xTupleCon 2014 — Why Open Source ERP?

Guest blog post by Ted Rohm, a senior research analyst at Technology Evaluation Center (TEC) focusing on ERP manufacturing solutions. He has over 20 years of experience in large-scale selection, design, development, and implementation projects.

xTuple, an award winning open source ERP vendor, recently held its user conference — xTupleCon 2014 — in its home town of Norfolk, VA. xTuple’s mission is stated simply: “To help companies of all sizes successfully implement powerful and easy-to-use open source ERP software, to grow their business profitably.” The conference brought together a global community of open source technologists and ERP users to learn, collaborate, and innovate.

There were a number of topics discussed and company updates shared at the meeting, including a VIP keynote from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. But before going into the xTuple conference highlights, I want to mention the conference session given by Josh Fischer, manager of xTuple’s Web Services Group, which really spoke to the heart of what xTuple (and the open source software community) is all about.

Why Open Source? It’s the Future

Fischer gave a number of informative presentations, including the “Top Ten Awesome Tools to Increase Sales,” and a talk about the xTuple and Drupal integrations that enable the xTupleCommerce solution. But the presentation titled “Why Open Source? The Business Value of Technology” was the one where Fischer’s passion for open source could be seen. He first dispelled many of the common stereotypes about open source, including that there’s no support, the code quality is poor, and the biggest misconception that gets thrown out by commercial vendors — that open source is littered with security flaws. Regardless of the labels, Fischer says that open source is really a methodology around open collaboration.

The granddaddies of open source products include Linux, MySQL, Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL, and Mozilla. New players continue to grow in the open source community including Solr, Ubuntu, Hadoop, Node.js, and even non-software open source products like Tesla and MIT OCW (OpenCourseWare). Not only are these open source products on the leading edge of technologies but the number of open source communities and projects continues to grow — for example, the GitHub repository is reported to have over 3.4 million users as of 2014.

Fischer also pointed out how open source helps business. Opposed to closed, commercially sourced solutions, open source provides flexibility, enables faster development, has more people collaborating in the community, delivers a larger number of advanced features, is often cheaper (software expenses are mainly person hours, not licensing costs), and, perhaps most importantly — it’s the future and it’s cool. Many people have and will talk about the pros/cons of open source software, but Fischer is a true evangelist of the growing trend.

xTuple the Company: Version 4

Ned Lilly, president and CEO of xTuple, gave the opening day keynote and told the audience that xTuple is now on its fourth version. Lilly started xTuple more than a decade ago because he was struck by the mess that is the ERP market. Lilly is also a firm believer in open source software and its transformative powers. The title of his talk was “Days of Future Apps,” featuring the themes impacting xTuple’s product and service development — embracing the future, new technologies, new platforms, and more flexibility to make business software do what customers need it to do.

Below is a brief history of xTuple showing how far it’s been able to come with a small dedicated staff, a committed partner community, and building an open source community around those key assets.

• Company 1.0 (OpenMFG): 2001–2004. Manufacturing only, no financials
• Company 2.0 (OpenMFG): 2004–2007. Community! Customer relationship management (CRM), multicurrency, and more. At this time, the product wasn’t yet fully open source.
• Company 3.0 (xTuple): 2007–2011. Real open source release of PostBooks, support for scripting.
• Company 4.0 (xTuple): 2011–present. Major research and development on multiple fronts. Lilly pointed out that the company has been knee deep in development for the past three years.

These past three years have seen significant R&D efforts for xTuple, including:

• Mobile Web client — fully interoperable with Desktop Client
• xTuple Server — more secure, standardized software appliance for easier implementations and upgrades
• xTuple Cloud — individual-company-focused Amazon/Rackspace cloud offering, emphasis on portability.
• REST API — robust, standardized interface for Web services to interact with anything in xTuple
• xTupleCommerce — overhaul of Web Portal product for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) sales
• xTuple Business Intelligence — integrated open source toolset for analytics, dashboards
• xTuple for Distribution — dedicated new edition for wholesale distributors

What are xTuple’s plans for 2015?

