Open Source Strategies, Inc.

I’ve known about the Magento e-commerce platform since 2008, and I was immediately impressed by its user friendliness and out-of-the-box features. Since then, Magento has really grown, and quite a few members of our community have asked for an integration with this e-commerce system. So, I’m really happy to say that with the help of IntegratingWeb, we have officially released an integration for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM with the Magento e-commerce platform.  Now you will have a choice of either using the Apache OFBiz e-commerce store included in opentaps already or the Magento e-commerce store with opentaps.

Here’s a video to show you how the opentaps - Magento integration works:

What’s really cool about this integration is that it adds a web-based Data Access Layer module based on the Pentaho Data Integration (kettle) ETL system.  This module is used for importing and transforming data into the opentaps Data Import modules, and you can use it for more than just importing data from Magento.  You can use it to import product and order data from other e-commerce or Point Of Sales systems as well, and kettle allows you to graphically redesigned the transformations of your data.

Here’s additional information on how to set up the opentaps - Magento integration.  Enjoy!

Filed under: About opentaps by Si Chen - 2 Comments →

In this part of our series on An Open Source Business, let’s take a look at our friends in the online music space and see what we can learn from them.

The Deal recently had an article about online music startups which should strike a chord with anybody who’s thinking about or trying to make a business out of open source.  Look at what they had to say:

“huge numbers, lots of hype, a surfeit of hope and a major chance of failure… some of the business models are inherently economically unfeasible… It’s completely unsettled and more and more fragmented…The rules of the industry and the economics of the industry have completely changed…Technological advances offer more and more delivery mechanisms, user options and wizardly new features…However, just who can make money off all this is almost as uncertain now as it was five years back…Everyone is gambling there will be a way to monetize distribution of recorded music, But no one has come up with the solution…Last year’s great hopes are this year’s busts.”

Sound familiar?  It should.  In a nutshell, open source business models share the same strategic problem that these online music startups have: how do you make any money when most of what you provide is available for free? Let’s look at the ways:

Free the Software, Sell the Services

Just about every commercialized open source project follows this business model.  The software is free, but the developers charge for services such as support, training, customization, and software development.  Sometimes the services are “productized” into manuals, seminars, installation CD’s, and packaged support, but the idea is the same.

This model works well…to an extent.  For example, we’re the main developers of opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM, and we’ve found that users are indeed willing to engage us for opentaps-related services because of our experience and knowledge with the system.  However, we’ve also found that users are willing to hire us mostly for customizations which are unique to their needs.  We’re still responsible for the architecture and user interface of opentaps ourselves, and that’s why since the release of opentaps 1.0 we’ve invested in everything from integrating Spring, Hibernate, and the Google Web Toolkit to building a Domain Driven Architecture.

Like the Free Version?  Please Pay Us for Even More!

Many open source software developers, and virtually all open source software companies funded by venture capitalists, engage in the “commercial/open source” model.  An open source edition is available free of charge to attract potential users, and a fancier commercial version is available for pay.

This is not an easy business model.  Let’s go back to music as an example.  I like Pink Floyd, but if you gave me The Dark Side of the Moon for free, would I pay you for Ummagumma, The Final Cut, and every other song by Pink Floyd?  No, I wouldn’t.  (Another example is travel: how many people actually pay for First Class?)

But perhaps the best evidence that this is a difficult business model comes from the commercial open source companies themselves.  Compared to a few years ago, their websites are de-emphasizing the open source version (sometimes you really have to look even to find the download page), and their “community edition” licenses are increasingly restrictive.

Nevertheless, I think this is a model which could be very successful if two conditions are met:

1. You must have a very large open source user base.  Think MySQL.
2. You must segment that user base carefully and identify the unique needs for your “enterprise edition” product.  The need must be fundamental — a little bit of eye candy and a few cool features alone won’t be enough.

Be careful, though: if you execute this model incorrectly, you could easily lose the goodwill of your open source users and unwittingly give away a viable commercial product for free.

The Alchemy of Open Source

There is a famous story of the Stone Soup, where many free ingredients came together to make an amazing finished product.  Lest you think it’s just a fable, Red Hat and Ubuntu do exactly that–they’ve combined major open source projects such as Linux, Gnome, Apache, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and MySQL and built major businesses from them.

