[OFBiz] Dev - Update on ERP Tender

[Nicholas Ochiel]

Hi everyone,
It's been slightly over a month since my initial mail indicating that we
were bidding for a tender issued by a large East African Firm.

Let me provide a few more details for future reference (or for anyone
interested)

1)The enterprise in question is known as East African Breweries Limited.
This is the largest, most valuable company in Kenya with an estimated
net worth of $12,500,000.

2)The system they required consisted of 2 main parts: a distributed
finance system and an order management system (the second of which we
had keen interest).

Unfortunately, New Enterprise Objects did not obtain the tender.
However, we did gain something more valuable i.e. lessons we can carry
with us and make use of going forward. I believe these issues are
relevant to the open source ERP community so I'll detail 2 of them here
(more details about this can be found on my blog later today).

1)Be more 'in your face' about the product.

NEO is a an open source startup. Gaining credibility in the
short term (and traction in the long term) can only be achieved by
communicating every aspect of the product and it's benefits to the
customer constantly and consistently. We did not do this well. We were
going against companies like Sun, Microsoft and Oracle and other large
ISVs. Without ensuring our own visibility, we got lost in the noise and
politics.

2)Educate(Evangelize?) about open source long before the opportunity to
leverage it arises.

Open source does not have a real presence or visibility in East Africa.
[If I could provide it] You would see that the very format of the tender
gave strong indications that they were only considering closed
proprietary solutions. In truth, the potential customer was totally
ignorant of open source and had no real concept of it's true value.

We should have educated the companies we anticipated to deal with long
before this tender was issued. We've learned from this and are putting
together a magazine called FOSS Representative federated under NEO(tm).
This will [initially] be specifically targeted at large enterprises in
Africa. As an initial step, we feel this will allow FOSS to gain
significant visibility in Africa.

We aim to provide visibility (for open source projects such as OfBiz)
and educate the decision makers on the broader issues  regarding Free
and Open Source Software (financial-legal). You can find the magazine
team's blog at http://fossrepresentative.blogspot.com where you can find
more details about the project. The web site will be up soon as well as
the first issue.

NEO aims to bring opens source into the African Enterprise and we
believe that OfBiz will be instrumental in that process. We would highly
appreciate any comments, barbs,advise and\or criticisms in this regard.
Additionally, I'd love to hear from those of you facing (overcoming)
similar challenges.

Contacts:
Feel free to mail me personally or [hidden email]. Use the
latter if you'd like to discuss various aspects of the magazine)

Thanks to everyone in this wonderful community for helping develop a
product which a startup like ourselves can now confidently use to engage
the enterprise in ways that profit all stakeholders. You are invaluable
and we continue to learn from you.

--
Nicholas Ochiel,
NEO (New Enterprise Objects)(tm)
Director, Head of Technology Solutions Innovation.
NEO:: http://openenterpriseafrica.com/neo

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will
not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men of talent. Genius will
not . . . the world is full of educated derelicts."

Read my blog at:: http://billionairebusinessman.blogspot.com/





 
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[David E. Jones]

Nicholas,

Sorry to hear the engagement didn't turn out. You are very right that  
especially for business automation software most businesses aren't  
even considering it, often even (or usually?) the larger ones. It is  
interesting to read your comments on the topic.

There was some pretty good discussion at the OFBiz Users Conference  
this year on this very topic, especially in the wrap-up panel  
discussion on the 2nd day. I am working on getting those digitized  
and compressed right now, and there were a few people who volunteered  
bandwidth to offer the conference recordings as a download. We may  
compress them more for that though, or lower the resolution a bit and  
such, the DVD resolution videos (720x480) compressed with the new H.
264 standard take up about 200Mb per hour, which is pretty  
incredible, but still a lot to download when there are about 12 hours  
of recordings for the conference. Undersun will also be making these  
available on DVD, just like the recordings of the previous conferences.

Let us know when you get that publication going, I'm sure many on  
this list would be interested in reading and possibly contributing to  
it.