• Come out of the “R&D tunnel” and focus on delighting the customer
• Help companies to grow business profitably
• Get mobile Web, BI, and e-commerce into people’s hands
• Better understand customer needs, and measure performance with respect to meeting them
• Make 2015 the year of the customer

xTuple’s Core Products

xTuple offers a number of core products. The details of the product offerings can be found on the xTuple Web site. To be clear, xTuple’s products are not all pure open source solutions; xTuple leverages open source technology (PostgreSQL, Drupal, etc.) and the open source community to deliver and support commercial ERP packages. Below is a brief breakdown of the product offerings:

xTuple ERP — core product

• Basic PostBooks® offering is free, but all versions include source code
• Commercially licensed versions for manufacturing and distribution
• Includes xTuple Server, REST Web Services API
• Desktop and mobile Web clients

xTuple Enterprise — premium product

• Includes everything in the Distribution and Manufacturing versions
• xTuple Connect — email and EDI integration
• Deep discounts on add-on products and services including project accounting, fixed assets, enhanced commissions, and other modules.

xTuple continues to build out add-on products and services modules and sees this as a model that it will extend going forward. The goal is to have powerful modules that people can add as needed for a fully integrated business management solution.

Training — xTuple®University

xTuple continues to offer in-person classroom training and workshops, and, based on customer requests, also delivers more and more online training. xTupleUniversity.com is now in beta with over 100 new short video tutorials, with more added every week. xTuple®University is offered free as a beta program through the end of the year.

Steve Wozniak Speaks

xTuple was able to bring more attendees into the conference by co-sponsoring a talk with the Norfolk Forum by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak — “Woz,” including a pre-talk reception where attendees not only met the technology icon but also enjoyed having their Apple products autographed by Woz. The Norfolk Forum holds the title as the oldest publicly-subscribed speakers’ forum in the United States. The Norfolk Forum dates back to 1933 and the talk by the Woz added to the impressive list of conference speakers over the now 80-year history of the Forum.

The talk by Steve Wozniak took the attendees through an interesting walk across the history of Silicon Valley. At the time when Woz and Steve Jobs were starting Apple, the orchards still dominating the valley between San Jose and San Francisco weren’t known as Silicon Valley. The silicon revolution was just beginning, and Steve Wozniak, self-proclaimed geek and ultimate prankster, took everyone along for the journey of what led to the creation of the Apple I and Apple II computers in the 1970s.

What was most interesting to hear from Woz was his thoughts on the future of computing. He isn’t that keen on wearable technologies like watches because the form is too small to be very useful. But, one area where he thinks technology can make the next leap is in being able to understand what we are saying and respond to it. Siri from Apple is a good start, but it can’t yet interpret what a person means. For example, if someone says “I’ll take five or six eggs” at a store, a real person would know that the customer wants a half dozen. But Siri still can’t make this leap of understanding. The next step in computing might be in taking natural language processing further with more artificial intelligence.

We at TEC have also seen that users need a new paradigm to be able to take full advantage of small footprint mobile devices (and wearables) for complicated operations in enterprise applications. Targeted mobile apps that enable simple timesheet entry or sales lead lists now proliferate as point solutions for ERP suites. However, a new set of intelligence will need to be built in to make smaller mobile form factors more useful for broader ERP application operations. For example, a user might be able to say “enter order” and the device would help determine (based on the user’s role, current environment, and other situational intelligence) that the person needs to enter a new work order, not place an order for Domino’s Pizza!

xTuple and xTupleCon in Review

xTuple continues to grow and gain momentum in the highly competitive ERP software space, with a dedicated set of commercial licensed customers and a growing ecosystem of product resellers who are also able to add value to the xTuple proposition. This growth is partly supported by the large base of users who have started with the free and open source software (FOSS) version of xTuple’s entry level product PostBooks®, currently used by thousands of organizations.

xTuple ERP is accessible to smaller companies but can also scale for mid-size and global organizations (with translations to support 26 languages and multi-currency/multi-site support). Based on conversations with xTupleCon attendees, some of the companies prefer xTuple over other ERP solutions because they can get at the code and develop system enhancements to support their unique business challenges.

The goals for xTupleCon 2014 were to: help maximize customers’ ROI; strengthen the bonds of the online xTuple community; and find out how xTuple can better serve its customers. From what we saw, it looks like Ned Lilly and his team achieved these goals and more. The conference itself provided a great return on investment, with educational sessions covering not just the xTuple products but also sessions on using GitHub, common EDI challenges, top ten tools to increase your sales, and more.

Thus xTuple and xTupleCon 2014 continue to meet the company’s goals. xTuple’s success is part of the continued success of open source software models. We look forward to seeing what the team from Norfolk, along with its global community of followers, continues to deliver.