Take the 451 Group's CAOS Open Source Adoption survey

The 451 Group, a consulting and research company with a strong focus on open source is conducting another round of its CAOS Open Source Adoption survey.

I am extending their invitation to any of you who is a decision maker in software procurement.

Given current economic conditions there is considerable interest in open source software and whether open source licensing can help users lower the cost of enterprise computing compared to traditional proprietary licensing.

The 451 Group would like you to contribute to its CAOS Open Source Adoption Survey covering end user attitudes to the potential financial benefits of open source. The survey can be found here

In return for your contribution, you will receive a copy of the research results, which will be delivered in an update to our second Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) research report "Cost Conscious, A practical guide for understanding and calculating the financial benefits of open source for enterprise IT projects". You will also receive an invite to a special 451 Group Webinar at which we discuss these results.

The survey includes about 20 questions. We are not asking for details of specific projects, so no sensitive data will be revealed. We are asking about the benefits and risks of open source in general, and how you evaluated the cost of open source in any relevant projects. All responses are of course confidential. The survey will be available for the next two weeks, but please complete it at your earliest convenience.

Thank you in advance for your participation.

Best regards,

Matthew Aslett/Jay Lyman
CAOS (Commercial Adoption of Open Source)
The 451 Group

SAP looks at Openbravo for clients

Traditional proprietary players like Microsoft Dynamics and SAP tend to naysay and vehemently deny that open source is an alternative to their software. They state publicly that open source is irrelevant in their market and say it should be ignored.

Yet behind the curtains, they behave otherwise. The public denial is just a poor attempt to hide the facts.

It has come to our attention that SAP is running a campaign in SourceForge, where Openbravo downloads are hosted, to capture leads for them. You can see a screenshot below.



We all have seen that SAP's sales have been declining quarter after quarter for the past several quarters; are they getting so desperate that they need Openbravo to generate leads for them in their own home market? The campaign is so obtrusive that some even sent us comments asking whether actually Openbravo ERP was developed by SAP itself. LOL

Every day Openbravo Business Partners are winning more and more bids against SAP. Clients in the mid market are doing the side by side comparison and trusting our comprehensive, innovative, and cost-effective solution.

We have a long way to go, however SAP knows clients are going our way. Wether you are looking for an ERP for your company or a system integrator looking for growth opportunities the time has come to realize Openbravo is truly opening the ERP's future.

Openbravo wins prestigious 2009 BOSSIE award

Again, Openbravo has won an InforWorld's BOSSIE award to the Best of Open Source Enterprise Software. This is the second time Openbravo is presented with this award, one of the most renowned in the open source industry.

The jury reasoned:

"Openbravo impresses with a well-developed POS (point-of-sale) solution, procurement and warehouse management tools, financial and accounting features, and production logistics for shop floor oversight. Further, Openbravo's plug-in architecture offers the same sort of extensive modularity found in SugarCRM and traditional commercial applications from the likes of SAP and Oracle. That means your developers can extend system functionality without worrying about stepping on core functionality. And the entire Openbravo system is supported by a healthy set of alerts, role-based user provisioning and access control, and a good Web-based UI."

All of us at Openbravo and our ecosystem are very happy and honored by the award. We have invested a lot of resources and effort in building one of the best products, and providing all the community tools and professional services to ensure Openbravo truly becomes an alternative to proprietary ERPs. We have achieved a lot, but there is still a lot more to be done! Hopefully we can do it together.

Thanks for your support!

Openbravo on the cloud

As you might know, Openbravo ERP has been commercially available for cloud deployment since early 2008. Openbravo Professional Subscription has offered an appliance than can be deployed on any popular virtual cloud and notably on Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (aka Amazon EC2).

We have used this capability extensively both with clients and internally for a long time, with awesome results:

• We have reduced our infrastructure costs significantly
• We have eliminated hardware maintenance costs
• We have reduced the time to deploy a new system, drasticaly simplifying the procurement process

As an example, our on-line demo is hosted in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Today I found an interesting 5 minutes video which explains the advantages of deploying aplication like Openbravo in the cloud.

This video is presented by rPath. Openbravo partners with rPath to enable its Professional Subscription for cloud deployment.

Buidling Great Communities

Tomorrow Paolo Juvara and I will bet at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco, CA.

OSBC is the premier strategy event for the open source industry. It was founded in 2003 by Matt Asay, who is an Openbravo advisor. Paolo and I plan to meet several of our peers to exchange ideas and best practices.

Additionally, I will participate in a panel to discuss the nuances of community building. The panel will be moderated by Stormy Peters, Executive Director and the Gnome Foundation.

Key ideas I will voice include:

• The importance for all the company to become "community" and embrace community processes and communication channels
• The importance to lead and set example if you want others to follow
• The importance of recognition and meritocracy
• The importance to invest in tools to lower collaboration barriers

I bet you recognize some of the initiatives we are taking in Openbravo to make the above statements a reality.

I will share my learnings after the conference in a follow-on post.