-David


On Aug 4, 2005, at 12:44 AM, Nicholas Ochiel wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> It's been slightly over a month since my initial mail indicating  
> that we
> were bidding for a tender issued by a large East African Firm.
>
> Let me provide a few more details for future reference (or for anyone
> interested)
>
> 1)The enterprise in question is known as East African Breweries  
> Limited.
> This is the largest, most valuable company in Kenya with an estimated
> net worth of $12,500,000.
>
> 2)The system they required consisted of 2 main parts: a distributed
> finance system and an order management system (the second of which we
> had keen interest).
>
> Unfortunately, New Enterprise Objects did not obtain the tender.
> However, we did gain something more valuable i.e. lessons we can carry
> with us and make use of going forward. I believe these issues are
> relevant to the open source ERP community so I'll detail 2 of them  
> here
> (more details about this can be found on my blog later today).
>
> 1)Be more 'in your face' about the product.
>
> NEO is a an open source startup. Gaining credibility in the
> short term (and traction in the long term) can only be achieved by
> communicating every aspect of the product and it's benefits to the
> customer constantly and consistently. We did not do this well. We were
> going against companies like Sun, Microsoft and Oracle and other large
> ISVs. Without ensuring our own visibility, we got lost in the noise  
> and
> politics.
>
> 2)Educate(Evangelize?) about open source long before the  
> opportunity to
> leverage it arises.
>
> Open source does not have a real presence or visibility in East  
> Africa.
> [If I could provide it] You would see that the very format of the  
> tender
> gave strong indications that they were only considering closed
> proprietary solutions. In truth, the potential customer was totally
> ignorant of open source and had no real concept of it's true value.
>
> We should have educated the companies we anticipated to deal with long
> before this tender was issued. We've learned from this and are putting
> together a magazine called FOSS Representative federated under NEO
> (tm).
> This will [initially] be specifically targeted at large enterprises in
> Africa. As an initial step, we feel this will allow FOSS to gain
> significant visibility in Africa.
>
> We aim to provide visibility (for open source projects such as OfBiz)
> and educate the decision makers on the broader issues  regarding Free
> and Open Source Software (financial-legal). You can find the magazine
> team's blog at http://fossrepresentative.blogspot.com where you can  
> find
> more details about the project. The web site will be up soon as  
> well as
> the first issue.
>
> NEO aims to bring opens source into the African Enterprise and we
> believe that OfBiz will be instrumental in that process. We would  
> highly
> appreciate any comments, barbs,advise and\or criticisms in this  
> regard.
> Additionally, I'd love to hear from those of you facing (overcoming)
> similar challenges.
>
> Contacts:
> Feel free to mail me personally or [hidden email].  
> Use the
> latter if you'd like to discuss various aspects of the magazine)
>
> Thanks to everyone in this wonderful community for helping develop a
> product which a startup like ourselves can now confidently use to  
> engage
> the enterprise in ways that profit all stakeholders. You are  
> invaluable
> and we continue to learn from you.
>
> --
> Nicholas Ochiel,
> NEO (New Enterprise Objects)(tm)
> Director, Head of Technology Solutions Innovation.
> NEO:: http://openenterpriseafrica.com/neo
>
> "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will
> not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men of talent. Genius  
> will
> not . . . the world is full of educated derelicts."
>
> Read my blog at:: http://billionairebusinessman.blogspot.com/
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dev mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
>

 
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[Si Chen-2]

You might find this to be interesting.  I think the "pitch" and
responses are pretty typical actually:

http://opensourcestrategies.blogspot.com/2005/06/30-second-pitch.html

Also, I've noticed that state owned enterprises in emerging economies
are not the best prospects for open source software.  I'm curious if
you've had the same experience from Kenya.

