It seems like a different era, but I vividly remember the excitement my wife and I felt when thinking about names for our two girls. We decided to keep it a mystery, so we had lists of both boy and girl names. Lots of discussion ensued — as anyone who's been in that happy situation can certainly confirm.
We're going through something similar here at xTuple. We already know quite a bit about our "baby" and how s/he works. Our bundle of joy started life as the "xTuple Web Portal," and the initial implementation was the online "supportal" that still today manages support tickets, bugs, and feature requests. It connected a website front-end to the ERP back-end — in this case, the Incident Management system in the CRM module. Then customers started asking us to add eCommerce/shopping cart functionality — for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer sales.
After all, who doesn't want to sell more stuff online? But, it's so much more than that!
Read on and Enter to Win
A lot of work has happened under the (soft) covers on our entire product family — and we decided early on that the Web Portal product would be the first major beneficiary of that work. We built out a new Application Programming Interface (API) with a modern, flexible Web services standard called REST. Through this REST API, we have basically made every single object in the xTuple ERP system available to Web services, where it can be "consumed" in real time. No batch jobs, no double-entry of data. And the Web Portal product was the first xTuple offering to use the REST API.
If that sounds like a full-scale rewrite to you, you're correct. But we think you'll agree it was worth it. Now, all the logic and information in your ERP system is instantly available to the website that your business partners use (customers, vendors, what have you). That means customer-specific pricing, terms, product availability, etc. We initially re-christened the product "xTupleCommerce" — thinking that eCommerce (get it, small e?) would be the primary functionality people were interested in.
How great would it be for your customers (and vendors) to be able to self-serve on your website? Updating their account information, checking on order status themselves, etc. — all without tying up your staff! And even if you — like many manufacturers — aren't in a position to sell certain products directly to the public, there are still plenty of other business problems you can solve with our "baby." How about selling replacement parts? Or empowering your distribution channel to use the website for their own sales? If you're in a project-based business, how great would it be to expose project status, activities, and documents to all the stakeholders in a project?
With all that power, we're starting to think "xTupleCommerce" might not be the most complete description of our little bouncing ball of code. So we'd like to ask you for help — help us name our baby!
Effective immediately, you can now take xTupleCommerce for a test drive yourself — with the Free Trial system (a public demo database which is refreshed every night), or, if you're engaged with our sales team, a private demo of your own, hosted in our Amazon cloud service, absolutely free! So not only do you get your own private ERP database to poke and prod — something we've, of course, offered for years — you also get your very own xTupleCommerce website instance, connected to the same database!
You'll be amazed at the extent of tools available to you — the website is a hugely scalable Content Management System (CMS), powered by Drupal. You can edit ERP information in either the xTuple desktop client or from the website, and you can configure how product information is presented, indexed by search engines, and the like. Blogs, static webpages, contact forms, and much more — all available to you now in a free private demo, so you can see for yourself the power of a fully integrated ERP/CRM system and customer-facing website.
So, if you're currently talking with an account rep about a commercial system, ask them to set you up with a new private demo! And if you're not yet talking to us and would like to, I have a feeling the xTuple Sales Team would be happy to hear from you.
And, if you've got an idea for what to call our little bundle of joy, email me directly, before December 31, 2015. If we choose your name, you can win not only eternal Internet fame and glory, but a perpetual license to the xTupleCommerce software for your website (a $17,250 value)!
Thank you, as always, for your support of the world's #1 open source ERP.
P.S. Please note, approval for a private demo database and website is not automatic and is subject to approval
Photo credit: xTuple baby, copyrighted
Ned Lilly
In October 2001, Ned co-founded xTuple, originally called OpenMFG, with the aim of bringing the worlds of open platform software and enterprise resource planning (ERP) together to solve the unmet needs of small- to mid-sized manufacturers. In 1999, he was a co-founder of Great Bridge, an early business built around the PostgreSQL database which is also the core technology for xTuple today. Great Bridge was incubated inside Landmark Communications, a mid-sized media company where Ned directed corporate venture investments, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and startup activity. Prior to Landmark, Ned worked for a regional technology group in Washington D.C. and had a brief first career in political media — television, radio and a non-partisan news wire. He holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia and an M.A. from George Washington University.