What are Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning- ERP Solutions?

Open source ERP solutions and features have significantly changed the landscape of enterprise resource planning solutions over the last five years. Open source technologies have not only made ERP solutions more affordable opening up a new market of customers they are offering more powerful features enabling consumers to optimize their resources. With the significant capital outlays for traditional ERP systems, it may come as pleasant shock to consumers that the cost of open source ERP solutions are literally zero. It’s no wonder that new ERP entrants are emerging and using ERP solutions for the first time as they are not hampered by large capital constraints. As anyone familiar with application service providers, or hosting third parties, are familiar with open source required no maintenance and are ready to operate with little training time and integration roadblocks. The more the particular open source solution has a strong following, the more there will be advances and enhancements to the software available to users. Again, the benefit of any open source upgrades is that users can simply reinstall modules and not have to rely on implementation logistics from the vendor. And best of all, these upgrades are usually at little or no cost to the user. Two sectors that open source ERP solutions have taken off are in the accounting and payments functions of an organization. With respect to an department-wide, complete open source ERP solution has yet to appear on the market, it is evident that there are a plethora of open source solutions currently and in the works in the marketplace. To the benefit of non-opensource solutions such as the original ERP giants such as Oracle, SAP, and IBM, the limitations of open source systems are that they only focus on one or a limited number of departments and functions within an organization. A company that is looking for one solution to handle their accounting, finance, sales, marketing, operations and administration functions will have to look towards other solutions on the market. However, the “big” ERP solutions on the marketplace are aware of the popularity of these open source products and are developing more nimble, flexible, and modular solutions that better offer features that are driving the popularity of open source solutions as well as software as a service, or SaaS, and other software on demand solutions on the marketplace. For the consumers it is a win situation as they have more enterprise system software solutions and products to choose from that will, in a nutshell, contribute higher returns at a lower capital and resource investment.