This is the business model we’ve chosen for opentaps so far.  We’ve built opentaps from major open source projects such as Apache, Funambol, Google Web Toolkit, Jasper Reports, Pentaho, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and too many others to name here.  We’ve had to be patient at times, but over the years, we’ve grown as all those other projects have matured.  Amazingly enough, these open source projects have put us years ahead of many commercial ERP systems technically and enabled us to build opentaps sustainably, so that we now have a fully integrated ERP and CRM system with business intelligence, ecommerce, and mobility integration without any VC funding.

But this is not an easy business model to execute.  You must be willing to understand other open source projects and have the technical ability to work with them.  Most importantly, you need patience.  With this business model, you are growing with the community of open source projects.

In the End . . .  Just Make it Better

No matter what business model you choose, ultimately you’ll succeed if you make technology easier and better for your users. In the online music world, there actually has been a great success story — iTunes.  They’ve done it by making downloading music easy and fun.  So learn from them.  If you can make software easy and fun, you will be successful.  Next to a great product, the business model is just a footnote.

In the next part of An Open Source Business, we’ll take a look at marketing strategies for open source software.

Filed under: About open source, About opentaps, An Open Source Business by Si Chen - 13 Comments →

A group of graduate students from the Lancaster University in Lancaster, UK contacted me last year regarding a research project they were doing. They wanted to compare open source and commercial ERP systems for the retail industry and evaluated opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM, openbravo, and Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision).

They were kind enough to share their results with us, and you can read it at Opentaps In Retail. I hope you would find it interesting.

Filed under: About open source, About opentaps by Si Chen - No Comments →

Easier to Use and Better Looking

• We’ve introduced a new keyword search feature for opentaps, based on Hibernate search, Apache lucene, and Google Web Toolkit
• We’ve also enhanced searching for invoices, payments, accounting transactions, and orders with new fields you can search with
• We think the new look for opentaps applications is a lot better and hope you agree.
• For Java developers, we’ve added support for hibernate caching and Java wrappers for ofbiz services and Java classes for constants to make your code easier to write and easier to maintain.

Try opentaps in the Amazon Cloud

opentaps is now available on Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).  Watch the “opentaps on Amazon EC2″ video to find out how easy it  can be to set up a pre-installed demo of opentaps in minutes.

Using opentaps with Magento eCommerce

For those of you who would like to use opentaps with the award-winning Magento eCommerce system, the opentaps-Magento integration is now ready for testing.  The Apache OFBiz eCommerce application is still included out of the box with opentaps, and we will be looking at integrating with other shopping cart systems such as Spree, Zencart, and osCommerce as well.

A New Look for opentaps.org

Thanks to the help of Integrating Web, opentaps.org will also soon have a fresh new look.  Here’s an example of what it’ll look like:

opentaps Version 1.4 is Coming!

opentaps 1.4 Release Candidate is now available for download, and opentaps Version 1.4 will be released shortly.

What About the Future?

We’ve already started thinking about opentaps 2.0, which will have a more modular architecture to allow add-on modules written in any framework or language to be loaded and used with opentaps.  We’re also looking at how to leverage the domain driven architecture and Google Web Toolkit to create a new kind of ERP application.  Please give us your feedback and help us build the next generation of enterprise software.

Filed under: About opentaps by Si Chen - No Comments →

We have just  made the release candidate for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM Version 1.4 available, and you can download opentaps 1.4RC1 from SourceForge.  We will also be making an opentaps Amazon EC2 image for this release candidate available shortly.

This release candidate is the final step before the official release of opentaps 1.4, which is expected in the next few weeks, and there should be only limited changes to opentaps 1.4 before its release.  If you have questions or comments about this release, please join us at the opentaps forum on SourceForge.

Filed under: About opentaps by Si Chen - No Comments →

I listened to a very good talk last weekend by Eric Qualman, author of Socialnomics, about social media and social networks. Eric had a lot of  good examples about how companies such as JetBlue, McDonald’s, and Burger King are taking advantage of social media to promote their brands and their products.

But what about small businesses? What if you are a startup or a neighborhood business, and you don’t have the millions of potential fans that a JetBlue or McDonald’s would have — not yet anyway?

This is actually a situation we’ve faced ourselves, starting opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM on a shoestring. And looking back, we’ve only been able to do it because we were able to tap into an online social network called “open source,” which is an online collaborative community of software developers that predates Twitter, Facebook, Google — even the Internet itself.

What we’ve learned don’t contradict what Eric and other people have said about social marketing, but there are a few twists I would like to point out:

Join a Bigger Network

When you are small, your network is also small, so you try becoming a prominent part of a larger network, instead of just promoting in your own network. For us, this meant making ourselves known in the larger open source community of software developers and users looking for open source software by releasing our software and our ideas to them.  Fortunately, people liked them.

