Now those guys, they know how to squeeze customers!

Some delightfully straight talk from Dell’s software chief, John Swainson, in an interview with IDG . He’s talking about their challenges rationalizing all the (largely IT admin) products they’ve acquired, notably through their buyout of Quest Software. That specific field is a little out of our wheelhouse here [at xTuple], but the general observations he makes are dead-on for ERP Graveyard readers:

IDG News Service: Having that many products is a blessing and a curse. Have you done much paring back? You have a few different data protection products, a few virtualization platforms.
Swainson: We had four data protection products, several virtualization, a bunch of performance management. The first time we did the count we decided we had something like 200 products in Quest alone, and after we went through in gruesome detail and eliminated the obvious overlaps. We’ve got about 40 or 50 products.

IDG News Service: That’s a big paring back. 
Swainson: A lot of this was features that were masquerading as products. So things that should never have been products, like utilities, we’d merge back into the performance management product and have a suite instead of trying to sell it separately. Some of it was straight overlap. In storage management, we really did have four data protection products, so now we’re going through the technical process of taking the best of each product and putting it together, on a common framework. That’s the long hard way to do it but sometimes it’s worth it because there’s a $200 million revenue stream and it’s worth protecting.

IDG News Service: Which one wins, the one with the most customers?
Swainson: The one that’s the best architected and the most flexible and modern and that has the most features usually wins, because it’s the one you can take back to that customer set and make it the upgrade. And you can usually modify it enough so that the upgrade is seamless.

IDG News Service: So then you end-of-life those products?
Swainson: Only maybe five of them have been literally end-of-lifed. You converge them, you sell them as packages. They’re not discrete products any more, that’s the big difference. The reason you don’t want to [end of life them] is because in the software industry, all the profitability comes from the tail. You’re better off putting it on maintenance. Even though it’ll attrition away over time, it’ll still be profitable. Exhibit A on this are people like Oracle.

I do think he meant it as a compliment   Also of note, he mentioned earlier in the article that Dell hadn’t quite figured out what to do in the area of hosted business applications:  “The challenge is that it’s a different customer, it’s a different selling cycle, it’s quite heavily fragmented, and the only real way to make money out of it I think is to own your own IP [intellectual property], and the IP is very expensive.”

He’s probably right about that last point.  Remember the Application Service Providers of the ’90s?

So if you’re a company looking for a next-generation business solution, but want to retain control over your software investment, what are your options?  SaaS and The Cloud are only partial solutions; without the ability to pack up and move your private cloud anywhere else you want (try doing that with NetSuite), you’ve just traded one form of vendor lock-in for another.

Here’s a hint:  Look into open source ERP .  Not only do you have access to the full source code, you can host your application wherever you want – and have full portability, from one cloud to another, or even back to onsite if that’s what you decide.

Open source is changing the world and OpenSource.com has resources to prove it

Unlike the venerable groundhog Punxsutawney Phil, my bullish prognostication for 2013 that “ commercial open source is simply a better model and is at its inflection point for growth ” is bearing fruit. Big business and governments around the world agree. Case in point, “ City of Munich stands by its calculation: open source saves millions .”

“The City of Munich stands by its November 2012 cost estimates, which concluded that using free and open source software for desktops and office productivity for its 15,500 PCs is over 11 million euro cheaper, compared to the ubiquitous proprietary alternative. “There is no reason to correct this information”, the city’s IT department comments on 11 February to claims to the contrary.”

“Writing on its web site, the IT department for the second time refutes claims made in a report for the vendor of the proprietary software. Following furore (sic) in the IT trade press over remarks by the author of the unpublished report, alleging that the switch had cost the city millions of euro, the firm in late January made available a summary.”

Microsoft recently railed against OpenOffice – the free and open source software unnamed in the article above. Microsoft just doesn’t get “it” – not surprising as their lack of innovation velocity and meager success in mobile, cloud and other areas is well documented. I don’t think they expected Munich’s first or second responses above.  It is interesting that Apache’s OpenOffice didn’t have to respond to the dispute. The City of Munich issued the strong and clear statement to the world verifying their massive savings by deploying open source software.

I’m closely following the progress of open source solutions as they are recognized around the world. Tremendous open source growth continues with commercial open source companies like @xTuple (PostBooks ERP, CRM, Accounting), @ProjectLibre (Project Management replacement for Microsoft Project), @SugarCRM and other successful open source solutions for business.

