openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Frederik Kramer <frederik.kramer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Fabien, dear others,

thank you for having started the discussion on OpenERP marketing quite a
while ago. Markus and me at initOS after carefully thinking about the
raised points would like to contribute our vision to the discussion
also. Obviously our point of view differs from the view of other
partners but we would highly appreciate if more partners could share
their thoughts also. Hope this helps you and your team as well as the
entire community to continue the promising path to success.

Our collected thoughts about OpenERP marketing ans positioning are:

- if you don't want to compare with SAP or other ERP-systems, why do you
compare with Magento ? At least for most of our customers Magento is
also perceived like the big heavy thing which is expensive and only
feasible for larger customers.

- comparing with Magento to us makes no sense, because Magento is the de
facto Open Source ecommerce leader with installations budgeted with $10m
and larger. OpenERP eCommerce in our point of view addresses the b2b
market where other ecommerce system have rather big issues.

- OpenERP apps are a great idea, but without a proper quality control
this idea is likely to fail. It definitely needs a reputation system so
that users can rate each app and its contributor.

- controlling your distribution channels is of utmost importance. There
are packages for some NAS storage and embedded device vendors that are
buggy and not updated at all (e.g. Synology). We have some customers
installing these OpenERP versions for testing in the first place. They
almost always conclude that OpenERP is buggy like a hell and not usable
hence.

- make your basic apps complete or remove it from the core. An example
is the social feature in OpenERP 7. It is a good example and feels like
a proof of concept. Customers struggle with its usability but as you
know the promised further development has not yet materialized and
disabling this feature is hard as well.

- localization is a big issue. Only having an accounting module is to
less. On each project we face the same issues with regard to
localization. So partners all do this localization task more or less on
their owns. A website for each region with partners contributing to the
customization will boost local markets. This will improve effort sharing
for localization and visibility for local partners on their local
markets.

- think about a SaaS offering for each country with a data center in
this market. This is not only a proper way to compete with other SaaS
vendors such as Salesforce for example but the only argument to get
German customers buying that offer for instance. In turn this is a huge
limitation with regard to competitors such as Actindo / Mittwald and
others that already learned that lesson.

- Partnering with a large infrastructure cloud provider with a data
center in Germany like Strato AG, Hetzner AG or Fujitsu would enable us
to provide private clouds for German customers. We have good relations
with these providers

- The partners and the partner network are OpenERP SA's turning key to
further develop regional markets, installed base as well as localization
(feature and translation-wise). They should be better visible, hence. We
(and especially engineering-focused partners like us) are not resellers
in the first place. We conceive ourselves as a member of a community
that likes to develop an already great product further. The reselling
part, however is the largest pain to be a partner at the moment.

- Lead management is bad as it is now. Leads are poorly quality assured,
the entire lead management and distribution process is pretty
unprofessional at least in our point of view. Besides completely
irregularly delivering leads to us, your sales representatives are
massively pushing for contract after contract (totally agree with
Raphael Valyi's reply here). One example here: We as a small partner
invested a total of roughly 30k€ (partner fee and direct opportunities)
last year only into maintaining our partnership status and doing lead
management (phoning up contacts that we got from you, completing leads,
clarifying users need and planning implementation paths etc.). 

We got no single customer from that investment! In turn all our
customers came through our website and the reputation we built by
contributing and offering information on these contributions. The entire
community would be better off if you would better distinguish partners
that have an engineering focus and those who have a marketing focus. The
latter ones should be tightly controlled on their implementation success
hence.

- please stop spreading the impression that one buys a proprietary and
bug-free product once signing an enterprise contract. OpenERP is open
source, it is free as in free speech but not free as in free beer.
Hence, bug-fixing and maintenance costs money. SME should have an
intrinsic motivation to assure business continuity by paying a fair
price for this service offering (e.g. the enterprise contract).
Your salespeople must be far better trained, understand this and share
that thought.

- finally please give the community the great tools they need. Launchpad
is a factor for delay


Kind regards Markus Schneider and Frederik Kramer

-- 
Dipl.-Wirt.-Inf. Frederik Kramer
Geschäftsleitung
        
initOS GmbH & Co. KG
An der Eisenbahn 1
21224 Rosengarten
        
Tel.: +49 4105 56156-12
Fax:  +49 4105 56156-10
Mobil: + 49 179 3901819
        
Email: frederik.kramer@xxxxxxxxxx
Internet: www.initos.com
        
Geschäftsführung: Dipl.-Wirt.-Inf. Frederik Kramer & Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Torsten Francke
Haftende Gesellschafterin: initOS Verwaltungs GmbH
        
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