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Open source software (OSS) ERP provider Compiere announced this morning that ex-Ask manager and ex-Oracle supply chain automation guru Don Klaiss has joined the company as president. This is an important "endorsement" in a sense for the company that recently secured some big-league financing from NEA and moved from Oregon to Silicon Valley. Ram Gupta, another ERP industry veteran via PeopleSoft is on the board along with Andre Boisvert (ex-IBM and ex-SAS and founder of Pentaho, the OSS BI folks), who is chairman of the board.

OSS has been basically an infrastructure software story to date but it looks like the Compiere investors and directors are going to take a serious run at the ERP midmarket using this technology. Compiere started in ERP in 1999 in the more traditional fashion and switched over to OSS circa 2002-2003. Its business model is to go totally indirect, having built up a channel of 100 partners worldwide. Founder and technology developer Jorg Janke started at Oracle Germany and the name Compiere has a French Connection that escapes me (but I'll ask them when I talk to them).

Compiere is mired in a bit of OSS culture intrigue: a group of the original Compiere open sourcers left the Compiere community last year and started ADempiere as a competitor. Adempiere says" "The community believed Compiere Inc. placed too much emphasis on the open source nature of the project, rather than the community nature of the project, and after an impassioned discussion decided to split from Compiere™ giving birth to the ADempiere project." It sounds like a bit of the open source vs. free software blog I posted on March 12.

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

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