PostBooks, for example, was voted SourceForge’s “Project of the Month (POTM)” in March. With over 4,000,000 downloads a day from Sourceforge.net’s categories (ranging from gaming to science to development software), this is an amazing feat for a business / financial management software. Rallying the open source community to vote for an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution as POTM speaks volumes about xTuple and also the maturing of open source business alternatives. Preceding xTuple by a few months, ProjectLibre was also recognized as POTM, and SugarCRM is shaking up the customer relationship management heretofore “Salesforce.com-centric” marketplace.

Why all the success now? With PostBooks, it is a confluence of factors.

1. xTuple, the company, is growing rapidly (over 50% last year), innovating customer-driven enhancements at break-neck speed, and the community of users is promoting PostBooks as the best choice for business.
2. Abandoned by their vendors, there is a figurative tombstone-filled ERP Graveyard of legacy solutions no longer supported by the “mother ship” with customers flailing.
3. ‘End of life’ pronouncements are couched in term-limited support (and upgrades) – ah, the screeching halt to innovation! Consolidations and private equity moves in the market have left some vendors with dozens of offerings, and the very idea they could be innovation leaders on so many different branches is farcical

Contrast the stagnation of proprietary vendors with a commercial open source company such as xTuple – with over 1,000,000 downloads of PostBooks around the world. The source code is free and open, with innovation coming from the community as well as the commercial sponsor, xTuple. Open source customers benefit from the rapid innovation and also the stability of community-monitored software development. Examples of xTuple ERP innovation driven by success with the commercial open source model, also extremely beneficial to users, include:

• B2C (Business-to-Consumer) storefront, this is coming soon and will empower companies with a Web presence for selling their products direct to consumer, fully integrated to their back-end inventory, accounting and manufacturing;
• B2B (Business-to-Business) module, allows selling partners to enter orders directly online, saving time, resources and money while increasing inventory accuracy and a company’s effective hours of operation to 24/7;
• Mobile Web modules, demonstrated at Macworld 2013 on a Mac laptop, while simultaneously working on an iPad, iPhone and my Samsung S III. I did look a bit odd with a Samsung at Macworld, but it reinforced the Mobile Web benefits of xTuple innovation!

The good news in commercial open source continues.

ProjectLibre’s replacement of Microsoft Project is now actively used in nearly 200 countries. With such a thriving global ecosystem, it is effectively only countries such as North Korea that are not currently using ProjectLibre. Making great strides in the CRM software-as-a-service (SaaS) space, SugarCRM replaced Siebel at IBM .  (WOW, a big win and congratulations to Larry, Chuck and the team at SugarCRM!)

The benefits are not simply for the open source vendors. The community of users benefits from the velocity of innovation. I almost never mention the tremendous cost benefits of open source software, because there are so many other areas on which to focus.

Open source as a movement is accelerating on multiple fronts and clearly has “legs.” Innovation solution leaders such as xTuple, ProjectLibre and SugarCRM will continue to take market share from the proprietary vendors. Our collective model is built for longstanding innovation and stability.

The ‘other’ model with enterprise sales was always based on a quarter-ending morphine “hit” to make the company’s revenue numbers work. If they missed those revenue numbers, the ax would come down and innovation and support would be negatively affected. The community and customers were always forced to take a back seat to that addiction.

In the commercial open source model, the community and vendors equally benefit from the alignment of our mutual interests. Jump on the open source bandwagon and experience the long-term benefits and security!

PostBooks was recently named a ‘Featured Project’ on Sourceforge. No small feat with over 320,000 projects on Sourceforge totaling 4,000,000 downloads per day. The Sourceforge team should be highly commended for the exposure and also the work they do for the open source community.

The open source PostBooks is a full-featured, fully-integrated business management system, the core of the award winning xTuple ERP Suite. Built with the open source PostgreSQL database and the open source Qt framework for C++, it provides the ultimate in power and flexibility for a range of businesses and industries of any size. It has been downloaded over one million times, a big number for ERP/Accounting/Manufacturing software.

As importantly, I speak with happy users of both the free and open source (FOSS) PostBooks and the commercially supported xTuple ERP Editions every day.  In fact, I visited customer Nordic Naturals a few weeks ago, and as I was signing in, the receptionist saw the xTuple company name on the security sheet. She smiled (sweetly) and let me know she was currently looking at an xTuple screen. Yes, she was smiling….

