Commercial Open Source Software

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.

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