By Benita M
Headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, xTuple is an enterprise software company that develops and markets open source software under the brand name xTuple ERP. In October 2001, Ned Lilly, the President and CEO of xTuple, co-founded the company, originally called OpenMFG, with the aim of bringing the worlds of open source and enterprise resource planning (ERP) together to solve the unmet needs of small- to mid-sized manufacturers, to integrate all critical functional areas in one system: sales, accounting, and operations, including customer and supplier management, inventory control, manufacturing and distribution.