Open-Source ERP’s Popularity Rises at SourceForge.net

Oh, what have those open-source hippies been working on these days.

An interesting development over at SourceForge.net is that the two most active projects for the past week, as listed Wednesday, are two ERP projects – PostBooks ERP, Accounting, CRM by xTuple; and ADempiere ERP Business Suite. These aren’t two arbitrarily large outliers. Openbravo ERP and webERP web-based ERP Accounting also made the top 15 list.

Ned Lilly, CEO at xTuple, reports that XTuple has about 500 active contributors and 25,000 people who have added to the application at some point. There have been roughly 400,000 downloads of the ERP project. It’s more difficult to figure out how many companies actually use the ERP system. XTuple has 200 paying customers, but Lilly estimates that there are anywhere from 7,000 to 10,000 running deployments.

“[It’s] a good time to be in open-source,” Lilly says. “It’s still the case that the technical guys find us and fall in love with the product and community.” Open-source business has become better understood and appreciated in recent years. “It’s almost happened overnight that we didn’t have to explain open-source to people anymore.”

Open-source ERP’s advantages come from its communal intelligence. Necessary upgrades can be found and resolved by any programmer, regardless of finances or business affiliation.

Granted, the security risk of depending on the unwashed masses of computer bums is what scares ERP industry leaders the most. Chances are that the landscape of the ERP market, still dominated by SAP and Oracle, will not change too drastically, too soon.

Businesses have turned to open-source ERP, though, to avoid the on-premise pitfalls of restrictive licensing, obligatory version upgrades, and high system maintenance costs. Open-source offers much more flexibility.

Application integrators too, may appreciate open-source. ERP vendor partnerships can become one-sided, where the vendor assumes control of the client. Open-source ERP can provide a customized solution centered on the customer’s actual needs.

Tags: Open Source ERP, Oracle, SAP, xTuple