Often I get asked the question why people refer to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system as a true “enterprise resource planning” solution if it doesn’t entail human resources management (HRM)—after all, every organization needs to manage its people, its products and services, and its finances. It seems that open source manufacturing and distribution ERP provider xTuple aims to offer true ERP, having recently announced a new technology integration partnership with a popular open source HRM software, OrangeHRM. Read the rest of this entry »

In the final days of 2012, xTuple, a commercial open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) company that works with a global community of tens of thousands of professional users, reported its second consecutive record quarter of sales for 2012. Due to a surge of new customers in manufacturing and distribution, revenue was reportedly up 74 percent over the third quarter last year—and sales in the first three quarters of 2012 were up 59 percent overall from the same time period in 2011.

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If you still think open source software platforms can’t attract enterprise software solutions, well, think again. Infor is collaborating with Red Hat to deliver Infor’s ERP suite on both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware solutions. Read the rest of this entry »

These days, amid the austerity, cuts, and general malaise, it is refreshing to hear about the whopping annual growth of a manufacturing-oriented enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendor. Sure, one can discount the magnitude of this upbeat news—this particular vendor is still budding, if you compare it to SAP, Oracle, or Infor—but I welcome this it(and so should any ERP vendor). More impressively, the vendor in case, xTuple, has also been tirelessly delivering new features for customers, and all the tinkering in the lab isn’t keeping it from ringing the cash register.

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Nuxeo sees its content management product as the base for organizations to create their own content-centric business applications. The company offers some interesting tools to aid in this process, which I’ll get to in a moment. Nuxeo also offers its own distinct modules for document management, case management, digital asset management, and with the recent version 5.5, for social collaboration. Read the rest of this entry »

TEC is offering a new report profiling the software vendor MODX and its Revolution WCM system. This report is now available to download (free) from TEC’s library of reports.

The MODX Web content management system is a relatively new commercial open source offering. It’s designed with an emphasis on customizability. Although MODX has a large community using its systems in small and medium-sized deployments, it’s targeting higher traffic deployments with its latest versions of Revolution.

To find out more about MODX’s commercial services, support, and partners, as well as some analysis of its Revolution product, read the complete report.

Openbravo ERP is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution on the less expensive side of the spectrum, which is valued by distribution and retail industries as well as by manufacturing, services, public-sector, and nonprofit organizations.

I caught up with Openbravo’s John Fandl recently about the company’s latest iteration of its ERP solution (version 3). In the past, we’ve mostly mentioned Openbravo as a peer to other open source ERP vendors, but it deserves to be considered in its own right. Read the rest of this entry »

On January 11, 2011, Jaspersoft launched a new version of its business intelligence (BI) suite named Jaspersoft 4, and just a couple of weeks later, on January 25, the open source BI provider launched a new set of software tools that provides support for a wider variety of data sources in the “Big Data” space. This is a clear sign that BI applications will come to address a wider number of data sources and expand the reach as well as the size of the information that BI systems can handle. Read the rest of this entry »

On January 11, 2011, Jaspersoft launched a new version of its BI suite named Jaspersoft 4. The open source software provider will be promoting its new business intelligence (BI) suite designed to provide users with self-service BI features via its Web Application user interface (UI). Built on open Web standards, Jaspersoft 4 is a complete Web application, and it’s ready to be deployed on premise as well as under Software-as- a-Service (SaaS) environments. Read the rest of this entry »

In part one of my interview with Martin Schneider, Senior Director of Communications at SugarCRM, we discussed the history of SugarCRM and the open source customer relationship management (CRM) space. Part 2 describes SugarCRM’s approach to development, their partner ecosystem, and how social media has changed CRM. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Martin Schneider, Senior Director of Communications at SugarCRM where he provided information about the company, Sugar 6 (latest version), and social customer relationship management (SCRM). In this first up close and personal blog post, Martin will discuss what made Sugar CRM the most successful open source CRM product and one of the best CRM products in the market.

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Part 1 of this blog series talked about Consona Corporation’s recent acquisition of leading open source and cloud computing enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider Compiere. After reading a slew of speculative blog posts (including the one from TEC’s free and open source [FOSS] buff and advocate Josh Chalifour), I had an incisive briefing with Consona’s CEO Jeff Tognoni, to give the company a fair chance to explain its strategy and the rationale behind the acquisition.

In Part 1, Tognoni first dispelled any idea that Consona’s intentions were to to copy the much larger and also acquisitive vendor Infor, as suggested by the related ERP Graveyard blog post. Thereafter, he explained that his interest in Compiere’s cloud platform coincided with (and was validated by) the recent launch of Consona’s CRM Cloud leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) for the server infrastructure and platform.

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In early June Consona Corporation’s analyst relationship (AR) contact forewarned me about the company’s upcoming acquisition of a “leading open-source and cloud computing enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor” and asked about my availability for a briefing once the acquisition was closed. After consultation with TEC’s free and open source software (FOSS) buff Josh Chalifour, we quickly identified Compiere [evaluate this product] as the most likely target (not to say prey).

Namely, this open source software vendor had been eerily quiet for a while (and ignoring our repeated calls for update briefings) and lately there had been much less activity within its once vibrant FOSS user community. The rumors about Compiere running out of “dough” and looking for a white knight had also floated occasionally. Once the acquisition was made official on June 16, 2010, Josh was swift with his blog post that mostly talked about the abovementioned observations prior to the merger and gave some speculations about Compiere’s future under Consona.

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In the enterprise open source space, a notable change came to light today affecting Compiere users and partners. Consona announced its acquisition of Compiere.

Compiere started back in 1999. One of its founders explained to me that the company’s business (circa 2004) largely came from support, migration, and priority requests from clients. An integral component of the delivery model was Compiere’s partners. So Compiere focused on providing second-level support to their network of local partners. These areas are where I’m most curious about Compiere’s move to the Consona fold. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I had a briefing with Jerome Ternynck (MrTed’s chief executive officer [CEO]) about the company and Version 9 of its product TalentLink. One key statement that Jerome made on talent acquisition was that before you manage talent, you need to make sure you acquire the right people for your company. Many human capital management (HCM) vendors have talent acquisition functionality as part of their offering, but MrTed specializes in this first and essential step of the talent management spectrum.

A Little Bit of History

MrTed was founded in 1999 by two recruitment specialists—Frederic Trinel and Jerome Ternynck. In 2000, MrTed raised a significant amount of venture capital and released MrTed’s flagship product called MrTedTalentLink (in November 2000). Read the rest of this entry »