Acquisitions Craze In ERP Market Spurs Demand For Open Source ERP
Many companies are embracing open source Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP because of the wave of acquisitions of small to mid-sized ERP service providers by bigger players in the IT world. Some clients believe that the bigger players do not concentrate on core competencies in ERP when pursuing acquisitions rather, they are solely interested in the acquisition so that they can become bigger organizations but eventually become rather disorganized due to the unwieldiness of their bureaucratic make-up. This is why open source ERP is becoming more popular. Open source ERP is the alternative sought by clients because it seems to be less expensive, more secure, and more flexible than solutions provided by proprietary ERP companies. The difference between the former and the latter is that the service providers of the former offer their software free of charge, being open source material. Open source ERP providers make their money by providing additional services such as technical support and security. As far as ERP comparison goes though, the functionality of open source ERP and proprietary ERP are believed to hover around the same level of competence, based on feedback from users. The other factors that influence enterprise resource planning decisions favoring open source ERP are the lesser expense that comes with ownership, additional flexibility, and community participation and expertise. In addition, more end-users are trusting open source ERP to provide key business functionality due to the advent of open source databases, as well as open source operating systems. When one talks about ERP integration, the ERP system selected ought to be able to merge or integrate all of the basic departments of a business or organization into one system that is fully capable of helping each of those departments to function. Open source ERP is supposed to have the advantage of being able to affect source code. For example, if the open source ERP service provider and software developer should close shop for some reason, the theory goes that the community will still have the ability to sustain the code.
Still, even with all this going for it, open source ERP still needs to be nurtured further for it to survive in the future. User interfaces based on open source ERP tend to be inelegant while referrals for ERP consultants and service providers devoted to open source ERP are rather difficult to find at present. And even if open source ERP software comes free of charge, you still need ERP consultants to help you navigate through it and build on its capabilities. The last factor which may hinder the future of open source ERP is the fact that a stigma exists about open source ERP that it is a very complicated solution that requires the service of experts for it to be usable by end-users. Some users claim that open source ERP is rather cumbersome to use as compared to Windows-based applications, though open source ERP works quite well anyway. Only time will tell whether open source ERP will become the wave of the future or go the way of the dinosaurs. |