ERP software and a smile don’t always co-exist. There should be a smile-meter for ALL business management software. It not only has to accomplish what it is intended for; software should also make your job easier.

xTuple is a company with not only great software but great people supporting the implementations, our Professional Services Team and our world-wide Partners. A wonderful part of open source software is the community support for issues, bugs, fixes and enhancements! PostBooks users have a robust community, evidenced by the developer blogs and user forums.

When I visit xTuple headquarters, I always like to see the Support Team in action, where the smile-meter is constantly enhanced by talented people who really care for our customers. The xTuple corporate culture cares for the community and for customers. In these days of the ERP Graveyard and End-of-Life pronouncements, it is personally satisfying to experience such a supportive and thriving culture.

Is such customer love and nurturing maintainable while xTuple continues to rapidly grow? Yes, another benefit of open source software is community, community, community. We open source evangelists continue to stay close to the community and collaborate with our global partners and users. This connection will continue and grow as we grow.

It is great exposure to be recognized as a featured project on SourceForge. xTuple will have further  significant exposure and milestones in 2013. You’ll see the new Mobile Web CRM at Macworld January 31-February 2, 2013, as xTuple’s Vice President of Sales, Wally Tonra, and I kick off another excellent year (after a stellar 2012). Come join us at Macworld or contribute to our growing community!

“Smile meter” photo credit:  Benjamin Smith on Flickr

Click here for larger image of Sourceforge Featured Projects

The Winter 2013 Class, of which applicants were evaluated according to five criteria of Team, Product, Market, Pain Point and Execution, includes:

RoboCent || Text and Call Notifications from 1.3¢

RoboCent enables small business, non-profits and political campaigns to easily send call and text notifications to their subscribers, starting at 1.3¢ per message. Through RoboCent’s streamlined and user-friendly platform, clients receive feedback from their customers, monitor their calls and texts in real-time and send out urgent notifications to subscribers within 5 minutes.

Go Wedding Pro || Book More, Shoot More, Make More

Go Wedding Pro  is a tool built by photographers for photographers. GWP will help wedding photographers stay on top of their clients’ needs by organizing wedding day details, and client info is easier to maintain and access on the go. Go Wedding Pro will make it easier to stay on top of contracts, invoices and tracking post production . From booking to delivering images, GWP  is the wedding photographer’s best friend.

Campus Wise || Making college life more convenient

CampusWise is a college classified company catering exclusively to college students. Our aim is to provide a safe and friendly environment so  students are able to trade both goods and services strictly amongst each other. Each school will have a customized page that will only be accessible to those students who share the same university email.

uVest || Personal investment app

uVest is the first personal investment application designed for casual investors who do not have the knowledge, desire or time to do complex market research and analysis to discover trading opportunities. uVest is designed specifically for mobile users who want to casually browse and enter trading opportunities from verified, high return traders at their convenience.

About Hatch

Hatch’s founders are committed, passionate members of the Greater Norfolk, Virginia (USA),  technology community – hundreds of companies showcase their ideas, mentoring programs are set up and virtually every major technology-related community organization is involved. Hatch entrepreneurs have decades of experience in technology and have successfully founded, built, run, sold and financed businesses.

Maximize your startup through at an intense three month accelerator program in the heart of the Mid-Atlantic technology corridor, located between the Research Triangle, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C. Norfolk, in the Southeastern corner of Virginia, is the ideal base camp to get your startup off the ground.  After spending your days working on your business, drive just 10 minutes to the Atlantic ocean for some sun, sand and beach volleyball.

Each startup accepted to Hatch is provided with a hands-on experienced mentoring team, state-of-the-art office space, legal and accounting advice and, most importantly, funding.  You won’t have to worry about anything other than how to meet the expectations of your Hatch-provided advisers and achieve skyrocketing success.  And finding a ride to the beach.  The program will relentlessly challenge you to make your vision come to life, or, if you have already started your company, provide the resources, instruction and feedback to make it better.  Hatch provides everything you need to accelerate the life cycle of your startup and take it to the next level.

Hatch partners include:

• City of Norfolk, Virginia
• Dominion Enterprises
• General Ideas – Technology Venture Consulting
• Kaufman & Canoles Attorneys at Law
• xTuple – World’s #1 Open Source ERP
• LeClairRyan Attorneys
• JR Research, Inc. – Value Added Recruiting
• Silicon Anchor News

Join Start Norfolk 3 at the Innovation Research Park at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, on March 22-24, 2013.

