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.kra...@initos.com Internet: www.initos.com Geschäftsführung: Dipl.-Wirt.-Inf. Frederik Kramer & Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Torsten Francke Haftende Gesellschafterin: initOS Verwaltungs GmbH Sitz der Gesellschaft: Rosengarten – Klecken Amtsgericht Tostedt, HRA 201840 USt-IdNr: DE 275698169 Steuer-Nr: 15/205/21402 _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~openerp-community Post to : openerp-community@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~openerp-community More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp