I’ve been watching Compiere a little more closely lately with a bit of wonder. The company has made some serious moves on both the technology and management fronts in recent weeks, which could seriously affect its operations.
Not much of a fuss was made about the naming of new CEO LaVonne Reimer, but it does bring in to question how much Compiere’s culture will change going forward. Previously, Jorg Janke seemed to be fine with the notion of Compiere being a very small entity on its own, operating as a research root of a partner powered sales and implementation network. In short, a fine example of an open source project where support and implementation dues kicked back from partners are the core commercial fruits of its labor. But as they seem to get more corporate, will funding rounds and an internal sales team arise? This would obviously bring more financial order and stability to development. But we wonder just how much the already decently sized global partner network of more than 65 firms might react. We liked the symbiotic relationship Compiere had until now, and wonder how much any threat of cannibalization will halt or otherwise hinder the development of adjacent and vertically focused open source applications by the partner network. Careful treading is obviously paramount here, and we imagine Jorg and LaVonne will hopefully take that into heavy consideration before making any moves.

And while I will be making a more formal report on the new collaboration tools coming in a month or so, the fact that Compiere is making strides in content management and collaboration is interesting to me. While collaboration tools can touch any department, it seems a strong method of filling out what I deem a light CRM funtionality in the core Compiere product. Sales teams and support professionals can utilize the collab tools, and the content management tools (which I am curious to see if this is another open source tool or Compiere’s own) can power knowledge bases and other customer-service initiatives. How far Compiere, or its partners, take all this into the CRM realm remains to be seen. But collaboration tools seem an interesting middleground between ERP and CRM.