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By developing an open source alternative Mr Juvara said Openbravo had intended to encourage a community of systems integrators and collaborators to evolve and create solutions suitable for different microsectors of the market. Four hundred different modules were available from the community he said.
To date he claimed that more than 3 million people had downloaded the product, and that at least 6,000 organisations around the world were running their business using Openbravo – with an average of 20-30 users per organisation.
Mr Juvara said he believed 200-300 companies were using the open source version of the system in Australia.
Besides the open source version of the product Openbravo sells a commercial solution to companies which do not want to participate in the open source community. Mr Juvara said this was the company’s primary source of revenues, and that it worked with 120 partners around the world to sell that version of the product.
It has three partners in Australia and is currently in negotiations with one of those partners which would see the local partner become master distributor for Australia. Openbravo has recently localised the commercial product for the Australian market where it currently has 15 users of the software, including ANZ Lighting, Bathroom Warehouse and four franchisees of Office National.
The software is sold as an on premise solution, or via the cloud. Mr Juavara said that “ERP has been a laggard in cloud adoption – but that has changed very rapidly in the last six months.”
He said that demand for cloud service in Australia was high, and that the company deployed Openbravo on Amazon’s cloud or allowed its partners to offer it as a service through their data centres. Other cloud based ERP solutions in Australia are sold by NetSuite and SAP’s SuccessFactors business which last week announced it would shortly offer an Australian hosted instance of the cloud solution.
