Marketing

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This Wiki is read-only for reference purposes to avoid broken links.

Current Efforts

The Marketing of ADempiere is currently under development. There is an ongoing discussion in Sourceforge, which is the source of marketing concepts, ideas and projects.

Marketing Concept

The 4P's of ADempiere are:

Product

The ADempiere is a world-class ERP software, providing functionality which is currently lacking in competitive products. ADempiere has inherited the unique characteristics of Compiere ERP & CRM. Thanks to Jorg Janke's experience in SAP as a localization project manager, the software from its early versions supports:

  • Multi-OS: Having been developed in Java is able to run on most Operating Systems
  • Multi-Language: Having all menus, tabs and help files in open, XML format makes the translation of the software in many languages a task accomplished easily without the need to have Java development skills. This, allong with Multi-Organization makes Adempiere especially attractive for exporting companies
  • Multi-Accounting: Having easily imported Accounting Schemas through simple MS Excel files, and being able to use multiple Schemas, makes ADempiere especially suited to the multi-national environment
  • Multi-Organization: ADempiere can have multiple branch offices and companies in one single installation, making it especially atractive in large franchises.

What ADempiere lacks and proprietary ERP suites all have

Although there are little differences among the ERP suites when comparing major features, the main difference between ADempiere and its closed source rivals is productization.

Productization means making software work for the general case and making it as easy as possible to use. For a custom program written by an IT department, it might be fine to have all the properties in a XML or txt file. For a commercial product, users expect a graphical administrative interface to help set the parameters. For ADempiere, installation means decompressing the binaries, and then figuring out how to customize it for the production environment. Commercial products generally have installation/deployment programs that does a lot of this automatically, and helps in creating tables, windows and rules.

On the other hand, productization requires a huge amount of work. It can take double or triple the amount of work of one major revision to turn a program into a product. Some "productization" features that are missing or are not developed enough for ADempiere are:

  • Administrative interfaces
  • Testing features
  • Testing on different platforms
  • Runtime monitoring through SNMP
  • Technical documentation
  • End-user documentation
  • Adapters to other programs, such as reporting software
  • Support for different databases and operating systems
  • Graphical configuration tools
  • APIs
  • Web services

What ADempiere should have and proprietary ERP suites almost none has

Innovative features
Integration with mature OSS software

ADempiere, being open source, can be integrated with innovative software developed from the open source community. Integration should be targeted to mature software, with minimal bugs and a large set of features, which will enable the ADempiere community to focus on integration and functionality instead of bug-fixing. A candidate software for integration would:

  1. Have a large community of its own
  2. Be easy to use on a day-to-day basis
  3. Easy to integrate into ADempiere

This software, among others, is:

  • Operating Systems

Being implemented in Java, ADempiere can run on Linux and there is an installer and instructions on ADempiere Install on Linux

  • Networking Services

ADempiere allready uses JBoss application server, but it could be integrated with:

although both are Linux-specific software written in C, and we would have little synergistic effects with Java and Eclipse.

  • RDBMS

There is some work to be done on integration with MySQL, but PostgresSQL is nearly done

  • Desktop
  1. Evolution (email client as well as calendar and contact manager, which also has a win32 edition)
  2. Mozilla (web browser and email client)
  3. OpenOffice.org (office suite developed in Java, including word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software)
  • Document Management System (DMS)
  1. KnowledgeTreeDMS, which is able to get plug-ins so a program categorizes and stores its documents directly into the database, written in PHP
  2. Xinco DMS, written in Java
  3. JlibraryDMS, able to get plug-ins, written in Java as well.
  • Groupware
  1. Opengroupware, which runs on Postgres and is compatible with Java
  2. Zimbra, which is dual-licenced..

There is a comparison among different open source groupware solutions, from ITwales.com

Of course, this list is minimal, and all contributions are welcome

Place (Distribution)

ADempiere, being an open source project, can be downloaded through Sourceforge, from all over the World. This is in sharp contrast to traditionall distribution channels which demand resellers and/or branch offices

Price

ADempiere, being open source, can be downloaded at no cost. Of course, the software should be customized in order for it to be usable. This defines its pricing model, which in simple words, is to pay only for the customization, with no software, licencing and upgrade fees. The total cost of the solution to the customer is both cost savings (due to lack of licencing fees etc), AND costs due to the expensive implementation and management. A white paper and a calculator that will help clarify these concepts can be downloaded from Jboss.

Promotion

The promotion of ADempiere now is mainly through the Internet. A Press Release has been released in Septemeber 22nd, 2006 regarding the reasons behind ADempiere's fork and the interest from the community ADempiere has received in such a short time.

The community allready has its own site, and Wiki. ADempiere promotional materials can be found in Marketing Materials.