Free ERP With The Compiere Linux ERP Product

Traditionally, very few Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications could run on Linux. The reason for this is probably that ERP vendors are conservative and would only port their applications to a particular hardware type if they are sure there is sufficient demand.

That time has now come, Linux is now an established - even a preferred - hardware platform for many organisations and the odd key vendors on reforming over themselves to provide a Linux version for their software.

SAP was the 1st first major ERP vendor to market a Linux version and all considered to be aggressively pro-Linux. This is illustrated by its attempt to support Linux for output management solution on the new IBM S/390 eServer ZSeries. In addition, SAP is working with Dell and Oracle to migrate the failover capability of Oracle Application Clusters to the scalability of the SAP R/3 system.

And now PeopleSoft - the world's 2nd largest ERP provider - is also demanding a piece of the action. PeopleSoft recently introduced a new tool that allows Enterprise One suite to run on Red Hat Linux, using BEA WebLogic infrastructure/software.

But SAP and PeopleSoft are proprietary ERP systems, and don't have a history in open source software. Compiere offers a genuine ERP open source package complete with customer relations management (CRM), partner relations management (PRM), supply chain management (SCM), ERP and online analysis processing (OLAP) modules. The software is coded as a Java application under the Mozilla license. Compiere told its its product to medium size organizations. The product is considered to be excellent value for money. The licence is free!

As in the case of the proprietary ERP systems, the devil is in the implementation not the software. At last count there were over 50 organisations offering implementation services for the Compiere ERP application. Costs for these services of comparable with the cost of consulting services for proprietary the ERP applications. Your company is therefore won't save on consulting fees, but certainly well on the licensing and product fee. Support from the vendor is a fraction of what you pay with SAP or PeopleSoft. For example, a one-year support contract for a ten user user license is about $1,500.

And the best is still to come. The Meta Group predicts that the Linux share of the ERP market will grow to 30% by 2007. There are ready is competition between SAP and PeopleSoft in this space. In addition, Compiere is now offering a open source alternative. We can expect other open source products to be available soon. This is sure to improve the quality of all Linux ERP solutions.