For our July “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected iDempiere, a Business Suite ERP/CRM/SCM done the community way. Project leader Carlos Antonio Ruiz Gomez shared some thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.
SourceForge (SF): Tell me about the iDempiere project please.
Carlos Ruiz Gomez (CRG): iDempiere is a complete Open Source ERP/CRM/SCM business solution for small-medium enterprises. It provides inventory management, order processing, accounting, reporting, customer relationship management. Full multi* software, multi-lingual, multi-organization, multi-tenant, multi-accounting, multi-currency.
The system has been designed in a way that changes are easy, even in production, allowing a fast implementation.
User interface can be adapted easily via an application dictionary that feeds a UI and a reporting engine.
Stable, based on Compiere which was SourceForge POTM in February 2004.
At this moment iDempiere is perhaps the only open source ERP done the community way.
SF: What made you start this?
CRG: I enjoy writing code, solving problems, helping others to solve their problems, I can do that as a passion, as a hobby; and I had strong background on business software. With this open source ERP I found a way to join my background with my passion.
SF: Has the original vision been achieved?
CRG: Yes, iDempiere is a real software used in production in thousands of companies worldwide, with a strong community. We have further vision and goals to achieve, but I can say the original idea has been achieved successfully.
SF: Who can benefit the most from your project?
CRG: All companies can benefit from iDempiere. The ERP brings control and organization. Companies using iDempiere avoid the big licensing costs associated with ERP and have complete control about adapting to their own requirements.
SF: What core need does iDempiere fulfill?
CRG: Managing the business and automating many back office functions related to technology, services and human resources. iDempiere ERP integrates operations from the whole company, including purchases, sales, inventory management, customer relationship, accounting.
SF: What’s the best way to get the most out of using iDempiere?
CRG: Implementing ERP is always a big project, although iDempiere is stable and usable out of the box, we strongly recommend companies wanting to use it to hire a known company with experience on ERP implementations.
SF: What has your project team done to help build and nurture your community?
CRG: The iDempiere community is strong, we usually hold in-person conferences bi-yearly, IRC meetings weekly, and constant communication via forums and other messaging mechanisms.
Credit attribution is a key value of our community and that’s why we usually recognize and [give] thanks to Jorg Janke as the creator of this amazing software and ideas, and we like to recognize the improvements that community added in Adempiere project, and also the learning that failing that project gave us to set up properly the community in iDempiere.
SF: Have you all found that more frequent releases helps build up your community of users?
CRG: Yes, we have been releasing official milestone versions every year, but thanks to continuous integration and with big help of SourceForge as our master release repository we are able to release automatically daily stable and development versions.
SF: What was the first big thing that happened for your project?
CRG: We started the project in 2011, during 2012 Trek Global (company based in Vancouver, USA) held a conference with the key developers and we created a big wish-list with all kinds of things that we hated from the previous software and things that we wanted to add or improve to make the software more robust, multi-tenant and usable. After that, Trek Global sponsored a big team of analysts, developers and testers during more than 1 year to solve most of the list. That represented a big jump on the quality, robustness and usability of the application.
SF: What helped make that happen?
CRG: Trek Global believed in our vision of the project and community setup and decided to sponsor this big jump to make this software the best in its class.
SF: How has SourceForge and its tools helped your project reach that success?
CRG: The hosting capabilities of SourceForge are by far the best at this moment, we made a judicious comparison against other open source hosting providers and found that the tools provided by SourceForge to distribute files are the best in its class, as well as the mirroring, speed of upload/download and statistics. All these capabilities have been key to helping us provide better services to our community.
SF: What is the next big thing for iDempiere?
CRG: iDempiere has a long term goal about modularity. Our main goal is to have a light core and separate all the business logic to be pluggable, extendable and replaceable. The project keeps evolving and achieving this shift will represent a big jump.
SF: How long do you think that will take?
CRG: As a long term goal it can take some time to achieve it, although our previous experience has demonstrated that with proper sponsorship these big goals can be achieved a lot faster.
SF: Do you have the resources you need to make that happen?
CRG: Not at this moment, we are in need of additional commitment and sponsorship to achieve those big goals.
SF: If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently for iDempiere?
CRG: We already passed that phase of redoing the project. I’m also one of the founders of Adempiere project and we learned from the failures on the community setup.
iDempiere project and its success is a consequence of the new setup, we fixed key things like ownership, decentralized version control, respect for community, protection for key contributors, and other values that have resulted in a successful and thriving project.
SF: Is there anything else we should know?
CRG: It is very pleasant for me to see iDempiere as project of the month on SourceForge, my involvement on the former Compiere project was precisely because of the mention on SourceForge on February of 2004. Since then and thanks to this community activity on SourceForge I started studying the software and fell in love with the architecture and design, not just as an ERP but as a full featured fast development framework.
Carlos Antonio Ruiz Gomez is one of the Project Leaders of iDempiere alongside Heng Sin Low. Their key developers are Hiệp lê quý , Nicolas Micoud and Redhuan Daniel Oon .