Previous Start Norfolk companies have been featured in Tech Crunch, Forbes, Inc., VentureBeat and DEMO. So, what are you waiting for? Sign up to consider investing, pitch an idea, join a team as a designer, branding expert, developer or engineer, observe and/or cheer for teams and absorb the enthusiasm.
Register Now for Start Norfolk 3! (Early Bird ends February 1, 2013)

Building The Future

Start Norfolk 3 is a weekend-long event to bring together the Mid-Atlantic region’s best and brightest to build companies to create jobs, generate awareness and change the world. Whether you have an idea to pitch, showcase your developer or designer skills, or you just want to learn as much as you can during the week, Start Norfolk has something for everyone.

The Pitch

Make it Good. Because you only have 60 seconds, no props, no slides, just a good ‘ole pitch. Keep it simple:

• Who are you?
• What is the problem you are addressing?
• How are you going to fix it?
• What do you need?

More than Just the Pitch

At StartNorfolk 3, you can pitch your business idea. Like what you heard? Then you can join a team of developers, designers, engineers, marketers, SEO Wizards and many more for the idea you liked best. You can also meet those in the local startup community, listen to high quality speakers, meet over 30 successful mentors and have an awesome time, all while learning how to improve your own business or helping you gain the confidence you need to start one.

Follow @StartNorfolk on Twitter || Like Start Norfolk on Facebook || Community Guide

xTuple is a proud sponsor of Start Norfolk

Photo credit:
Paul Chin Jr. on Flickr

Economic gardening initiatives and accelerator programs for startup companies sprouted in the area in 2012.

Last April, StartNorfolk held its second startup weekend designed to connect entrepreneurs with people who have investment capital, management, design and programming experience to jump-start the best business ideas.

Inside Business highlights the top stories of 2012.

The winners were d8night.com, which gives ideas for dates; Podium Pro, a public speaking application for the iPad; and Care Direct, an Internet platform for emergency medical help.

Start! Peninsula followed suit in December awarding each of the three finalists of its weekend-long event with $10,000; a business management software program produced locally in Norfolk called xTuple; and office space in one of the five sponsoring area incubators.

More than 500 people attended the StartNorfolk events and 100 ideas have been pitched, said Zack Miller, chief operating officer of We Are Titans, a Norfolk product development shop that helps startups and established businesses worldwide build custom web and mobile applications.

Of the 150 people who attended Start! Peninsula, 35 made business pitches.

The winning ideas were Handheld Handyman, a dedicated video chat application; Oralize, a device to detect the early stages of oral cancer through saliva; and Olde Virginia Cidery, a hard apple cider brewery.

Thomas Flake, director of the Peninsula Technology Incubator, said he expects to have eight businesses operating out of the incubator by January.

He hopes to make Start! Peninsula an annual event that is offset from StartNorfolk by six months.

Miller also launched Hatch Norfolk, the area’s first-ever accelerator program this year.

Five companies were chosen for an 11-week mentor-intensive program in which they received working capital, business mentoring and free office space in the city-owned building at 111 Granby Street. Local investors xTuple, Kaufman & Canoles, Dominion Enterprises and JR Researching each invested $10,000, along with the city of Norfolk, which provided the space.

My distribution compadre, Tom Atkins – a sales engineer at xTuple, and I know very well that our customers are always saying “it is all about the item.”  In fact, one very smartly delayed their ERP implementation to ensure data synchronization throughout their existing systems first.

A recent online article from Replacement Electrical Parts Company (Repco) located in Marlton, New Jersey,  highlights this necessary obsession with numbers by distributors as well as two organizations we follow closely as reliable industry sources: the Industry Data Exchange Association (IDEA), in Arlington, Virginia, and the National Association of Electrical Distributors (NAED), both of whom are collaborating with the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) and overseas with the European Technical Information Model (ETIM).

If you’ve been around electrical sales for some time, you know that industrial transactions often revolve around one phrase: “Gotta part number?” The answer to this question can close a sale, put it on pause, or send it south. A part number given that is off by just one digit can result in a costly “return to manufacturer authorization” (RMA). This wastes resources up and down the supply chain.

