OPEN SOURCE ERP, WILL IT MAKE TRADITIONAL ERP IRRELEVNT?

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are critical to many companies' business processes, such as purchasing, order management and financial management. Because those processes are key to a company's success or failure, and because ERP systems are used predominantly by big, slow-to-change companies, traditional closed source vendors have been a natural source of software to run ERP systems.

But I don' think there can be may CEOs who are not ERP angst. Revamping an ERP system is almost a nightmare, cos its a big big process involving great replacement costs, time consuming.

No wonder there is a hunger to find alternative sources of ERP, and definitely OPEN SOURCE ERP will feed the hunger!!!

WHAT MOTIVATES A COMPANY TO LOOK FOR OPEN SOURCE ERP?

• To obtain a significant return on investment (ROI) while maintaining functionality equivalent to commercial tools.
• To leverage open source solutions by avoiding proprietary software.
• To harness the open source model to accelerate innovation and the speed of application customization.

IS OPEN SOURCE ERP THE ANSWER??

• CUSTOM FIT

Open source ERP systems are gaining traction; by finding a quality vendor to partner with, service providers can help customers migrate to a new open source ERP platform. Open source addresses a key concern when it comes to custom fit.Many small firms custom fit and flexibility is the major advantage of open source ERP.

• FLEXIBLE SUPPORT SYSTEM

Mid-market CIOs also have to be realistic about support options—and the need to not only manage costs but also keep a few exit doors open in case of trouble. An aspect of open source that attracted these open-source ERP adopters was flexibility with who could support their development and maintenance needs.

FUTURE OUTLOOK

Analysts are split on how wide the appeal of open-source ERP will be in the coming years. When you consider the entire universe of ERP deployments, few companies have adopted open-source ERP software. Early adopters tend to be the smaller companies. According to recent Gartner research, among companies currently using or considering using open source in any form, 12 percent are using open-source ERP today. And 14 percent plan to do so in the next 12 months. Open-source ERP should have increasing appeal because of the wave of ERP consolidation—mostly acquisitions by Oracle, Microsoft and Infor.

SAP and those guys are not serving the mid-market—they provide more functionality than customers need at a price they can’t afford, but open source is meeting the needs.

Well we definitely have to wait and watch if Open source is going to compete with big vendors or totally going to make their product irrelevant...