Network (verb) through the Networks (noun)

Use social networks as an opportunity to network with other people in compatible fields.  For example, we’ve benefitted from associating with other open source software projects, such as Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Funambol, Pentaho, JasperReports, etc.

Be Memorable

Most importantly, be memorable. Be different. Believe it or not, the small business has the advantage here. People are always looking for interesting new things to talk about.  If you are a small business with a memorable product or service, the word will spread a lot faster now than ever before.

Filed under: About Social Media, About open source, About opentaps by Si Chen - No Comments →

Here’s a new look for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM:

Tell us if you like it!

Filed under: About opentaps by Si Chen - 6 Comments →

And now for something I’m especially proud of.

We’ve just finished putting together the new keyword search feature for opentaps. Now if you go to opentaps CRM, you’ll see a new keyword search box on the right:

Type in a keyword, click on search, and opentaps will return results from different sections of the CRM application, including accounts, leads, contacts, cases, orders:

And here’s an example of searching for an order by its ID:

The results are returned in a floating panel which shows up on top whatever screen you’re on.  You can click on a result to take you to it, or just close the floating panel to stay in the page you’re already in.

Now Here’s the Best Part

This new keyword search feature is implemented with Apache lucene and hibernate search. What we’ve done is create a separate and modular component in opentaps and loaded  with the Spring framework as a domain under our domain driven architecture:

Each opentaps application then uses the underlying search component to put together its own search services and user interface. For example, opentaps CRM uses the accounts, lead, contact, cases, opportunities, and orders search services from the search domain.

What this also means is that if you want to use a different indexing and search engine, all you have to do is implement the search domain and then plug it into opentaps using this our domain driven architecture.

Anybody out there interested in working with the Google Search Appliance?

Filed under: About opentaps by Si Chen - 3 Comments →

GWT is short for “Google Web Toolkit”, an open source library of tools for building rich web applications using Ajax. We have been working with GWT in opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM for over a year now, and I’d like to give you this example of how GWT really can do.

A long, long time ago…

Almost 4 years ago, we built the first version of opentaps CRM. It had several tabs for all the function of a full-featured CRM application, including leads contacts, accounts, cases, opportunities, etc.   Under each tab we added a “quick widget” to help users do common tasks easily, like entering a lead with basic information:

GWT Made It Better

When we started working with GWT over a year ago, we started by porting these quick widgets to GWT. This was nice, because now you can enter a lead without having to refresh your entire web page. We also updated the find and list forms in opentaps with GWT, so it’s easier to scroll through lists of  data like leads and cases. These are all enhancements which will be part of opentaps 1.4.

But This is What It Can Really Do For You

Looking back, this was a classic example of old thinking with new technology, like the early TV commercials which featured an announcer reading a script in front of a microphone.  (”Folks, it’s So So to tell you about the incredible advantages of the new Such and Such…”)  Sure, now you can see the announcer, but you’re just watching a radio commercial on TV.

What GWT really allows you to do is create “widgets” which can be pasted anywhere, so you don’t have to be tied to the context of the page.  For example, Google adwords is a widget that can be pasted on any web page to serve up ads from Google.

In a similar way, these opentaps CRM quick action widgets don’t have to be tied to just a particular part of opentaps anymore either, because you’re not.  You might be entering some information about a sales opportunity and get a call.  It turns out to be a new prospect.  When you’re done on the phone,  and you shouldn’t have to go look for the Leads tab to enter the new prospect’s information.

And you won’t. As of the next release of opentaps, the quick action widgets have been changed so that they can be put on any page in opentaps CRM. For example, they are all available from the “My Home” page of opentaps CRM:

By default, they are closed, but once you click on the tab bar to open them, you can use them to enter information without leaving the screen you’re on:

They will also remember whether you would like them open or closed, so if you have widgets get you use frequently, they will stay open for you:

Filed under: About opentaps by Si Chen - No Comments →

You can now deploy opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM on Amazon EC2 using new Amazon Machine Images for opentaps.  These images allow you to deploy an Amazon EC2 server with opentaps with demo data pre-installed on either a MySQL or PostgreSQL database.  To use them, just search for “opentaps” under “Community AMIs” when launching a new Amazon EC2 instance:

Here’s a short video to show you how to get opentaps up and running on Amazon EC2:

Filed under: About opentaps by Si Chen - 1 Comment →