Compiere Blog

Open Source and Obama

Compiere CEO Don Klaiss was part of a group of open source leaders that recently endorsed a letter to President Obama promoting open source technology. Check out the article in Information Week about the letter here.

Compiere eLearning: New Open Items and Payments

In response to our customer’s learning needs, Compiere is providing a new eLearning Module that covers Open Items and Payments. The latest eLearning module teaches users to quickly retrieve information on the current “Open” or unpaid invoices as well as past due invoices. This module will also cover adding a bank and a bank account, receiving payments from customers, and submitting multiple payments to multiple vendors at once.

The new eLearning module is included in the Compiere eLearning series. You may purchase the entire series or simply purchase the “Open Items and Payments” eLearning module separately.

Learn more about all twelve modules by visiting the eLearning Page. To try eLearning products before purchasing, check out ‘Navigation in Compiere’ free of charge.

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!

Compiere is a Key Player in ERP

In the month of February, two major industry publications listed Compiere as one of the top ERP vendors, and we are in good company with a number of top vendors on each of these lists.

CRN, a publication targeting VARs and integrators, put together a list of the 6 key players in ERP.  The  article and list associated with it was targeted at the small business market, and Compiere was one of six vendors on the list along with Microsoft, Sage, Intuit, and others. In addition to making the list, CRN made a couple of great points about the ERP market and Compiere. CRN stated that “In the SMB sector, the ground is slowly shifting to open-source ERP alternatives. Solution providers are exploring low-cost open-source ERP alternatives because they have full control of the software and can easily differentiate themselves.”  This is certainly a trend that we have been seeing at Compiere.  As more customers look for flexible solutions, they are naturally turning toward open source products.  CRM also points out that “Compiere is an out-of-the-box ERP product, but with an unusual twist—the software uses a generic model-driven architecture to change the application and add new features.”  This model driven architecture in addition to having access to the Compiere source code is what provides our customers and partners the flexibility to create customized solutions to meet a particular need.  One of the biggest advantages of Compiere in the SMB market is our ability to scale.  A company can start with a Compiere solution when they have only a few employees, and the same solution can continue to scale as the company moves from small to medium to large enterprise without the pain and cost of migrating to a new ERP provider.

CIO magazine put together a list of Open-Source ERP's Big 3 with Compiere featured prominently at the top of the list as the oldest open source ERP vendor.  The article states that “at least five open-source ERP projects exist today, but just three of those—Compiere, Open For Business and Openbravo—have gained traction, analysts say.” Compiere “has the most adoption and 'has grown into a significant level of functionality,' says Paul Hamerman, a Forrester Research analyst.” This list was part of a broader article answering the question “Is Open Source the Answer to ERP?”   The short answer is: “A growing number of mid-market CIOs say yes. In the wake of recent ERP vendor consolidation, open source promises flexibility for the future. Plus it fits the need to customize—affordably.”

A big thank you to Wilfrido Solano at WOSS Business Solutions, one of Compiere's new partners in 2007, for reminding me to blog about these articles!

Training and Open Source Business Models

With our February training classes just around the corner, I have been thinking about how training fits into the overall business model of an open source company.  We tend to think about providing support, maintenance, and consulting services to generate revenue for open source companies.  I usually lump training into the broader category of services when I think about open source business models without giving it much thought; however, training can play a significant role for some open source companies.

From a business standpoint, training is a more scalable service than some of the others. The materials can be developed and used several times with only minor modifications and delivered by one of the many experts within the open source company. By contrast, support and consulting services are usually tailored to the unique needs of an individual customer requiring a slightly different approach to each problem.  I always try to look for ways to improve scalability allowing our work to be leveraged multiple times. Training seems like a relatively scalable service that can be delivered to many people in a cost effective manner.

*Caution: Shameless Self Promotion Plug Below*

We still have a few seats left in our February training classes.  The next training class is three months away, so now would be a great time to attend training!

