2008 could be a very good year for the likes of Compiere and Openbravo if 451 CAOS Theory’s blog stats for this year are anything to go by.

I’ve just been taking a look at the most read stories of the year, and following the usual suspects (Oracle Unbreakable Linux, the Linux desktop, the EC’s attitude to open source) I was surprised to see that the fourth most popular post was this one about Openbravo’s deal with rPath to create an open source ERP appliance.

While Openbravo’s ERP appliance is an interesting project, there is nothing particularly controversial about it, which makes its inclusion amongst the most-read blog posts all the more surprising. More people were interested in that post than Novell’s deal with Microsoft or the patent battle between NetApp and Sun, or Barack Obama’s promise to support “universally accessible formats”, for example.

While it is impossible to guess what drove the readers to that post in particular, one has to conclude that there is significant interest in open source ERP software. This suggestion is backed up by the fact that the phrase ‘open source ERP’ was the sixth most popular search term to have driven people towards the 451 CAOS Theory blog.

UPDATE - As if to prove the popularity of open source ERP, within three days of its publication, this very post had become the eighth most popular 451 CAOS Theory post of the year, with a good chance that it could climb even higher before the year is out - UPDATE

Meanwhile, Glyn Moody recently noted that ERP could provide a happy hunting ground for open source software, at least in the UK. Moody pointed to figures from the Office for National Statistics that indicate only 6.5% of 8,000 businesses surveyed were using ERP systems in 2006, providing open source vendors with a significant number of greenfield sites.

More evidence of the interest in open source ERP comes from the number of vendors and projects. As well as Compiere and Openbravo, a quick Google search also throws up:

• TinyERP
• xTuple
• opentaps
• Apache OFBiz
• OpenPro
• ERP5
• ADempiere
• GNU Enterprise
• JFire
• webERP

What is also interesting about these projects is that they are so far largely self-funded. Compiere pulled in $6m Series A funding from New Enterprise Associates in June 2006, while Openbravo raised 5m euros ($6.6m) Series A funding from Sodena in January 2006, but that’s about it. At the very least you can expect further funding in this area in the next year.