Compiere Blog

Compiere Hits 1.2 Million Downloads

Last week, Compiere passed a wonderful milestone: 1.2 million downloads on SourceForce.net. This is an amazing achievement for an enterprise software application. Compiere is the only enterprise software project on SourceForge.net today with more than 1 million downloads. At 1.2 million downloads Compiere leads the next most downloaded enterprise software project by more than 20%.

This achievement is a testament to the creativity, effort and perseverance of our two founders, Jorg Janke and Kathy Pink. As we continue to grow the company, we plan to be able to share even more success stories with current and potential users of Compiere.

Gathering Feedback

As we work to prioritize our new product features and improvements for 2007, we want to get input from our broad community of users, customers, and partners.  What product features and improvements would you like to see in Compiere?

If you are interested in contributing to this community effort by making suggestions for new features and product improvements, please add a reply to our SourceForge thread on the “Compiere Direction and Suggestions” topic.

I will be summarizing this input later this week and early next week to use as we work with Don Klaiss, Compiere CEO, to set our priorities for the Compiere product in 2007 and beyond.

Will Compiere Remain an Open Source Product?

Shortly after joining Compiere as the new CEO, people began asking me about my plans for Compiere and whether we would be evolving from an open source business model to become a proprietary product. The answer is absolutely not! I joined Compiere because I believe that Compiere can be a successful commercial open source company and because I was excited about the Compiere technology, product and community. Open source is an important part of Compiere’s business model and is a key differentiator over proprietary ERP/CRM products. With more than 1.1 million downloads of our software, we have become by far the most popular open source ERP project. I look forward to working with our customers and partners to create an even more active, vibrant community around our technology.

I spent most of last weekend at the Open Source Think Tank 2007 event meeting with other open source leaders, industry experts, and enterprise CIOs. At this event, I spent quite a bit of time listening to CIO’s describe what they are looking for from open source companies as well as discussing different approaches and business models with fellow CEO’s. There is a lot of experimentation in the commercial open source arena, but what is clear is that collectively we are able to deliver far greater value to the market than traditional, proprietary vendors.

Compiere has a few different areas of focus for 2007 including an increased focus on our open source community, expanding our partner program to include development partners, support for an open source database and other open source technologies, improved user interfaces, additional support offerings, and more. We think that 2007 will be a big year for Compiere and our extended community!

Don Klaiss, Compiere's New CEO

In case you missed the press release, I wanted to spend a few minutes on the blog talking about  Compiere's new CEO, Don Klaiss. Don just spent the last 15 years running Oracle's application business, and he has a wealth of knowledge and many years of experience in the enterprise software space. 

This is a great change for Compiere.  Jorg will be moving into the CTO position giving him more time to focus on the product, while Don takes over the management of the company.  As Compiere continued to grow, we realized that it was time to further divide the executive management duties within the company as we grew past the point where our two founders were able to run all aspects of the company.  This change will allow us to spend more time focusing on product improvements while also focusing on growth of the business by attracting new partners and new enterprise customers.

We are happy to have Don Klaiss join Compiere, and you can find more details about this recent change in the press release.