Installation Workshop: February 11, 2007
Intensive Training: February 12-16, 2007
Collaboration Mgmt: February 17, 2007
Technical Training: February 19-21, 2007

Compiere Expands Support Offerings

Compiere has just announced our expanded support offerings.  I see this as a natural evolution of the company as we expand into additional markets. Compiere has historically been focused on the small and medium business markets, but lately we have been talking to and closing deals with large enterprise companies.  The new support offerings were designed to provide enterprise level support to those large customers with complex installations while still providing offerings attractive to our small and medium business customers.

Compiere support is available through our partners or directly from Compiere. The following levels highlight Compiere’s basic support offerings, and Compiere partners may offer additional support services that build on these three offerings.

• Self-Service Support is designed for smaller customers using Compiere under an open source license. Self-service support is aimed at customers who have the resources and desire to complete a significant portion of the implementation and ongoing maintenance work without assistance from Compiere, but still want access to migration tools.

• Standard Support is aimed at the needs of most Compiere customers. Standard support customers can choose the EULA which among other benefits provides indemnification. Additionally customers can choose from standard edition databases, such as Oracle Standard Edition (SE) and other databases and receive access to releases prior to the general release.

• Extended Support is designed for enterprise customers with large or complex installations. Extended support customers can choose the EULA which among other benefits provides indemnification. Additionally customers can use enterprise edition databases and application servers and receive access to daily build releases.

We have been hiring new people, and as we expand and grow the company, I think we are really in a position to take the company to the next level.  Offering a variety of support services, including extended support for enterprise customers feels like a step in the right direction for Compiere.

Keep watching for our press releases and reading this blog.  We expect to have more news for you in February!

Open Source as a Marketing Strategy

Why open source? Companies have many different reasons for embracing open source ranging from idealogical beliefs to economic and business arguments to technological motives. In most cases, companies based on open source software probably have several reasons for choosing open source. In this blog entry, I want to explore just one of the many benefits of having a business model based on open source software: Open Source as a Marketing Strategy.

There are many different open source business models, but most of us generate revenue through the sales of value added services of some type: support, training, documentation, consulting and more. In contrast, many proprietary companies also have licensing revenue as a significant revenue source.  This difference results in questions like “how do you make money if you give your software away?” or “how do you make people buy support from you?”, and these questions often come from very smart people with dozens of years of experience in software.  My favorite answer to these questions is “you need to think of open source as a marketing strategy!”

Since Compiere is freely available for download, anyone can install the software, try it, and see if they want to use it in their environment.  Many of these people will never generate any revenue for Compiere, but maybe they tell a few other people about Compiere, and maybe those people tell a few more people ... This viral marketing helps to promote and market open source products with little involvement from companies like Compiere. Having an open source business model can generate a level of awareness that might otherwise cost a substantial amount of money to achieve through trade shows, advertising, etc.

Using open source as a marketing strategy requires a shift in thinking for anyone coming from a proprietary background.  As open source companies, we need to encourage people to download our software for free – the more, the better!  It does not matter to me that someone gets our software for free without paying Compiere a dime. Yes, they are benefiting from our hard work without giving anything in return, but all I need is for them to tell someone who will eventually want to attend training or purchase some type of support or other services from Compiere.

Open source companies also need to be a bit careful not to be too heavy handed with pushing people into revenue generation.  We cannot (and do not want to) force people into purchasing support agreements or other services, because this would severely limit our ability to benefit from open source as a marketing strategy.  Instead, we need to provide compelling services (support and others) that benefit our customers. Those customers who need and want our help will pay for it.

Open source as a marketing strategy can also have a dark side.  Your product needs to be really good for this strategy to work.  Otherwise, the negative publicity can irreparably damage the product's and the company's reputation. Even with a great product, people can expose every little wart, and when you mess up, they will let you (and everyone else) know about it. I like to think that this feedback just helps keep us on our toes.

Despite the dark side, open source has a marketing strategy has its advantages. The viral marketing of the tell a friend variety can get quite a bit of awareness for a product in a short amount of time.  As long as you embrace the need to think about marketing in a slightly different way, open source can be a great marketing strategy.

Open Source Meets Business

Jorg Janke will be giving a keynote presentation at the Open Source Meets Business Conference on January 24^th in Nuernberg, Germany.  He plans to give Compiere's perspective on the future of open source business applications.

If you are in Germany on January 24^th and are interested in the business of open source, you should plan to attend this event!