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As promised, I followed up last Tuesday's blog post (March 13) about ex-Oracle supply chain automation guru Don Klaiss joining open-source software (OSS) ERP company Compiere. I “met” with Don recently to hear about his plans. Compiere is also one of the charter members of the Red Hat Exchange so the meeting did double duty. One of the keys to the growth of the OSS community is some real-life business applications and the Red Hat Exchange and Compiere in particular are possible leading indicators of whether or not such OSS applications will take off in business settings. OSS applications--as opposed to tools-- are primarily popular only in government and education today.

As I said last week, Compiere founder and technology developer Jorg Janke started at Oracle Germany (working indirectly for Don). I said that the name Compiere had a French Connection that escaped me but that I’d ask when I talked with the company. I had the right idea but the wrong language. It apparently relates to the Italian word, to complete. [Similarly, the OSS community that forked from Compiere in October 2006, ADempiere, is based on the Italian word meaning 'to fulfill' but with additional context of "to free (discharge); it also means to honor and respect."]

Perhaps with that forking of the code set in mind, Don Klaiss said he believes that Compiere prior to his arrival took advantage of the marketing benefits of the OSS business model, and the quality-control and testing benefits of the OSS culture, but that his new company has not taken as much advantage of the development benefits of the OSS culture as it could have. He wants to keep up the pace on the first two OSS characteristics and do OSS development with an interesting twist. He hopes to do that by
-- having his development staff (while following the OSS rules of the road) concentrate on the core ERP functionality
-- having channel partners (and anyone else that wants to) join in extending the core with industry specific extensions or modules.

Don feels the core is unique for a midmarket product because the founders were originally from outside the U.S. and have provided solid multinational accounting, along with distribution, point of sale (POS) support, an integrated web storefront, and Project-like functionality. He wants his developers to move as fast as possible to add production planning and core service industry support.

The key to 'Compiere the product' is a Java/J2EE development/deployment platform on which is based a dictionary-driven model-based “programming” environment. It sounded to me a little like J.D. Edwards World (with which Don was familiar having been at Oracle when Oracle acquired PeopleSoft). In a sense, the dictionary-driven approach almost means programmers are not needed. And it means end users can make modifications and extensions without being stuck in the modified extended version of the core product when a new release comes out (which is quite often given the OSS culture). I even think a new type of open source community could be spawned of the dictionary-driven appoach, made up of the budget planners, plant managers, warehouse supervisors, and so forth, but Don was not ready to go that far.

So, while he won’t see SAP or his old company much in terms of ERP competitors, he will run into all the various flavors of Infor, Lawson, Sage, and that little ERP company out of Redmond WA by way of Scandinavia and Western Scandinavia (Fargo).

In addition to running the development community, Compiere will sell various degrees of services and support to the eventual user while the Compiere partner community does implementation and acts as an agent for the Compiere services contract. Compiere will also help partners in their marketing and even in their business planning. He foresees development partners providing extensions that are available by subscription and may even go the Software as a Service (SaaS) route himself for some types of extensions. He wouldn’t want to do SaaS for the core product without really thinking through potential channel conflict. As with Progress, whom I posted about here, Compiere uses mostly open source components and contributes back to the OSS movement when it finds quality problems. The Compiere ERP product currently uses Oracle as database and is porting to DB2 (not all versions of course) and postgreSQL

Looking to a natural fit with the Open Source Alliance (OSA), Don feels there is a lot of merit in the interoperability planned among the various OSA applications. Compiere will be monitoring the development and adoption of the APIs but was not committing to it the first week on the job. At some point, Compiere will re-evaluate whether or not it has enough resources in order to make meaningful contributions to OSA’s progress.

As for the Red Hat Exchange (RHX), it will serve as another distribution channel for Compiere and could be fairly significant because Red Hat has such a large installed base. RHX could complement Compiere’s current partner channel because they can provide implementation services to customers that RHX signs up. Red Hat doesn’t want to get into that business.

I’d be interested in hearing what any Compiere partners out there think. Let me know through the comments box.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Development |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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