Building An Open Source ERP Company From Pamplona, Spain: OpenBravo CEO Paolo Juvara (Part 3)

Sramana: You had a lot of success on SourceForge.net, but how did you create your brand in the greater open source community?

Paolo Juvara: In September 2007, we began to consistently rank as the No. 1 project on SourceForge.net. That was a huge achievement for us. We even made project of the month. We also attended several open source events and we received the Best in Class award at LinuxWorld Expo. Our activity in the open source community really helped drive our brand across the world.

One of the things that has been good for us and that I would recommend to other entrepreneurs who are building a software company is to use open source methods to build a global brand. It is far easier to do it as an open source company than as a traditional software company.

Sramana: In 2007, when you began reaching the top spot on SourceForge and receiving awards, what was your product distribution like? Were there any trends among customer types?

Paolo Juvara: At that time, we were still primarily a direct services business. We had an open source software offering, but we made money by doing projects and consulting work for customers based on our open source project. In 2008, we changed to pure channels, and we no longer do direct implementations.

In 2007, we had a couple of international projects, and the rest of our work was done in Spain. Our primary activity was in the distribution industry. In late 2007, we acquired a small Spanish open source project called LibrePOS that expanded our functionality. That has directly resulted in our OpenBravo POS product line.

Once we acquired LibrePOS, that opened a very important sector for us, which was the retail industry. From there we expanded into public service and public administration. We have also found that a lot of nonprofit organizations use OpenBravo.

Sramana: You are in a very competitive space; from low-end ERP solutions to high-end ones, there are a lot of offerings. QuickBooks is a dominant player in the segment, and they are not very expensive. With that in mind, what do you think has driven the adoption of open source ERP?

Paolo Juvara: It is a very tough market. It probably does not get any more difficult than ERP. The sales cycles are long, the value of the sales varies because of the competition that you mentioned, and by nature it is a channel business which brings in its own unique complexities. With channels you have a lot of dependencies with your partners.

With that being said, we have gained a good level of success. Our secret is providing an ERP that is functionally complete and able to evolve, yet is agile with components. We just launched OpenBravo3, and I think that offering will really complete our story. We had an issue with our earlier releases where the upgrades were difficult for our customers. We solved that problem in 2009. We made it much easier for people to move from one version of a product to another.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building An Open Source ERP Company From Pamplona, Spain: OpenBravo CEO Paolo Juvara
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