By Sean Michael Kerner
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is the goliath of the software industry, encompassing in its scope the financial and sometimes physical operations of a company.
Many smaller companies don't bother with full ERP applications due to their complexity; it's a situation that xTuple President and CEO Ned Lilly is trying to fix.
Until this week, xTuple was known by the name of its flagship commercial product OpenMFG, which is an ERP application geared for manufacturing. Lilly and his team are now expanding the scope of ERP with a new open source-style offering called PostBooks®, which is based on a similar code base as OpenMFG.
"The difference between PostBooks® and the commercial OpenMFG product will be high-end stuff. Maybe on the order of 15 or 20 percent of the high-end functionality," Lilly explained. "It's not just a carve-off project. We will continue to run them in parallel and enhancements and contributions to one will feed the other."