First Openbravo World Conference a resounding success
– More than 200 attendees from 20 countries meet to share ideas at inaugural Openbravo World Conference –
Barcelona, Spain (May 07, 2009) – Openbravo, the leading developer of web-based open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Point of Sale (POS) solutions for businesses, welcomed over 200 partners, developers and enthusiasts, who traveled from more than 20 countries to attend the annual Openbravo World Conference, held in Barcelona from April 17-19, 2009.
The event was organized together with the support from numerous sponsors, including Oracle, IBM’s DB2, Elondra, Talend, Sun Microsystems, Essentia, ProcessMaker, and Canonical.
Attendees discovered more about Openbravo’s plans and vision from the management team, heard the latest news about the company’s award winning ERP and POS solutions, and learned more about the many opportunities and benefits that Openbravo can deliver for their own businesses and end customers. Community members and sponsors also participated by showcasing innovative solutions in combination with Openbravo technologies, while demonstrating the pioneering modules built on the latest release, Openbravo ERP 2.50.
On the opening day, which was exclusive to official partners, attendees were presented with Openbravo’s latest Global Partner Program and Products & Services catalogue.
Cees Poortman, VP Commercial Operations of Openbravo, said: “The new partner program has generated a lot of interest. The principal objective of this new partner program is to make our partners more successful in working around Openbravo and to keep building on our innovative business model. This was a great day where partners from all over the world got to network together, while making close ties with their Regional Channel Business Manager.”
Presentations on the following two World Community Days focused on the theme of ‘Empowering the Ecosystem’, also the title presentation of Openbravo CEO Manel Sarasa which opened the weekend sessions. The presentation summarized how Openbravo is committed to the idea that creating products that facilitate community development, third-party add-ons and easy distribution build a better business environment for all. Keynote speakers included Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho, who spoke about how open source is affected in a downturn economy, and Matt Asay, VP of Business Development at Alfresco, who advocates the value of community in open source. Also, the featured customer stories, presented by Openbravo partners from across the world, let attendees see firsthand how other companies have benefited by using Openbravo and the impact that the company is having on SMBs worldwide.
Openbravo ERP 2.50 took centre stage at the conference, introducing new features including modularity, to allow for developers to easily add additional functionality to Openbravo’s offering. Openbravo also introduced its new Forge, a central gathering place where developers can work on Openbravo’s core products, as well as their own third-party add-ons. It will provide a hub that will help partners to advertise their add-ons, drive traffic and grow their own business.
Manel Sarasa, CEO of Openbravo, said: “Having Openbravo ERP 2.50 and the new Openbravo Forge enables us to deliver on the ‘ERP Ecosystem’ concept. The community can develop add-ons easily through using Openbravo ERP 2.50’s modular architecture, and each developer now has a central place to work on and promote their projects in the new Forge. We showcased several new modules at the conference, and each was very well received.”
To honor the valuable contributions of its partners and community members, the inaugural Global Excellence Partner Awards were also presented on Partner Day. OpenTRES from Singapore won the partner award in the Global category, while Microgénesis was recognized in the category for Spain. The Community award winners were also announced, and can be found at http://worldconference.openbravo.com/agenda.php#awards.
Manel Sarasa added: “We wanted to let our partners and community members know how important they are to us, which is why we decided to present our first Openbravo Awards. We are thankful to all for making our first event of this scale successful, are we are proud to have met with everyone at the conference. We hope to see them all again next year.”
Source: OpenBravo