In their annual ERP special edition, CIO Review recognized Agility ERP as one of the “20 Most Promising ERP Solution Providers.” CIO Review interviewed Agility ERP cofounder John Fandl to learn what our customers already know – that iterative and adaptive methods are superior to conventional approaches in achieving rapid and sustainable success.
Your company has identified a clear business need for application software–perhaps related to ERP, CRM, Document Management, etc.–and has a budget. You’ve sat through a few vendor demos, and have also selected a popular commercial open source project for consideration. So far so good.
In Part I of this 3-part series we stressed the importance of finding an open source service provider that serves companies of your size and type, with the specific services you need. This article will consider the “engagement model“, which is the default way the provider works with its customers.
In Part I of this 3-part series we noted the importance of finding an open source service provider that serves companies of your size and type with the specific services you need. In Part 2 we considered the “engagement model”, and gave examples of how misalignment in that area can trip you up.
We close in Part 3 with an important consideration that is very specific to open source: the relationship between the service provider and the open source vendor. In this article we focus specifically on the case of an ERP project being used by enterprise (mid to large) customers, a scenario where we have extensive direct experience.
Openbravo is the world’s most complete and scalable open source ERP Platform, featuring modular architecture and a model-driven core that automatically generates a powerful browser UI and REST web services based on your data model. Openbravo embeds a fully integrated set of best-in-class open source IT building blocks including workflow (Activiti BPM), reporting (JasperReports) & analytics (Openbravo Analytics), as well as an integrated mobile web framework — making Openbravo the most productive way to build end to end, multi-device user experiences that both end users and enterprise IT will love.
As 6-time winner of the Infoworld Bossie (Best of Open Source) Award, Openbravo ERP is a well-recognized and established project in the global open source ecosystem. It is commercial backed by Openbravo, and leverages the Openbravo ERP Platform to deliver a broad, easily adapted functional footprint:
Quartz is a Java-based open source Job Scheduler that is embedded in the Openbravo ERP Platform, and many other enterprise applications. It is used to schedule the execution of asynchronous tasks, providing a very reliable mechanism to ensure that transactions get posted to accounting, information gets exchanged with external systems, etc.
Java is the most widely-used programming language in the enterprise, with over 9 million practititioners worldwide. The Java language and Java Virtual Machine (JVM) are used globally by nearly all major commercial software companies (Oracle, IBM, SAP, etc.), as well as large-scale open source projects like the Openbravo ERP Platform to provide the performance, developer productivity, and code quality required by mission-critical applications. The large number of enterprise-grade open source infrastructure and developer tools and frameworks written in Java make it the obvious choice for major server-side software development initiatives.
JasperSoft Studio is an Eclipse-based open source visual report designer that generates xml-based report definitions run by the JasperReports engine embedded in the Openbravo ERP Platform. If you have ever used a banded report writer like Crystal Reports, you will be immediately comfortable with JasperSoft Studio.
iReport Designer is a standalone open source visual report designer that generates xml-based report definitions run by the JasperReports engine embedded in the Openbravo ERP Platform. If you have ever used a banded report writer like Crystal Reports, you will be immediately comfortable with iReport Designer.
JasperReports is an open source Java reporting engine embedded in the Openbravo ERP Platform. It runs reports designed with free visual tools like the standalone iReport Designer or the Eclipse-based JasperSoft Studio.
Saiku is an open source Analytics Client, and serves as the UI component of the Openbravo Analytics Module. It uses the MDX language to seamlessly interact with the Mondrian cubes that Openbravo generates, allowing users to easily create, visualize and analyze information in graphical & pivot table formats.
Mondrian is an open source Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) engine, providing a key back end component of the Openbravo Analytics module. Mondrian cubes are automatically created from the Openbravo Application Dictionary, allowing business users to analyze large & complex datasets in real-time using visualization tools like Saiku & Excel.
