Compiere Blog

Compiere Continues to Grow

Today Compiere announced the opening of a product development and support center in Noida, India, located near the capital of New Delhi.

The development and support center, which is fully operational, represents significant growth in capabilities, skills and geographical presence needed to address the expanding customer demand for Compiere solutions. The office is staffed by experience application software development, test and support engineers.

Read the press release for additional details.

Compiere Expansion

Compiere announced today our expansion into Europe in addition to expanding Compiere's executive team.  Having an office in Germany will allow us to better serve the Europe, Middle East, and African markets with a local presence to focus on sales, support and solution delivery for our channel partners and customers throughout the EMEA region. As general manager of Compiere EMEA, Yves Sandfort will lead efforts to further increase our reach and the productivity of our partner network to our 20+ authorized partners within the EMEA region. With our expansion into Europe, we will also begin holding training classes in Europe again with the first class tentatively scheduled for the June / July timeframe.  We will post more details about the training class on our website in the next few weeks after we have finalized the dates and logistics for the training session.

We also announced the addition of three people joining our executive team in our U.S. corporate office:

• Kyle Rosier, director of sales for the Americas, will oversee channel activities and lead direct sales in the Americas.
• Sunny Gosain, vice president of development and customer support, has global responsibility for product development, customer support and information technology.
• Bill Freedman, director of marketing, will lead outbound marketing efforts globally.

When Compiere had only a few people employees, the number of initiatives we could focus on was very limited. This expansion gives us the ability to focus on a larger number of initiatives including more focus on product development, support, global sales programs, and marketing.

We welcome Yves, Kyle, Sunny, and Bill to the Compiere team!

 

Another Compiere Blogger

Readers of this blog will also be interested in reading Jorg Janke's Blog.  He has a very interesting post about Compiere's Origins and History.  Did you know that Compiere's history can be traced back to the 1980s? Did you know that the first production Compiere deployment was sponsored by Goodyear in March of 2000? Do you know where the name Compiere originated? Detailed answers to this question and more can be found on Jorg's blog.  We look forward to reading more posts from Jorg in the future!

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.