The World as seen through ADempiere

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The World outside ADempiere

The "World as seen through ADempiere" is about everything that is happening in the outside world. It is further divided in two parts, one for issues that are not central to ADempiere, but might affect the project (ie Software patents in EU), and issues that are extremelly important to ADempiere (ie What other open source ERP's are there, and what their communities/companies/users are good at?).

The World Outside in General

The "World Outside" is seen as:

  1. Political: ie, what is the government trends in open source?
    1. OSS has minimum costs for large government installations
    2. OSS provides transparent and open infromation management
    3. In OSS, there is no legal entity for a government to deal with
    4. EU may fund OSS R&D efforts
  2. Economic: Ie, what is going on with the economy and how does this affects IT spending?
    1. The last oil crisis has raised the operating cost of private enterpises, and inflation among consumer spending
    2. Costs of administration rises and pressures to flatten the management layer requires Business Technology tools.
  3. Social: Ie, what is the general acceptance of open source to the general public and clients?
    1. Open Source Software promotion should be based in promoting features and cost, rather than brand name. The software will make a name of itself through satisfied users.
    2. In the Social Environment, the forces are first coming from within us, our individual projects, where on our own we cannot sustain a prolong impact, but collectively we can. Externally the community of users are also likewise looking for an easy adoption scheme and a web based community is it.
    3. Internally, the community as a new brand to lead the way as a reference of stability differentiates from the chaos outside where commercial forces exploits OSS.
    4. End-users are still confused as to the true merit of OSS. Much market education is ongoing.
  4. Technological: Ie, how is the open-source development model compared to closed source (Microsoft etc)? How do Java and LAMP compare against Windows and .NET?
    1. Customers will pay for solutions - The more complete, the better
    2. Software is better developed in less, more frequent steps
    3. Free interchange of ideas fosters evolution, all fostered by the technology of the web.
    4. OSS is still controversial, where TCO is shifted from licensing costs to expertise costs.
    5. Mobile devices and computing will be ubiquitus in two years
  5. Legal: Ie, What are the open source licencing (GPL, MPL) schemes? What other licenncing schemes might affect us (eg Compiere Licence)?
    1. ADempiere is licenced under the GNU GPL.

The World around us

The "World around us" refers to what is going on, on the ERP sector, regardless of open source or not. This immediate World is seen as:

  1. Threat of new entrants: Ie, how easy is to enter/leave the ERP development market?
    1. Forking is easy to challenge incumbents as proven by ADempiere vs Open Bravo vs Compiere
    2. It is comparatively easy to enter the ERP market by developing/forking an existing open source ERP, but in order to sell it you need to make a name of yourself, provide an easy migration path from different ERP vendors, and make installation faster in order to lower costs even more.
    3. The market is difficult in its subject matter expertise.
  2. Competition: Ie, how fierce is the competition (from Navision, SAP etc)?
    1. The competition is in terms of coming from branded giants, for new OS players, needs ranking in SourceForge., and is easily displaced with sustained open nature as in case of Google.
  3. Substitutes: Ie, what substitutes are there? (All other international accounting software suites)
    1. The substitutes are..
  4. Bargaining power of customers: Who makes the terms?
    1. Our customers have significant power, due to technological lagging, lack of features and increasing competition.
  5. Other Interested Parties: Ie, what other interested parties are there and what are they trying to accomplish? (eg IBM, SUN)
    1. The other parties are.. and try to..

What is going on?

We have identified the following opportunities. According to their importance, are:

  1. Rising operating costs will turn private enterprises to consider the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of their IT investments
  2. An IT solution needs to be able to provide infrastructure to support the enterprise as a whole, and be cost-effective
  3. A live Web community has enourmous outreach and provides excellent continuity by itself
  4. The OSS development model is at its best in developing solutions based in real cases
  5. Funding for ADempiere could be secured through an EU FP7 project proposal
  6. An open source software platform can be endorsed by public administrations

We have identified the following threats. According to their importance, are:

  1. ADempiere is not very well-known to the general public
  2. ADempiere is not productized yet (needs tools for deployment and installation)
  3. Customers have alternative (both OSS and proprietary) solutions that can turn to
  4. OSS solutions are still considered difficult to work with
  5. OSS needs user base and comparative -if not better- features than closed source alternatives
  6. There is no ADempiere legal entity to negotiate with Public Authorities

Reference

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