openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Carlos Vásquez <carlos.vasquez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Fabien,

I do like your thoughts about the marketing strategy in general. I agree
with the communication techniques you propose.


*ERP vs. Apps*

As our fellow partners stated, the main discussion point is which image we
do want to market to our customers. Speaking about the ERP vs. Apps
approach, I kind of agree with both you and the other partners. We do not
spend one cent in marketing, we only follow-up sales of people that contact
us. For now it has been enough to keep us busy and running. Those people
who contact us are almost always looking for an ERP. We usually have to
sell an implementation project where other ERP solutions are also
participating, sometimes there are big ERP solutions (SAP, Dynamics,
Oracle, etc), and usually there are local ERP solutions. I think dropping
the ERP solution as a marketing point, would affect us in this market.

But, we have more and more calls from people looking for a cheaper and
faster solution for their problems. An ERP implementation is not affordable
nor suitable for their business. We are getting ready to offer OpenERP in a
way very similar to your SaaS offer. This offer will be ready very soon and
we already have several customers waiting to test it. Also, we started
doing fast, out-of-the-box implementations about 3 months ago to gain
experience for our new "SaaS" offer. It has proven to be very successful.
These customers are more prone to identify themselves with a solution
marketed as business apps running together. Here I do understand your point
and it will help to bring more customers for this line of service.


*Open Source*

Also, the first kind of customers are usually more interested in an Open
Source solution and they often understand its benefits and it can be an
important sale point for them. The later kind of customers, usually do not
know about Open Source, and they do not care. They need a good, affordable
and reliable solution for their needs. Open or closed is the same for them.
So again, we do have here 2 ways of marketing this because there is in fact
(as Ana said) 2 targets.

The one thing that help us in the sale process is that our customers can
easily find us in the partners directory. The new partners page with
automatic country filter is doing a great job with this. Also the way you
redirect all kind of leads to us.


Maybe it is a good idea to separate the ERP/OpenSource and the Apps/Product
approach. Is it really necessary to choose only one way? I always like
simplicity, but in this case, focusing only one target may be wrong, it is
worth the discussion.


*Pull strategy*

There is one more thing I think I can give some valuable feedback. The
services you offer to partners are somewhat rigid in some cases. I would
love to sell an Enterprise contract with every OpenERP implementation. But
this is not possible. The OPW is not made for end-users, us partners we
have to take part in the process. We have worked out several bugs with the
support team. Our experience has been varied. Sometimes the person assigned
to the bug can solve the problem in a reasonable time frame, other times we
have ended up fixing it ourselves. In all cases we have to spend at least a
couple of hours in total of our time. If our customer reports a bug, we
have to test to know where is the problem. If there is something wrong with
some official code and there is an OPW contract we can send it to your
team. In most cases, your team needs several replies from us. They usually
do not do a very good job finding the problem, we have to do some heavy
testing for them as they keep rejecting the issue of proposing some
simplistic workaround. For important bugs, we end up spending more than 2
hours answering mails and doing remote desktop demo sessions. At the end we
have to integrate and deploy the solution. I explain all of this because we
have to charge several hours to our customers on top of an Enterprise
contract. And we also need to support the localization and customizations.
The total cost of support gets expensive. Of course your contract also
includes migration. But if we want to use this service, we also need to
charge some extra fee to migrate the localization and customizations. This
is the main reason we do not sell Enterprise contracts very often, and the
ones we have sold, are not renewing.

For partners which do develop and do heavy customization, I find the
Enterprise service and its pricing method very rigid. I am worried because
we could work much better with your team and get you to earn more money,
which is good for all of us. And for our new "SaaS" offer, I contacted you
guys to work out something to include support from your team in our cost
structure, but the only thing you have to offer is the regular Enterprise
support with the usual "per user" pricing method. This will at least
duplicate our cost for each user. This is not acceptable, nor is reflecting
the reality. You know that in this kind of service, the amount of support
is deluded because everyone is using the same exact code base. So we
decided to go on our own, without your support. We ran some numbers, and we
think it will be cheaper to support the platform ourselves, even with the
migration process.

So as of now, I do not think you have good service offer for us. The
pricing structure do not work outside Europe of North America. I know and
appreciate you are making efforts to adapt your prices. It has been a very
good first step. But it is not enough. You have to differentiate
configuration only partners, from development ones. We are more than open
and willing to work with you. So, even if you make a great marketing
strategy, the pull strategy you propose will not work very well in our
particular case. I think it is the best way to go, we need to improve who
does generating partners revenue will create revenue for OpenERP S.A.


*Recap*

All of this said. I do appreciate your efforts to involve the community,
and do think that there are great things we (the partners) can do with you
(OpenERP S.A.). A marketing investment in marketing will benefit us. And I
do trust your judgment to integrate internal ideas with community
suggestions into an excellent marketing strategy.

Regards,
--
Carlos Vásquez
CTO · Director de Ingeniería
CLEARCORP S.A.

carlos.vasquez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cel: +(506) 8351 4484
CR: +(506) 4000 CORP (4000 2677)
US: +1 (786) 472-4267
skype: crvasquez
twitter: cvclearcorp

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Calle de Platanares
11402 San Jerónimo, Moravia
San José, Costa Rica
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http://www.clearcorp.co.cr