Here’s a video to show you how the opentaps - Magento integration works:

What’s really cool about this integration is that it adds a web-based Data Access Layer module based on the Pentaho Data Integration (kettle) ETL system.  This module is used for importing and transforming data into the opentaps Data Import modules, and you can use it for more than just importing data from Magento.  You can use it to import product and order data from other e-commerce or Point Of Sales systems as well, and kettle allows you to graphically redesigned the transformations of your data.

Here’s additional information on how to set up the opentaps - Magento integration.  Enjoy!

The Deal recently had an article about online music startups which should strike a chord with anybody who’s thinking about or trying to make a business out of open source.  Look at what they had to say:

“huge numbers, lots of hype, a surfeit of hope and a major chance of failure… some of the business models are inherently economically unfeasible… It’s completely unsettled and more and more fragmented…The rules of the industry and the economics of the industry have completely changed…Technological advances offer more and more delivery mechanisms, user options and wizardly new features…However, just who can make money off all this is almost as uncertain now as it was five years back…Everyone is gambling there will be a way to monetize distribution of recorded music, But no one has come up with the solution…Last year’s great hopes are this year’s busts.”

Sound familiar?  It should.  In a nutshell, open source business models share the same strategic problem that these online music startups have: how do you make any money when most of what you provide is available for free? Let’s look at the ways:

Free the Software, Sell the Services

Just about every commercialized open source project follows this business model.  The software is free, but the developers charge for services such as support, training, customization, and software development.  Sometimes the services are “productized” into manuals, seminars, installation CD’s, and packaged support, but the idea is the same.

This model works well…to an extent.  For example, we’re the main developers of opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM, and we’ve found that users are indeed willing to engage us for opentaps-related services because of our experience and knowledge with the system.  However, we’ve also found that users are willing to hire us mostly for customizations which are unique to their needs.  We’re still responsible for the architecture and user interface of opentaps ourselves, and that’s why since the release of opentaps 1.0 we’ve invested in everything from integrating Spring, Hibernate, and the Google Web Toolkit to building a Domain Driven Architecture.

Like the Free Version?  Please Pay Us for Even More!

Many open source software developers, and virtually all open source software companies funded by venture capitalists, engage in the “commercial/open source” model.  An open source edition is available free of charge to attract potential users, and a fancier commercial version is available for pay.

This is not an easy business model.  Let’s go back to music as an example.  I like Pink Floyd, but if you gave me The Dark Side of the Moon for free, would I pay you for Ummagumma, The Final Cut, and every other song by Pink Floyd?  No, I wouldn’t.  (Another example is travel: how many people actually pay for First Class?)

But perhaps the best evidence that this is a difficult business model comes from the commercial open source companies themselves.  Compared to a few years ago, their websites are de-emphasizing the open source version (sometimes you really have to look even to find the download page), and their “community edition” licenses are increasingly restrictive.

Nevertheless, I think this is a model which could be very successful if two conditions are met:

1. You must have a very large open source user base.  Think MySQL.
2. You must segment that user base carefully and identify the unique needs for your “enterprise edition” product.  The need must be fundamental — a little bit of eye candy and a few cool features alone won’t be enough.

Be careful, though: if you execute this model incorrectly, you could easily lose the goodwill of your open source users and unwittingly give away a viable commercial product for free.

The Alchemy of Open Source

There is a famous story of the Stone Soup, where many free ingredients came together to make an amazing finished product.  Lest you think it’s just a fable, Red Hat and Ubuntu do exactly that–they’ve combined major open source projects such as Linux, Gnome, Apache, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and MySQL and built major businesses from them.

This is the business model we’ve chosen for opentaps so far.  We’ve built opentaps from major open source projects such as Apache, Funambol, Google Web Toolkit, Jasper Reports, Pentaho, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and too many others to name here.  We’ve had to be patient at times, but over the years, we’ve grown as all those other projects have matured.  Amazingly enough, these open source projects have put us years ahead of many commercial ERP systems technically and enabled us to build opentaps sustainably, so that we now have a fully integrated ERP and CRM system with business intelligence, ecommerce, and mobility integration without any VC funding.

