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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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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In a call yesterday with xTuple’s Ned Lilly, we had a chance to catch up on the open source ERP vendor’s current business. I wanted to say a word about the company’s recently launched xChange online store, which I think is a smart way for an open source enterprise software vendor to provide clients convenient access to community and partner innovations. It may also be a cost-effective means for acquiring specific ERP-related functionality and services as needed.  Read the rest of this entry »

After almost a decade of following the enterprise applications market via insightful, sometimes exhaustive (and exhausting) free research articles (which will continue to go on in earnest and continue to be rated by our readers), the time has come for me to be in tune with the Web 2.0 and related social networking. In other words, the time has come for my blog at TEC, and the dilemma was then what to start with.

Well, given that facilitating impartial software selections has always been TEC’s “raison d’etre”, then the first topic should logically have something to do with that. To that end, as discussed in our now ancient article “Do You Know How to Evaluate Your Strategic Technology Provider?” , best practices drawn from TEC client organizations that have completed internal technology selections suggest that project teams should examine six key criteria groupings. The first three criteria sets should examine product specific capabilities, while the second three should investigate the software vendor’s overall corporate capabilities.

One of the later three criteria is Vendors’ Corporate Viability, defined in the above article as Read the rest of this entry »