opentaps at 1.4: Our Inflection Point

1.4 is a big number. The recent opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM Version 1.4 release marks a milestone of our effort to build free, openly available enterprise software.  This journey began over six years ago with the goal of building full featured business software that could work for a variety of companies in many different industries.

And now, I’m pleased to say, we’ve done it.  Take a look at what opentaps can do for you today, and I think you’ll agree that, broadly speaking, we have a very extensive feature set.  Take a look at the community around opentaps, and you’ll see that we’ve been validated by companies large and small around the world.

So what next?

These are my goals for the next leg of our journey:

• Easier — I want opentaps to be easier to use, easier to set up and configure, and easier to customize and build on top of.
• More advanced — I believe that opentaps is already the most advanced open source ERP and CRM solution available today, thanks to the great open source projects we stand on top of: Apache, Spring, Hibernate, Jasper, Pentaho, Funambol, and Google Web Toolkit.  But there are some new technologies now which I believe will fundamentally change the way business software works.  I want us to be ahead of the curve, so that your business can be ahead of the curve with opentaps.
• More community effort — We got here not because of how good we are, but because we’ve been able to leverage the work of many open source projects and their communities.  Now that opentaps is gaining momentum of its own, I’d like to see us in turn contribute to other open source projects and their communities–either with more projects based on opentaps, or more modules available for opentaps, like you see with WordPress, Drupal, or Magento.

In the next few months, we will be laying the foundation for realizing these goals, and I will let you know as the steps fall into place.

Onwards!