At the recent Cloud Expo 2011 in New York City, TMC’s CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) sat down and spoke with OpenERP’s business development director for the Americas, Fabrice Henrion.
As TMC’s Paula Bernier (News - Alert) wrote recently, OpenERP is a five-year-old company selling ERP applications, open source and software as a service. It generally caters to small and medium businesses and has more than 500 customers – and OpenERP’s software sees more than 1,000 downloads daily.
OpenERP officials say companies are starting to look for ERP suites to replace Quickbooks and other home-grown products, but they don’t have the resources to go with something from Oracle or SAP (News - Alert). That’s where OpenERP comes in.
The company sells a range of business apps, not just ERP, but CRM, inventory control, HR, manufacturing and distribution, warehouse management. As Henrion said, SMBs generally don’t have the right products and apps they need. The goal of OpenERP is to give affordable tools to businesses.
Manufacturing, e-commerce and distribution are three industries that have seen a big growth in demand from SMBs for such business tools in recent years, particularly in the U.S., Henrion said.
The company is based in Belgium. Early this year they introduced OpenERP v6, a major upgrade for its business applications, which have been tested and improved by a global community of open source developers who contributed more than 800 suggestions, enhancements and fixes to the software.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Tammy Wolf