I’m back from a stay in India, what an experience. I’ve put the top 61 of 600 photos on a simple page with some comments (nothing work related). I have used Facebook, which apparently is the 6^th most visited site in the United States, but not yet recognized by my spell check. Check it out if you like: Photos from India.

As for the Educational Services offering, things have been drastically improving over the last four months. The team is now formed of 6 full time members. We’re more diversified geographically - Canada, Barcelona, Pamplona, Poland, and myself from the United States – and this is matched with complementary work backgrounds. Two of us have taught at the university level, two have professional software training experience, and our director, Andreu, worked all over the place while at Accenture for 7 years. The balance is fits.

During the last few months, we setup In-Class (Live) trainings in New York (USA), Hanover (Germany), and today are off and running with our most ambitious project yet… Over the next three weeks in Barcelona, we’re giving the following:

• Our first In-Class Sales and Implementation Training (1 day crash course on getting the message out and managing the implementation process)
• Advanced Development Training (1 week of detailed cases explaining specific development technique).
• In the middle our now very well tested and ridiculously intensive Kick-Off Training (a 2 week introduction to OB functions, development methodologies, and installation/administration).

I shouldn’t complain, we still have our goal of an 8/1 trainee/teacher ratio, and have dedicated Consulting/Development expert support when developing new services. However, what I am now missing are more diversified mediums of getting solid information the information out. But anyway, off to Sao Paulo next month!

Last week, while still in Cannes, I read an article about SAP’s point of view on the impact of open source in ERPs. Henning Kagermann, SAP’s current CEO, declared in Computer Business Review that “Open Source is an option for operating systems and databases but not at the business application level”. This point of view does not surprise me since it is not a new statement coming from a top software executive. In the past, important executives such as Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer also disregarded the Open Source opportunity/ threat in the operating system world. But … you know … what really strikes me is the main rationale that Henning was using to support his point of view. He argumented that Open Source successful projects are those where developers like to work for “fun” and literally said “I have never seen anyone who likes doing that (referring to altering applications to cater for legal or regulatory changes such as Sarbanes-Oxley or Basel II). That is not fun. There is no choice. The boring bits are a strength of SAP” .
I am really astonished … Can we imply that SAP’s strengths against open source competitors are only built upon boring pieces?. Does Henning see open source competitors failing on their purpose because there is no fun on building ERPs?. If that was the name of the game … and you are working at SAP … please tell your boss that our growing community encompassing now more than 50 employees and more than hundreds of individuals working for IT companies around the world is really having “fun”!!!!. But please tell him that we are not having fun for the sake of fun. And here it comes the true reason why open source will make it in the world of ERPs: Fun for the sake of building Openbravo, the leading open source ERP Company in the space. At the end experience tells us that everything that can be built on open source, is finally built on open source (see other similar projects that are building business applications successfully with open source @ the Open Solutions Alliance )".

Anyway … I am convinced that we will see Henning in the future adapting its pitch as many others (read Gates and Ballmer) have done it. Don’t you think?

Green is the codename for the new technological platform of Openbravo. Openbravo Green is built on the strengths of the current release, improving those areas where limitations to the current model have been encountered.

One of the main aspects of Openbravo Green is openness: an open source project, based on proven standards and open source technologies. This will benefit the Openbravo community with a product easier to learn, extend and integrate with other products.

Another important aspect of Openbravo Green is that we do not want to lose all the functionality, developments and knowledge around the current Openbravo platform. We will put all our effort to do the upgrades from previous versions as easy as possible and to ensure the reliability of the upgraded system. In most of the cases you will be able to run the current functionality in Openbravo Green with no changes at all.

I am proud to announce that there is a platform prototype development in progress for Openbravo Green. Currently this prototype is just an example of an Openbravo window that allows to view and edit records of product categories of the Openbravo demo database. In this prototype we are testing all the aspects we want for the Openbravo Green platform: technologies like the Spring framework, Hibernate, Acegi security, Dojo toolkit DWR, and so on. And also we are trying to organize the source code in layers to keep the design of the application as clean as possible. We want to make with this prototype a proof of concept of the Openbravo Green platform and include all the features and requirements we are planning for the Openbravo Green platform. You can have a look at the demo at http://demo.openbravo.com/green/ and if you want to go further you can also check out the source code and give it a try: http://openbravo.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/openbravo/branchs/green/

We are very excited with the opportunity of starting a community-driven development and incorporate all the best that you: developers and users can offer to this development. Everybody who want to be involved in the development of Openbravo Green is welcome. We are looking forward to get feedback from our community regarding Openbravo Green. You can follow the discussions in the Openbravo Green forum: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=680521

By now there is a proposal available for reviewing and feedback http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/index.php/Design_principles_for_Openbravo_Green until 1st of August 2007. Once the design principles are frozen, we plan to continue with the detailed architecture design documents, which will also be a subject of discussion during a period of time.

See you at the Openbravo Green forum.