By Houston Neal
Ned Lilly co-founded xTuple, originally called OpenMFG, in October 2001, with the aim of bringing open source and ERP software together to solve the unmet needs of small to midsized manufacturers. Before that he was a co-founder of Great Bridge, an early attempt to build a business around the PostgreSQL open source database. PostgreSQL is the core technology that xTuple uses today. Ned is also well known for his ERP Graveyard blog.