openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Carlos Vásquez <carlos.vasquez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Eric,

I was talking Thursday to my account manager just about this. Not with the
purpose of complaining about it, but because we are worried.

I know this has been a delicate subject in the relationship of OpenERP with
its partners (at least some of them). And I really appreciate your
approach. Let's try to work together to solve this.

>From my point of view, it is a problem of rigidity of the service. I don't
think that adding extra features to the Enterprise contract will work. The
service should be available in independent items. For example, we should be
able to have a migration contract alone, without bug fixing. Or viceversa.

Also, there are projects that are not the usual implementation. For
example, we are getting ready to start a SaaS offer for out-of-the-box
customers. We reached to OpenERP to find a good solution so they could help
us support the platform. Our thinking was that OpenERP has experience with
this with its own SaaS service. But the answer was to charge the usual user
fee and get a normal Enterprise contract for each database. From a business
point of view this is not viable. It doubles (at least) our cost. And we
are not asking to answer to all customers directly for bug reports, we are
asking to answer to us, we would be in charge of getting the fixes online
and doing the triage to report only valid bugs. This would drastically
lower the work for OpenERP. But we couldn't reach any understanding in the
negotiation. So we are going live without the participation of OpenERP.

The above example is just to illustrate what I mean by rigidity of the
Enterprise offer. We are aware it is not because OpenERP's team is not
willing to sell services, it is because a corporate policy that they only
can offer the Enterprise offer as it is. I would like to make OpenERP earn
money on each project we do. We are 100% clear that it is the best way to
go. But it has to be profitable for us. After all this is a business, we
are here to make profits.

If we had a larger service offer from OpenERP, or if OpenERP would be open
to find custom solutions with us, we could be more creative to integrate
its services in our own. For now, the one-size-fits-all offer is stopping
us. It works for mid-size (or bigger) projects, with enough budget, and
where the customer is willing to outsource the support and not getting its
IT team to do it. Other cases are hard to sell and/or not profitable.

The other services we can buy are hour based services we don't need. This
is what our team does. I rather pay my team to do this, because I make
profit with the same price (or lower in the case of an analyst), and
because it is the reason to have such a team.

We really hope we, OpenERP and the partners, can get somewhere with this.
There are a lot of things we can do to improve the situation and transform
it into a win-win relationship.

I am 100% open to discuss this further, as it is something very important.

PS: I don't know if this is the proper channel to discuss this. Can someone
at OpenERP tell us which one is? (And get involved please :-) ).

Regards,
--
PS: escribí este email desde mi teléfono, por favor disculpe la brevedad y
cualquier error de escritura.

Carlos Vásquez
CTO · Director de Ingeniería

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