Open Source ERP Vendors Are Opportunistic During Current Economic Recession

With companies tightening up their purse strings all across the globe, selling new enterprise solutions to company prospects is not an easy task. However, open source products are using the economic crisis to spotlight their free solutions and convincing companies to give them a try. The economic slump has provided a unique opportunity for vendor in the open source arena. As spending moratoriums curtail company spending, open source sales and marketing groups are working hard to convince companies that open source solutions are powerful tools, and that given the state of the market, companies could take advantage of their lower cost and positively impact their bottom line. Companies in essence can’t afford not to try open source solutions. It seems that the effort is paying off as small and large companies initially skeptical of the quality of “free” solutions on the market are finding open source solutions to be quite good. Marketing and advertising strategies for these vendors are focusing on the current IT trends making considerable headway in the market such as software on demand (SOD), and software as a service (SaaS) solutions and designing solutions to easily integrate and utilize the technologies. Mobile technology advances as well as web’s next generation of collaboration hosted products are finding there way into the design of open source solutions on the market. The goal of the marketing spin it to highlight product features that focus on optimizing productivity, cutting out the fat, and adding value across the entire organization. The low cost or no cost of open source products is the key factor driving the appeal of open source verses the traditional proprietary ERP software solutions. Organizations are open to download open source software and testing it out before they pay a penny for it. The balancing act for open source providers are to get customers in with free solutions and eventually getting them to pay for some type of service. Many open source solutions work in tandem with company’s existing proprietary enterprise software, if they have one, further mitigating implementation time and adoption. The basic message with open source enterprise solutions is that companies can thoroughly test drive and lease solutions to make sure that they have an added value, user friendly solution for their business activities rather than making a lifelong commitment to a capital intensive proprietary enterprise solution that may not work out in the short or long term.