Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Open Source ERP is Heaven Sent

My friend's hardware business is growing and he wants a new ERP within this year because his aging ERP could no longer handle the needs.
In an email he sent to me, he said he was frustrated because he felt that ERP companies are not considering mid sized companies like and there not much ERP choices within his budget range.
I mentioned to that there are ERP applications for midmarkets and even software giants have them. For instance, SAP has A1Stargeted to midmarket enterprises, Microsoft will be coming up with Titan multi-tenant ERP and Oracle has several ERP products for mid sized markets with its JD Edwards Enterprise One software.
A couple of days later, he said that even though the ERP for mid sized markets I mentioned to him were relatively cheaper, they still come with a six figure price.
Well, how could I not have recommended open source to him? It was my friend who found open source ERP. With open source ERP, he said his company could save a lot of money from licensing cost alone. And that is not even considering other cost which would go into customization. With the money saved, the company could only focused on customizing open source ERP to better fit the needs.
Open Source gives more flexibility, not just with ERP but with other open source applications as well. And for businesses, flexibility means money.
With regards to ERP choice, control is one of the biggest considerations, almost the same degree to cost.
Technical support is one area which attracted open source ERP users. With propriety ERP, there could be a very few select technical support. SAP for example is very expensive in training and there are very few professional who have SAP skills. In the case of open source, if a company feels unhappy with the service of one ERP vendor, it would be easy to switch to another. Companies are not tied to any proprietary vendor telling them what to do.
IT observers are divided on their conclusion on how fast the companies will adopt open source ERP in the future. Even the longest lived and most established open source ERP cannot yet fare up with the wide usage or proprietary software.
Those who have adopted open source ERP now are mostly smaller companies who take advantage of the monetary savings from the licensing cost.
According to my friend, he read some research which shows that among the companies which are currently using or considering adopting open source in any form, 12 percent are using open source ERP. And in the next 12 month, 14 percent are planning to adopt open source ERP too.

I think for owners and decisions makers of business, it is not really a big question of whether open source ERP will be popular or not. The internet has billions of users who are continually collaborating to make software affordable to all. The possibility that more innovations in open source ERP will from this collaboration of brilliant minds!

No comments: