Musings on personal and enterprise technology (of potential interest to professional technoids and others)

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Total cost study for an open source ERP project

Interesting way to think about COTS vs. OpenSource for ERP (thanks to The Enterprise System Spectator for this and for pointing to the original Baseline Magazine study)

The Enterprise System Spectator: Total cost study for an open source ERP project: "...Open source is moving up the technology stack to business applications. Whether it can gain significant market share remains to be seen. ERP systems are much more specialized than operating systems and application platforms. It is not clear to me whether there are sufficient populations of developers to gain critical mass for these products, as there has been for products lower in the stack. Who should consider open source ERP today? In my opinion, these solutions today are not so much an alternative to proprietary software as they are to custom development. An organization that knows it will need to do significant customization or enhancements to an ERP system should consider open source as a starting point instead of proprietary ERP. Organizations with unique requirements or unusual business models may be in this category. Modifying core code of a proprietary ERP system generally voids the warranty and makes on-going support less relevant, since the vendor will not support your custom modifications. Why not start, then, with open source ERP, where there is little if any charge for the source code? To me, that's a better choice than to start with 100% custom development. I'm looking for more cost metrics on open source ERP implementations. If you're willing to share them with me, let me know..."

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