A recurring theme of discussion is exactly what defines an “OS company”. Many potential customers are finding more and more difficult to distinguish between “real” open source, viewable code licenses, quasi-open and more; companies are trying to leverage the opportunity of the OS market to push an offering, even if it is not OSS at all.

    Recursion Recursion by gadl

    Of course, a company like Alfresco can proudly claim that – being its main offering a pure GPL software – they are OS, libre, and whatever. But what exactly makes a company an open one?
    It is not difficult to find previous traces of the same argument before; starting from Mark Shuttleworth’s comments, Aitken’s ones or by Savio Rodrigues. Within the FLOSSMETRICS project we are facing the same problem, that is how to assess the “openness” of a company, and we observed a few things:

    • an OSS project is not only about code; in fact, in many projects the amount of non-code assets (like documentation, translations, ancillary digital material) is substantial. Considering companies as open only by measuring code patches is reductive;
      .
    • a company may sponsor a project in many ways. For example, granting hired programmers time to work on OSS projects (during work hours) is an indirect monetary sponsoring activity; hiring main developers and giving them flexibility to continue develop OSS code is a direct sponsoring.

    There are relatively few examples of the first kind; among them, companies that localize and create country-specific versions (like the italian accounting scheme for the Adempiere ERP created by Anthas to allow for a simpler commercialization.

    The second model is quite common: IBM sponsors development of the Apache web server, as a basis of its Websphere product, Google employees are asked to work for an OSS projects one day per week on company time (and sponsoring the summer of code, by the way), EnterpriseDB pays many PostgreSQL developers.

    Given this, we ended up classifying OS firms as those that:

    • sponsor, support, facilitate an open source project, that is a project that has a license compatible with the OSD definition, in a direct or indirect way.
      .
    • the sponsoring/support must be continuous, that is it should not be a single, one time contribution.

    This allows to include only those companies that leverage OSS in an organic and structural way, or they would not be able to justify the investment over an extensive period of time.

    This excludes one-time donations, for example; and it also excludes those companies that just take OSS and resell it packaged without added value, or “dump” a worthless software code under an OSS license hoping that someone willtake it up from there.

    Technorati Tags: adempiere, alfresco, anthas, Commercial Open Source, Open Source Firm

     

    • Savio Rodrigues 6:22 am on May 31, 2007 Permalink

      I agree Roberto, defining an OSS company is difficult and going to get increasingly so as more companies add OSS into their software strategy.

      Something that I’ve been thinking about since OSBC, which relates to your post…

      We’ve all heard about how open source Google uses to run their business. We also know that Google pays (some of their) employees to work on OSS projects as part of their day jobs. But what of all the OSS changes that Google makes and does not contribute back to the community? Does that make Google a ‘bad’ OSS company? How can they be ‘bad’ when they’re using OSS in a way that the OSS license allows??? But really, we all know that Google can’t be bad/evil, right 🙂

    • Roberto Galoppini 11:53 am on May 31, 2007 Permalink

      @Stefano Maffulli: Stefano I couldn’t manage to comment your post (may be is it great time to become a FSFE Fellow in order to? ;-), so I am writing you here for the time being. Mission and CSR might help, but my guess is that it is more effective to judge firms by their actions, even if requires some effort.

      @Open Source Solutions: I guested Carlo’s post even if I previously took a completely different position on the matter, and now I am seriously wondering about it all.

      @Savio: you are raising the same point I early discussed with Carlo, amazing! 😉 We all know Google is taking advantage of the GPL loophole, but it is also true that is contributing to many projects, and we can’t also forget the Google Summer of code.

      I think we should start creating categories reflecting the corporate-community relationship, and also the “old” Externally funded”/ “Internally funded” models. But all these (complex) distinctions might bring more confusion than clarity, I am afraid.

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