Data standardization initiatives have been streamlining the way manufacturers, representatives, wholesale distributors and exporters market industrial products globally. E-commerce has helped it gain momentum with electrical standards committees. Mutual partnerships like the Industry Data Exchange Association (IDEA), in Arlington, VA, along with the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) and the National Association of Electrical Distributors (NAED), are collaborating overseas with the European Technical Information Model (ETIM). ETIM is comprised of a growing number of participating European countries.

They are all focused on the classification of technical data used in wholesale industrial and electrical product distribution. Yet another organization is involved. GS1 is responsible for the allocation of unique numbers — the basis for bar coding and numbering that is ubiquitous on consumer and industry packaging to facilitate inventory management.

Data links in the Supply Chain mean more choices for wholesalers

A common scenario for data standardization arises when cross-referencing one manufacturer’s part number to another manufacturer’s part number or to an equivalent private label brand.

A real-world example of where the cross-referencing, or “substitution” of one part for another, can be seen is in choosing a private label brand over an original equipment manufacturer’s part. REPCO (Replacement Electrical Parts Company) in Marlton, NJ supplies quality private label electrical contacts that can be “crossed-over” from the OEM. Companies like REPCO offer electrical wholesalers another choice that matches performance while delivering significant cost savings.??

A follow-up article on electrical Big Data will reveal behind the scenes “Gotta part number?” situations that play out every day in the microcosm of the electrical workplace as IT, sales and marketing staffs grapple with the data to deliver exactly what the customer is expecting.

I will be certain to look for that follow-up report!

Photo credit: BBVAtech on Flickr

Stacey Pandeloglou has over 35 years of experience providing technology solutions to the wholesale distribution industry. Stacey is an Account Executive with xTuple, which offers a fully-integrated end-to-end software system for companies with sophisticated inventory control needs, enterprise-class functionality specifically for distributors and light manufacturers, without the enterprise-level cost in time or money. Contact Stacey @xTuple via email. xTuple software is tailored to meet business needs with multi-platform support for Mac, Windows, Linux and mobile ~ to Grow Your World.® Follow @xTuple #ERP #CRM #accounting

Software is a tool – Implementation is a talent

Software is a commodity.  There.  I said it plainly.  Microsoft and Sage won’t like it.  Wah!  Sound of world’s smallest violin playing sad music, fading into the land of a fairly sarcastic, but unfortunately this is a common tale…

You bought QuickBooks or Peachtree at OfficeDepot or BestBuy – wherever you buy office supplies – when you started the company. It’s served you well for a couple of years, but you’re up to ten users and the transaction volume has sales reports taking 15 minutes to run and you’re opening another branch in another city, and …fill in your particular growing pains here…

So, as you did a couple of years ago when you started, you go online and check out some accounting applications. Your accountant recommends one company, and you find five different packages on their website. You also heard that your OS provider has been buying up accounting packages and giving them all the same name. They all claim to do the same things, and there really isn’t that much difference in their interfaces. Frustrated, you fill out some contact forms, and ask for a price quote and a demo. Somebody says he can’t do that until he meets with you and does a “needs analysis.” You don’t have time for that.

So you look over the quotes and answer emails through some demos that all look alike.

A week’s worth of training? You don’t need that! It’s just QuickBooks on steroids, isn’t it? How hard could it be to install? At these prices it ought to install itself and import all your QuickBooks data with one click, right?

Let me ask you:  If your doctor said you need to see a cardiologist, would you do a Google search for the cheapest one, or would you ask your doctor who he or she recommends?  If that cardiologist said he needed to run some tests first to make sure you got the right treatment, would you say “Just open me up now.  This should only take an hour.”?

The decision you need to make is not “which software package should I buy,” it’s “who can I get to help me implement a software system that will make my company more efficient, better positioned for growth, and therefore more profitable?”

Photo credit: FastJack on Flickr

Based in Atlanta, Ga., Friendly Systems strives for long lasting, friendly business relationships built on mutual trust and respect. Not here to “sell boxes of software,” Friendly believes that finding the right business solution is a process best done together. From pre-sale to post implementation, Friendly Systems works with you to configure an integrated system so your business can keep growing.

Photo credit: Opensourceway on Flickr

Why such bullish prognostication?

Bottom line: commercial open source is simply a better model and is at its inflection point for growth. Open source is good for the global marketplace, innovation and the companies who back the projects. This is a winning “trifecta” – one now broadly recognized in education, business and governments worldwide.