But this is not an easy business model to execute.  You must be willing to understand other open source projects and have the technical ability to work with them.  Most importantly, you need patience.  With this business model, you are growing with the community of open source projects.

In the End . . .  Just Make it Better

No matter what business model you choose, ultimately you’ll succeed if you make technology easier and better for your users. In the online music world, there actually has been a great success story — iTunes.  They’ve done it by making downloading music easy and fun.  So learn from them.  If you can make software easy and fun, you will be successful.  Next to a great product, the business model is just a footnote.

In the next part of An Open Source Business, we’ll take a look at marketing strategies for open source software.

They were kind enough to share their results with us, and you can read it at Opentaps In Retail. I hope you would find it interesting.

Spree

Spree is lightweight and easy to use, and the user interface for both the online store and the backend administrative module were quite intuitive. There is a good amount of documentation on the Spree website, and the authors of Spree seem really interested in helping you understand their system and work with it.  Their BSD license is one of the least restrictive open source licenses.   There is an active community around Spree, as evidenced by the Spree extensions available.  Finally, Spree is written in Ruby on Rails, which is a very well-thought out web development frameworks.

Magento

Magento is a much bigger application than Spree.   Its  online store is also very intuitive and easy to use, but it’s altogether more polished and commercial-looking than Spree. The backend administrative applications are bit more complex, though. The free documentation available seems to be just  the Magento wiki, which has a lot of content available but is not as consistent. There are also several books on Magento, ranging from to Magento: Beginner’s Guide to The Definitive Guide to Magento and php/Architect’s Guide to E-Commerce Programming with Magento. (Note: I haven’t read these books yet and can’t give them any recommendations.) Finally, Magento is written in PHP and the code seemed well-organized on first inspection, which means that a good developer should not take too long to get familiar with it.

Magento has a  commercial/open-source licensing model, and the free version is licensed under the OSL 3.0 license. The OSL 3.0 is also a true open source license approved by the Open Source Initiative,  but it is more restrictive than the BSD and the GPL license. (See the GNU Project’s comments about the OSL, for example.)  Still, do not view this as purely negative. If the commercial/open source licensing model can support full-time professional developers to work on Magento’s open source version, then ultimately it would benefit most real end users of the open source Magento  e-commerce platform.

The biggest advantage for Magento, though, seems to be its large number of third party modules available. There are over 1300 add-on modules available for Magento.  (And the opentaps-Magento integration will soon be one of them!)  Although most of these are commercial (as in “for pay”), and many of the free ones are in “beta” status, there still seems to be a lot of stable, free modules available.

How to Choose?

My personal opinion is that this comes down to a decision between Ruby on Rails and PHP. You should ask yourself which one you would prefer to work with and feel more comfortable with. However, keep in mind that while Ruby on Rails has been a very successful web development framework, PHP is simply the most dominant one today.  (See for example O’Reilly’s State of the Computer Book Market and the TIOBE Software Index.)  Therefore, there are many more developers, service providers, and add-on modules for PHP than Ruby. For example, Facebook’s developer API is mainly for PHP.  Until Ruby on Rails comes up with a “killer app” that does something which PHP fundamentally is not well-suited for, I would not expect this to change.

• We’ve introduced a new keyword search feature for opentaps, based on Hibernate search, Apache lucene, and Google Web Toolkit
• We’ve also enhanced searching for invoices, payments, accounting transactions, and orders with new fields you can search with
• We think the new look for opentaps applications is a lot better and hope you agree.
• For Java developers, we’ve added support for hibernate caching and Java wrappers for ofbiz services and Java classes for constants to make your code easier to write and easier to maintain.

Try opentaps in the Amazon Cloud

opentaps is now available on Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).  Watch the “opentaps on Amazon EC2″ video to find out how easy it  can be to set up a pre-installed demo of opentaps in minutes.

