@Gavin, Yes, OpenERP was only installable in prod by serious serious geeks so far (not only computer geeks, but also ERP specialists, good consultants, so aliens in a word), that's why there are so few I think. Oh yes, there are plenty of those guys say in the aerospace/banking fields. But the point is that since it targets the mid markets, integrators can hardly attract them. But overall it already makes an ever growing few success stories and a ever growing skilled community.
Imagine guys skilled like this one http://www.chricar.at/ChriCar/index.html working at night and week ends to have its integration business sustainable. It was not easy, that's sure. People have to realize how difficult it is, even that's true, done with the right guys it can be several times cheaper than high end proprietary ERP's. I've been partner of Openbravo one year when I was taking care of the tech survey at Smile, and in my opinion, yes, it's just worst. I should say I've seen quite a few guys trying both and sticking to OpenERP but never the reverse. But those are few stories because ERP's are so complex than learning two is so hard. I've also know some Openbravo partners that invested all into it and just died without even be able to try OpenERP, end of the story (one example, second French partner; dead //forge.openbravo.com/users/palmtree-it ) IMHO, Openbravo is much more professional with all the marketing, the release cycle, the work planing, the partnership and many things. Thanks to their fund raise, they hired experienced guys Tiny did not have. At some point they are organized just like a non open source company (still they release their work publicly). BUT, the flip side, is that it costs them money, so very easily you would have to start paying way more to get any support. All those non coding guys live with your money: http://www.openbravo.com/about-us/board-directors/ (and no, they haven't a such large real customer basis that it's negligible) My opinion is that by 2008 they were never competitive against SAP BO/ Sage X3/MS Navision/Divalto in France in the 2 years term (and decision makers hardly think about later). Luckily for them, it might change soon, I think they improved a bit (they actually listen to the suggestion I gave them with making a REST bridge, invested on minimal modularity) and also outsourced to India were they could finally get the ton of polishing work on their obsolete expensive tech that was required. So I think in 2010 they just start being competitive against some proprietary ERP's in rich countries too; finally. The fundamental difference between Openbravo and OpenERP is pretty much a whole different technology at its roots. I won't take time to try to convince you here: but Openbravo is a ton (millions of lines) of non OOP PS/SQL lurking inside XML CDATA sections, at best verbose Java (and consider the Java language being abandoned slowly now for high level business code, even more now with the Sun collapse; don't get me wrong, the Java platform on his side with the new language running on it will have a bright future. But hey, OpenERP close to running Jython smoothly, so OpenERP wins again here). Openbravo modularity is really childish compared to OpenERP: no way to add screen extension points, no component oriented UI (a lot more clicks), method granularity is almost always several hundreds lines of PS/SQL: if a module want to override something: he hardly can call super, he should copy/paste/change a whole PS/SQL procedure. Now they have a way to package procedures and screen together in a module, but those will be hardly compatible. Really far from the real tight integration you can achieve with OpenERP modules. unlike OpenERP, Openbravo has no BPM engine to abstract the workflow logic: it's all if/else hardcoded instead. Openbravo doesn't comes close to the memory session new gen osv_memory OpenERP wizards to offer a modular OOP decent UI (even if further improvement would be welcome). Because they don't use an ORM in their core (Hibernate is used by less than 5% of the logic, only the most recent stuff), they don't have caching and the hit the SGBD much more heavily than OpenERP, their performance suck totally (just install it and you will understand). Their development cycles are really orders of magnitude slower compared to OpenERP: their screen are generated static HTML taking dozens of minutes to generate and then you have to deploy start your Java server which is really a slow startup compared to OpenERP... Because of those fundamental differences in the platform, being a successful Openbravo third party integrator is so much harder (nearly impossible, find me just one that his not just an self bought Openbravo showcase). Remember Openbravo raised nearly M 18$ and invested heavily in marketing. They say now that want to fund raise again ("future financing rounds" http://www.openbravo.com/about-us/press-room/news/139/bob-mann-joins-openbravo-as-new-chairman-of-the-board.php ). OpenERP is their side made it from scratch due to their own real value only. Until 2008, they had a very poor marketing, people hard not here due to their marketing (at least the real integrators). as a result, Openbravo has a very little experimented community, few success stories. A very small scope compared to OpenERP (a third of it at best: CRM or project is a joke in Openbravo). By mid 2008, I can tell you that Openbrao did had way more bugs than OpenERP: doing a simple order/invoice/expedition cycle was almost impossible on PostgreSQL (after the marketing it was already the leading open source ERP since 2007)... So, to sum it up: yes OpenERP is really hardcore. But don't fool yourself, Openbravo is even harder (and certainly not better). Given the OpenERP (+Tryton now) competition, I don't even see the point with Openbravo even if it start being better than BO and similar proprietary products (don't get me wrong OpenbravoPOS on the contrary is a very decent product OpenERP does not have, but hey you could just connect it the same way). I think OpenERP will improve now that Tiny is getting bigger with the right guys being set up. In any case, it has always improved steadily since the beginning. If it weren't to improve or were to do a false move, that's not too risky either, I guarantee you they are too many involved integrators, there would be a successful organized fork (or even Tryon would pass them). Now it's hard for everybody, including Tiny, so let's be patient and understand all the implications of being really open source (upfront investment is really hard; generic international ERP is fucking complex to get right), so as long as they do their job decently, that's all right, they still do better than any of us individually. We also now have guys taking the test approach pretty seriously with such initiative https://launchpad.net/oerpscenario , even some Tiny framework unit test were contributed recently... So hopefully out of the box quality pass an acceptable threshold soon, meanwhile skilled integrators will close the gap. ------------------------ Raphaël Valyi CEO and OpenERP consultant at http://www.akretion.com -------------------- m2f -------------------- -- http://www.openobject.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=50451#50451 -------------------- m2f --------------------
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