openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Wouter Tebbens <wouter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

some brief thoughts from my part:

* keep the name "OpenERP"
* explain both the Apps and the ERP (if it stays in the name, so you
wouldn't drop it, right?)
* emphasise the importance of open source and software freedom (no
lock-in, free/open license, competitive market place, community, dynamic
innovation through open development, standing on shoulders of giants
(PostgresQL, Python, ...))

As Nhomar said, open source IS a very important customer value. And even
if some people don't understand much of it, I think it is very important
to explain the enormous differences between free software/open source vs
proprietary/closed software. It's the end of monopolies.... and
customers generally do appreciate the strategic value of freedom.

best,
Wouter

On 02/17/2014 12:11 AM, Carlos Vásquez wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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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