Global Marketplace and FOSS

Global markets now have access to leading edge products and can embrace those that are either free and open source (FOSS) or commercial open source with the backing of a stable company. The proliferation of legally free versions of business software around the world is a game-changer for both developing economies and the software industry.

The FOSS xTuple PostBooks, for example, competes with expensive enterprise resource planning software (ERP) with deployment costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. These legacy ERP vendors have sliding-scale pricing to offset some of the economic differences around the world, but in the past, the only choice of global manufacturing and other businesses in need of ERP was spreadsheets or pirating software.

The problem for businesses using spreadsheets is their competitors – competitors who are using ERP software are more efficient, which has a serious economic impact. A fundamental misunderstanding on software pirating: they want legal software but also need the efficiencies of more capitalized ventures.

Enter a provider such as xTuple with its free PostBooks; the appreciative comments from around the world speak volumes as to the benefits, shared in the public forums and user review sites. PostBooks – with a million downloads around the world – will continue to proliferate to all corners of the globe, providing tremendous business productivity benefits.

The complementary side of xTuple and other open source software vendors is the provision of commercially supported version(s). xTuple’s flagship software falls into this category and having PostBooks at the core is a huge advantage. With every new release, there are millions of people worldwide who not only run the software and test it but have access to the underlying source code – an enormous benefit for the stability of xTuple, the company and the products.

Why am I bullish on commercial open source?

Commercial open source means better quality, more rapid innovation, and free or low-cost. Historically, security, bugs and support have been the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt – a tactic used in sales and politics) of proprietary vendors – vendors who ask you to rely on their competence that they stay up-to-date with technologies and security vulnerabilities.

Linus Torvalds, Finnish American software engineer who was the principal force behind the development of the Linux kernel, noted on security and bugs, “given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow” or, more formally, “given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone.”

Thus, the xTuple source code is available, and there are many eyeballs on it. The FUD has clearly been dismissed – even the White House now uses open source, running what is arguably the most vulnerable website in the world on an open source stack, including Drupal.

Introducing a hidden bug? How can you do that when it is not hidden? There are millions of people testing, identifying and fixing bugs in open source solutions before a release. xTuple and other companies have open forums with bugs identified and status updates completely transparent. Contrast that with the release of Apple Maps. Blasphemy perhaps, but the quality difference between Google Maps and Apple Maps is astonishing. Apple is the epitome of a proprietary vendor’s closed road map and lack of transparency. Apple worked in secrecy and users never saw a preview of Maps. If they had, someone would have noticed that Greenland was not in the Indian Ocean (true bug!).

The open source model is better on all fronts, especially with commercial sponsorship and support. So the velocity of innovation is faster, the quality of code is better, the total cost of ownership is lower – and why I am excited with commercial open source for 2013 and beyond.

Stable companies and no end-of-life pronouncements

There has long been a question from corporate IT departments as to who would support open source software, a concern which evoked images of the Wild West. Look at the vibrant success of Red Hat with Linux, Acquia with Drupal and now xTuple ERP. These thriving companies and their proliferation of open source solutions are part of an ecosystem which continues to be a driver for stable company growth. (Example: Red Hat has over a $10.5 billion market capitalization and over $1 billion in revenue, supporting Linux which is free open source software.)

The open source model works for the marketplace and also for the companies supporting the solutions. This is obviously good for companies such as xTuple, yet also good for its customers. How many ERP users have had their software sent to an “End of Life” (EOL) status or had their vendors acquired in a distressed sale? In both cases, the customer loses without continued investment and innovation. It has become so common, there is a blog to monitor it all called the ERP Graveyard.

What is the roadmap for end-of-life products? xTuple’s PostBooks cannot be sent to an EOL status; it is available to everyone for innovation. xTuple even publishes pricing on the website. The lack of visibility into roadmaps and corporate direction by closed and proprietary vendors forces blinders on long-term forecasting for their customers. Transparency and clarity is important, and open source vendors don’t restrict but ensure this information is publicly available. Have you ever tried to rationalize the Microsoft pricing and CALS licenses, including SQL Server, Dynamics, CRM?

Don’t be surprised if you receive different answers from both Microsoft and their partners regarding the licensing requirements for internal/external users. Worse is receiving an audit letter from Microsoft or another vendor accusing you of violations – after taking their recommendations. Yes, it happens daily!

