Hi Eric, I was talking Thursday to my account manager just about this. Not with the purpose of complaining about it, but because we are worried.
I know this has been a delicate subject in the relationship of OpenERP with its partners (at least some of them). And I really appreciate your approach. Let's try to work together to solve this. >From my point of view, it is a problem of rigidity of the service. I don't think that adding extra features to the Enterprise contract will work. The service should be available in independent items. For example, we should be able to have a migration contract alone, without bug fixing. Or viceversa. Also, there are projects that are not the usual implementation. For example, we are getting ready to start a SaaS offer for out-of-the-box customers. We reached to OpenERP to find a good solution so they could help us support the platform. Our thinking was that OpenERP has experience with this with its own SaaS service. But the answer was to charge the usual user fee and get a normal Enterprise contract for each database. From a business point of view this is not viable. It doubles (at least) our cost. And we are not asking to answer to all customers directly for bug reports, we are asking to answer to us, we would be in charge of getting the fixes online and doing the triage to report only valid bugs. This would drastically lower the work for OpenERP. But we couldn't reach any understanding in the negotiation. So we are going live without the participation of OpenERP. The above example is just to illustrate what I mean by rigidity of the Enterprise offer. We are aware it is not because OpenERP's team is not willing to sell services, it is because a corporate policy that they only can offer the Enterprise offer as it is. I would like to make OpenERP earn money on each project we do. We are 100% clear that it is the best way to go. But it has to be profitable for us. After all this is a business, we are here to make profits. If we had a larger service offer from OpenERP, or if OpenERP would be open to find custom solutions with us, we could be more creative to integrate its services in our own. For now, the one-size-fits-all offer is stopping us. It works for mid-size (or bigger) projects, with enough budget, and where the customer is willing to outsource the support and not getting its IT team to do it. Other cases are hard to sell and/or not profitable. The other services we can buy are hour based services we don't need. This is what our team does. I rather pay my team to do this, because I make profit with the same price (or lower in the case of an analyst), and because it is the reason to have such a team. We really hope we, OpenERP and the partners, can get somewhere with this. There are a lot of things we can do to improve the situation and transform it into a win-win relationship. I am 100% open to discuss this further, as it is something very important. PS: I don't know if this is the proper channel to discuss this. Can someone at OpenERP tell us which one is? (And get involved please :-) ). Regards, -- PS: escribí este email desde mi teléfono, por favor disculpe la brevedad y cualquier error de escritura. Carlos Vásquez CTO · Director de Ingeniería carlos.vasq...@clearcorp.co.cr CR: +(506) 4000 CORP (4000 2677) US: +1 (786) 472-4267 Cel: +(506) 8351 4484 skype: crvasquez twitter: cvclearcorp 300 m. Este de la Escuela Calle de Platanares 11402 San Jerónimo, Moravia San José, Costa Rica http://www.clearcorp.co.cr
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