Using opentaps with Magento eCommerce

For those of you who would like to use opentaps with the award-winning Magento eCommerce system, the opentaps-Magento integration is now ready for testing.  The Apache OFBiz eCommerce application is still included out of the box with opentaps, and we will be looking at integrating with other shopping cart systems such as Spree, Zencart, and osCommerce as well.

A New Look for opentaps.org

Thanks to the help of Integrating Web, opentaps.org will also soon have a fresh new look.  Here’s an example of what it’ll look like:

opentaps Version 1.4 is Coming!

opentaps 1.4 Release Candidate is now available for download, and opentaps Version 1.4 will be released shortly.

What About the Future?

We’ve already started thinking about opentaps 2.0, which will have a more modular architecture to allow add-on modules written in any framework or language to be loaded and used with opentaps.  We’re also looking at how to leverage the domain driven architecture and Google Web Toolkit to create a new kind of ERP application.  Please give us your feedback and help us build the next generation of enterprise software.

Let me show you with an all-too-LA example:

In the age of television,

• media was how content was transmitted: cable, satellite
• content was the shows
• networks like ABC, NBC, HBO, and ESPN bundled the content and broadcast them over media to viewers, who used
• platforms to view the content.  The most common platform was the TV, and then later VHS (remember those?), DVD’s, TiVO, and now Hulu showed up.
• And networking was the act of gathering up content for distribution.  Power breakfasts at the Peninsula Beverly Hills, next to the old CAA building.

So what does it look like today in the social media world?

Today, we have:

• Media Twitter , Blogger, WordPress, and Facebook
• Content are all the blogs, tweets, videos out there
• Platforms are the PC’s, iPhone’s, Blackberrys, and tablets we’re using to play the content
• And now: networks are still the aggregators of the content.  Google does it with search.  Facebook does it with the friends network.  But anyone can do it in this day and age — even you.  Just start gathering up the content I’ll like and broadcast it on your blog, Facebook page, or Twitter, and I’ll join your network.
• networking with all the bloggers, twitterers, and movie makers (or open source projects) out there.

What Does It All Mean?

We all want to make a big splash by coming up with the next Facebook or iPhone.  But if you look at the history of TV, you’d realize that most of the money was made by the content producer (like Aaron Spelling) or networks (think Ted Turner), not by the providers of media (Adelphia?) or makers of platforms (Zenith.)

I think the same will be true of the new social media world.  Ten years from now, we’ll be glad to have our iPhones and tablets and use Facebook and Twitter, but what makes our lives better day in and day out–and what we will pay for day in and day out–will be great content producers and the networks, big and small, which gather them for us.

What Does This Have to do with Open Source?

Actually, everything.  But let me save that for a future post.

This release candidate is the final step before the official release of opentaps 1.4, which is expected in the next few weeks, and there should be only limited changes to opentaps 1.4 before its release.  If you have questions or comments about this release, please join us at the opentaps forum on SourceForge.

But what about small businesses? What if you are a startup or a neighborhood business, and you don’t have the millions of potential fans that a JetBlue or McDonald’s would have — not yet anyway?

This is actually a situation we’ve faced ourselves, starting opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM on a shoestring. And looking back, we’ve only been able to do it because we were able to tap into an online social network called “open source,” which is an online collaborative community of software developers that predates Twitter, Facebook, Google — even the Internet itself.

What we’ve learned don’t contradict what Eric and other people have said about social marketing, but there are a few twists I would like to point out:

Join a Bigger Network

When you are small, your network is also small, so you try becoming a prominent part of a larger network, instead of just promoting in your own network. For us, this meant making ourselves known in the larger open source community of software developers and users looking for open source software by releasing our software and our ideas to them.  Fortunately, people liked them.

Network (verb) through the Networks (noun)

Use social networks as an opportunity to network with other people in compatible fields.  For example, we’ve benefitted from associating with other open source software projects, such as Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Funambol, Pentaho, JasperReports, etc.

Be Memorable

Most importantly, be memorable. Be different. Believe it or not, the small business has the advantage here. People are always looking for interesting new things to talk about.  If you are a small business with a memorable product or service, the word will spread a lot faster now than ever before.

Tell us if you like it!