Meeting Yossi…

Some weeks ago I was interviewed by Yossi Bhardi, the person behind the Open Source ERP Guru blog. I not only enjoyed the interview, which you can find here, but also having the chance to talk to Yossi for the first time. Yossi is one of those committed volunteers who invests his personal time in following the ERP Open Source revolution. The work he does from his blog is a great contribution in building the OS ERP market and therefore something that helps the whole industry. As I always mention when talking about other OS ERP players, the more successful we all are, the bigger the open source ERP stake of the market will become, for a greater number of customers to enjoy an offer which is more valuable, fair and easy to understand when compared to proprietary ERP solutions.

Thank you Yossi and keep up with the good work!

What a great OffSite!

From the day I started working in Openbravo, we have been periodically conducting Offsites with all company employees. These are full day events in which we gather all Openbravo members who can make it (this year we had people in Miami that could not attend), in one place to:

• Celebrate achievements and progress together
• Give a brief update on the current status and plans for the coming months. Alignment of priorities are key to continue serving our community well.
• Work together on selected topics which are important to our business and people
• Participate in fun activities together. You know what they say… those who work hard, play hard! ;-)

This last OffSite has again brought me lots of good feelings and positive ideas to keep on making it happen. If anyone wants to understand what Openbravo’s biggest asset is… I’ll tell you right now... join Openbravo (whether as a community member, a partner, a customer or as an employee) and discover our amazing team!

I feel extremely proud on the almost 100 professionals from 15 different nationalities which are currently employed full time by the company, in a multitude of locations around the globe. Our people are highly professional, have the optimal knowledge and are passionate and committed to making it happen. And I tell you this … there is no better asset in a company like ours than people. People who work hard, play hard, and have fun doing both!

Ps_ Because the SanFermines holiday was right around the corner (the famous running of the bulls fair taking place in Pamplona), we had this Offsite in a bull fighting venue. This photo was taken in the arena where many Openbravo employees braved the bulls! By the way … nobody got hurt.

Freedom is a much powerful change agent than dictatorship!

This Sunday I watched again V for Vendetta, the comic written in 1982 by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and brought to the cinema by many of the filmmakers involved in the Matrix trilogy and directed by James McTeigue. If you like fiction, politics and films with a powerful message, you need to watch this movie. Here are some takeaways that I think perfectly apply to nowadays world of software:

1) Dictatorship tries to force what a reduced number of people believes is right. Freedom, on the contrary, gives choice to people and allows for new ideas to appear.

• Dictatorship in the world of software is represented by any company that thinks that through 100% vendor centralized approach they can satisfy the needs of all clients. Don't you think that the world is too large to be able to accomplish this by only a single vendor?.

2) You are free when you really have a choice to decide and, sometimes, human beings forget about being true to what they really want.

• There is too much FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) around software. Extensive FUD from proprietary vendors to open source projects. Some FUD from open source projects to proprietary vendors. At the end, users decide. Our role as IT professionals, regardless of what is our origin (proprietary or open source vendors), should be to ensure that users can decide freely without so much FUD generated and allowing to be honest about what they need and want. In that mindset, I am sure the right choice will always be made.

3) The power of freedom is in the community (and if not, watch the movie until the end: GREAT!) built by people/ organizations that have made their choice and join forces.

• This is by far the most important idea that open source brings over the table. An open source project with a successful community will always win in competition against 100% centralized proprietary vendors. The change proprietary players need to push within their organizations to adapt to the new paradigm of collaboration sometimes breaks the principles in which they were created. This is what I like about Openbravo: we are strictly built on the principles of open collaboration with users, partners and individuals who can contribute their ideas at will. Our principles are built on top of our competitor's weakest points.

Finally, for the ones that have seen the movie, I love the sequence when the inspector has that feeling of "I know what is going on here", "everything is connected". I sometimes have the same feeling. And the feeling is great because is when you discover that all facts, feedback that you get from the community, partners, clients, VCs, employees,.. plus your own thoughts come along into building a disruptive model: the leading open source ERP movement. ;-)

Anyway, this is what I wanted to share with you from this weekend. If you have seen the movie or you see it, please don't forget to leave your comments here.

