Open ERP

The Open Source ERP Guru put together an informative history of ERP applications: ERP History | Open Source ERP Guru

It all began with 5 IBM engineers from Manheim, Germany , working nights and weekends on the next big thing in software: ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning. The year was 1972, and the business software world was a spaghetti of systems, vendors and technologies. Departments could not communicate with each other because their software systems spoke different languages. Babel tower of custom applications. SAP was about to change everything.

They even have a Flash-based history timeline. Go check it out!

I read an interesting blog post today from Michael Dizon, who used to be a Senior Lecturer at the UP College of Law and whose interests, among others, is ICT law, policy and practice, and Free and Open Source Software or FOSS.

Many business executives are looking for more ways to cut costs during these tough times and have a mandate to "do more with less." Open source software fits the bill perfectly as it has little or no upfront costs, licensing flexibility (often times you can install on as many PCs you want and for as much users as you need) , development flexibility (the source code and APIs can be customized, the platform and toolkits are readily available), and the fact that many open source projects actually have better and larger support communities than proprietary products.

This year may actually be a turning point in the adoption of open source software as projects steadily mature (think Linux and MySQL) and interest among corporate users grow. According to a report released by research firm Gartner in November of last year, the adoption of open source software is becoming pervasive among large multinational organizations. Of the 274  surveyed by Gartner, 85% said they were currently using open source in their enterprises and the remaining 15% said they expect to use it in the next 12 months.

The VAR Guy has posted in his blog a survey of open source companies which are focused on growth via channels such as VARs, solutions providers and managed service providers.