Commercial open source and xTuple in 2013

The xTuple community and company are booming, announcing 66% growth in the second quarter of this year and 74% growth in the third quarter. I was fortunate to join xTuple during the recent annual partner conference. What a great experience to meet partners from around the world. Consistent with other thriving open source companies, highly motivated and successful subject matter experts are building their businesses around xTuple. This means great worldwide support but also rapid innovation, with partners and customers alike creating modules and additional functionality as well as integrations with other software. The source code is available for the community to extend, which adds to the velocity of innovation.

2013 will be a big year for commercial open source vendors, including xTuple. Companies such as SugarCRM and Acquia may be preparing for initial public offerings (IPOs) based upon their business models. We will continue to see more large companies and governments worldwide adopt open source as their standards or as an “Open Source First” policy, whereby open source solutions are preferred and must be precluded prior to adopting a commercial alternative. This trend will continue as well as become pervasive within the corporate world. “Open Source First” will continue to spread due to its success stories, enabling xTuple and other open source solutions to be universally evaluated. When xTuple is evaluated as an ERP solution, it has an amazing success rate, including such recognized companies as U-Haul and Nordic Naturals, the international leader in delivery of the safest, most effective omega oils.

xTuple is looking forward to even more success in 2013 and beyond, riding the same wave of innovation that other solutions are seeing in commercial open source growth. Building on success to-date , the xTuple team has added depth and continues to invest in improving both the classic Desktop offering and the recently launched Mobile Web application. xTuple, recognized as the world’s leading open source ERP, also has many companies interested in Partner opportunities – all at the same time the vast list of companies relegated to the ERP Graveyard is growing.

Have you seen your ERP solution pronounced “End of Life” and what are your plans for the future?

But with hot air came a great idea – Handheld Handyman, a dedicated video chat application. It was picked as one of the three winners of Start! Peninsula held at Christopher Newport University in Newport News [Virginia (USA)] earlier this month.

The idea came after a professional told Alessi he needed to see the unit in person to properly diagnose the problem but wouldn’t be available for two days.

Unwilling to wait, Alessi used FaceTime on his iPhone to video chat with the repairman, allowing him to see the unit and fix the problem.

“That’s when I had my ah-ha moment,” Alessi said. “There was a dedicated objective for using video chat and it worked.”

As a video game programmer, Alessi, 33, of Norfolk, was able to develop the technology on his own. He signed up for Start! Peninsula in search of branding and legal advice. He came away with both and $10,000 to get started.

Excerpts by Lydia Wheeler for Inside Business, originally posted December 7, 2012

The idea for Start! Peninsula came after StartNorfolk, which was first held in November 2011. Thomas Flake, director of the Peninsula Technology Incubator in Hampton, thought the Peninsula needed a startup weekend of its own.

Like StartNorfolk, Start! Peninsula was a weekend-long event designed to connect entrepreneurs with people who have investment capital, management, design and programming experience, to jump-start the best business ideas.

A panel of three judges narrowed the pool of entrepreneurial hopefuls down to 10 on Friday. Each was awarded office space in one of the five sponsoring area incubators, free telephone and Internet service, and xTuple, a business management software program that’s produced locally in Norfolk. The sponsoring incubators included the James City County Business and Technology Incubator, the Hampton University Business Incubator, 757 Creative Space and the Peninsula Technology Incubator.

In addition to Handheld Handyman, Oralize, a device to detect the early stages of oral cancer through saliva, and Olde Virginia Cidery, a hard apple cider brewery, were the other two finalists.

Ankit Shah, 27, behind the idea for Oralize, is a doctorate student at the University of Virginia. He’s studying at the NASA Langley Research Center and plans to stay in Hampton and develop his product idea. Last Wednesday, he said he was still trying to figure out how to utilize the money and proceed with development of the company.

William Correll, 22, creator of the Olde Virginia Cidery, is a student at Hampden-Sydney College. The college’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Political Economy sponsored his trip to the event and his entry.

Originally Correll’s plans were to locate the brewery in Martinsville, but now that he’s made so many East Coast connections at Start! Peninsula, he wants to locate the brewery in Hampton Roads.

In the future, Flake said, the plan is to make Start! Peninsula an annual event separated from StartNorfolk by six months.

More on 2012 startup activity in the Hampton Roads/Norfolk, Virginia (USA) region.