Long live to V!

Resuming my blogging experience

It has been a while since my last post and I want to apologize because of this. Although I am not the kind of person that has a natural blogging gene, I promise I will still try to keep on sharing with you my thoughts around Openbravo.

To resume my blogging experience I want to tell you two quite obvious things:

• Openbravo is doing great and as a result of our growth we have successfully closed our second financing round. A round which was planned from the day we acquired our first investors in Jan 2006 . And a round that does not only give us additional resources to invest on our products and community but also strengthens our Board and gives even a more international profile in line with the nature of our opportunity.
• My second obvious message is a logical one and is for you: Thank you so much for your interest on our products, your decisions to adopt them, your willingness to contribute your experiences and above all your willingness to be successful in opening the world of ERPs. We will continue to be faithful to our vision and continue to improve all the things we do with professionalism and emotion as we have done from day one.

Talk to you soon!
M

Open Source rocks and Openbravo does not stop!

First my apologies to all the readers for not having posted any messages since quite a long time already. My only, hopefully valid, excuse is the enormous workload we had to close the year 2007. Now, what can I say that has not been said by other bloggers, analysts and press in the last days?. Three short comments that have attracted my attention over this period:

1. I think we all will agree by now that Open Source has consolidated as one of the most important forces that today is changing the software industry. Just look at some of the transactions that the industry has had in the last weeks ranging from Zimbra, Xensource, MySQL or Trolltech. By the way … isn't it strange that with the latest news of Microsoft bidding to acquire Yahoo, Zimbra could become part of Microsoft? I am curious to see what will the implications would be.
2. Further, the initially successful Netsuite IPO has brought even more attention than there already was into our space: the world of ERPs. Specially proving that there is a huge opportunity for the company or companies that are able to deliver something new and compelling to midmarket companies.
3. Openbravo has had a marvelous 2007!. I would suggest that all of you read the round up press release that we just published today. We are proving that there is a better and more efficient model to satisfy the hundreds of thousands of traditionally under-served small and mid-sized companies around the globe.
   

2008 looks incredibly promising for Openbravo. I have no doubts that with our product, community and hard and good work we will continue to advance very rapidly. Bear with us my friends!

By the way, do you know that we have been presented with yet another award, this time in the Open Source Meets Business Conference?

Will SAP help grow the SME ERP market?

After long delays, SAP has finally presented a new additional product targeting SMEs. For a long time the product, code named A1S, now comes to life with a new brand name: SAP Business Bydesign. Although many things are still unclear (how much is slideware vs. real product with optimal performance, what will be the future of SAP Business One, what will be the role of SAP midmarket channel partners, will SAP achieve its aggressive targets,…) this movement is a recognition that the industry is changing and web-based technologies are the future, as we saw many years ago from our foundation back in 2001. Additionally, we believe that SaaS makes a lot of sense for many SME clients which are not IT experts and look for an affordable, easy to configure solution without IT hassles. And therefore SaaS is here to stay and I am sure SAP will be a great contributor/ enabler in growing up this market.

At the end, I believe SAP will help us grow the market and since SAP remains closed source (big surprise ;-) and I still think the new leaders of tomorrow will be companies who adopt a new and better way to develop and sell software the open source way …Openbravo is also here to stay!

Another great award for Openbravo!

Today I just been informed of Openbravo winning a new award: the 2007 InfoWorld Bossie Award. It is great news for our project that in less than a year has already obtained three prestigious awards including this last one.

We know, as the article mentions, that in the world of ERPs “change happens slowly” and that's why we usually say that our business is more of a marathon than a sprint. And this is the reason why we like these awards since they clearly give to all the members of the broad Openbravo community additional energy to keep working hard whoever and wherever they are. Additional energy to continue leading this marathon towards opening the world of ERPs!.

I also feel very proud of our Engineering team who had a key role in the launch of our new release which incorporates many critical features which are being valued very highly. Finally, I want also to congratulate the other software applications that have obtained an award in the Best Application category together with Openbravo: SugarCRM, LifeRay, Alfresco, Scalix and Jabber and the rest of software companies awarded in the other categories.