Frepple is professional-grade, commercial open source supply chain and production planning & scheduling application that helps manufacturers minimize inventory investment, improve delivery performance and improve production efficiency. It goes beyond the capabilities of Openbravo’s traditional MRP and Purchase Planning to include capacity constraints, graphical scheduling, real time capable to promise, forecasting and demand management, and more. A bi-directional integration connector for the Openbravo ERP Platform makes Frepple a natural choice for Openbravo customers looking for an advanced planning and scheduling feature set that works seamlessly with Openbravo.
PostgreSQL is a powerful, enterprise-grade open source database system that is production-proven to multiple terabytes with OLTP workloads. It is freely available for easy on premise installation on all major server operating systems, and is also available as a scalable database cloud service (DBaaS) from trusted providers
This 30 minute tutorial style video can be used to quickly learn how to use and navigate the Openbravo user interface. This video was created by John Fandl of Agility ERP and covers the bases so you can navigate, query and enter transactions in Openbravo. It is a great starting point for new users to become familiar with Openbravo navigation and use.
Find out why SAIC is using Openbravo. In this web interview, John Fandl interviews John Coble of SAIC. This is the $1.1B logistics group of a $10B / year defense contractor that is using Openbravo and Agility ERP services.
A brief tutorial that teaches you about the Openbravo 3 Audit Trail feature, including a functional demonstration, a list of configuration steps, and a discussion of the business benefits.
This brief tutorial video will show you some of the options available to personalize the Openbravo user experience without programming. These functions are available to end users for individualized experience, can be used by business functional leads to create and administer the user experience for their department or can be used by the IT staff to guide company-wide usage.
In a complex enterprise or web business, many network components, servers and database components work together in concert to deliver end- to-end services. Intermittent or chronic performance issues can be very difficult, time consuming and stressful to pinpoint. Agility ERP consultants solve this by using AppDynamics to proactively troubleshoot, monitor, and continuously assess your business-critical enterprise applications.
Now owned by eBay, the Magento eCommerce platform serves more than 110,000 merchants worldwide and is supported by a global ecosystem of solution partners and third-party developers. Winner of Infoworld Bossie (Best of Open Source Software) from 2008 – 2009 and honorable mention 2010 (note: ecommerce category no longer tracked by Bossie starting in 2010)
Here is an interesting and easy to understand perspective regarding DevOps from Rackspace - an innovative hosting company. The Technical Operations group of TDS (parent company to Agility ERP) uses Rackspace to support clients looking for a hybrid hosting facility that can handle both physical and cloud deployments models from a single provider.
The Pentaho Open BI Suite provides a full spectrum of business intelligence (BI) capabilities including reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, data integration, and a BI platform that have made it the world’s most popular open source BI suite. Winner of Infoworld Bossie (Best of Open Source) from 2008 – 2011
Talend’s open source data integration solutions are optimized for enterprise-grade ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading). Winner of Infoworld Bossie (Best of Open Source Software) from 2009 – 2011
Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world. Winner of Infoworld Bossie (Best of Open Source Software) from 2010 – 2011.
This is a tribute to Winston Royce (an early computer scientist and the inadvertent pioneer of waterfall development). In this video, Maxim Dorofeev takes a somewhat comical look at the downside of waterfall development and how an iterative approach will produce better results.
An interesting perspective on the early history of the DevOps movement. How did DevOps start? What is the deal with the name? Where did this all of this come from? Why did DevOps emerge when it did?
Activiti is a light-weight workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) engine that is embedded in the Openbravo ERP Platform. Activiti BPM core is a very fast and robust BPMN 2 process engine for Java that is freely distributed under the Apache license.
Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations worldwide. As the reference open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies, Tomcat provides a proven runtime environment to deploy Java-based enterprise applications like the Openbravo ERP Platform.
Eclipse is a widely-used open source development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. It is used globally by many enterprise open source projects like the Openbravo ERP Platform to enhance developer productivity and code quality.