Si

David E. Jones wrote:

>
> Nicholas,
>
> Sorry to hear the engagement didn't turn out. You are very right that  
> especially for business automation software most businesses aren't  
> even considering it, often even (or usually?) the larger ones. It is  
> interesting to read your comments on the topic.
>
> There was some pretty good discussion at the OFBiz Users Conference  
> this year on this very topic, especially in the wrap-up panel  
> discussion on the 2nd day. I am working on getting those digitized  
> and compressed right now, and there were a few people who volunteered  
> bandwidth to offer the conference recordings as a download. We may  
> compress them more for that though, or lower the resolution a bit and  
> such, the DVD resolution videos (720x480) compressed with the new H.
> 264 standard take up about 200Mb per hour, which is pretty  
> incredible, but still a lot to download when there are about 12 hours  
> of recordings for the conference. Undersun will also be making these  
> available on DVD, just like the recordings of the previous conferences.
>
> Let us know when you get that publication going, I'm sure many on  
> this list would be interested in reading and possibly contributing to  
> it.
>
> -David
>
>
> On Aug 4, 2005, at 12:44 AM, Nicholas Ochiel wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>> It's been slightly over a month since my initial mail indicating  
>> that we
>> were bidding for a tender issued by a large East African Firm.
>>
>> Let me provide a few more details for future reference (or for anyone
>> interested)
>>
>> 1)The enterprise in question is known as East African Breweries  
>> Limited.
>> This is the largest, most valuable company in Kenya with an estimated
>> net worth of $12,500,000.
>>
>> 2)The system they required consisted of 2 main parts: a distributed
>> finance system and an order management system (the second of which we
>> had keen interest).
>>
>> Unfortunately, New Enterprise Objects did not obtain the tender.
>> However, we did gain something more valuable i.e. lessons we can carry
>> with us and make use of going forward. I believe these issues are
>> relevant to the open source ERP community so I'll detail 2 of them  here
>> (more details about this can be found on my blog later today).
>>
>> 1)Be more 'in your face' about the product.
>>
>> NEO is a an open source startup. Gaining credibility in the
>> short term (and traction in the long term) can only be achieved by
>> communicating every aspect of the product and it's benefits to the
>> customer constantly and consistently. We did not do this well. We were
>> going against companies like Sun, Microsoft and Oracle and other large
>> ISVs. Without ensuring our own visibility, we got lost in the noise  and
>> politics.
>>
>> 2)Educate(Evangelize?) about open source long before the  opportunity to
>> leverage it arises.
>>
>> Open source does not have a real presence or visibility in East  Africa.
>> [If I could provide it] You would see that the very format of the  
>> tender
>> gave strong indications that they were only considering closed
>> proprietary solutions. In truth, the potential customer was totally
>> ignorant of open source and had no real concept of it's true value.
>>
>> We should have educated the companies we anticipated to deal with long
>> before this tender was issued. We've learned from this and are putting
>> together a magazine called FOSS Representative federated under NEO (tm).
>> This will [initially] be specifically targeted at large enterprises in
>> Africa. As an initial step, we feel this will allow FOSS to gain
>> significant visibility in Africa.
>>
>> We aim to provide visibility (for open source projects such as OfBiz)
>> and educate the decision makers on the broader issues  regarding Free
>> and Open Source Software (financial-legal). You can find the magazine
>> team's blog at http://fossrepresentative.blogspot.com where you can  
>> find
>> more details about the project. The web site will be up soon as  well as
>> the first issue.
>>
>> NEO aims to bring opens source into the African Enterprise and we
>> believe that OfBiz will be instrumental in that process. We would  
>> highly
>> appreciate any comments, barbs,advise and\or criticisms in this  regard.
>> Additionally, I'd love to hear from those of you facing (overcoming)
>> similar challenges.
>>
>> Contacts:
>> Feel free to mail me personally or [hidden email].  Use
>> the
>> latter if you'd like to discuss various aspects of the magazine)
>>
>> Thanks to everyone in this wonderful community for helping develop a
>> product which a startup like ourselves can now confidently use to  
>> engage
>> the enterprise in ways that profit all stakeholders. You are  invaluable
>> and we continue to learn from you.
>>
>> --
>> Nicholas Ochiel,
>> NEO (New Enterprise Objects)(tm)
>> Director, Head of Technology Solutions Innovation.
>> NEO:: http://openenterpriseafrica.com/neo
>>
>> "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will
>> not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men of talent. Genius  
>> will
>> not . . . the world is full of educated derelicts."
>>
>> Read my blog at:: http://billionairebusinessman.blogspot.com/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Dev mailing list
>> [hidden email]
>> http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
>>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Dev mailing list
>[hidden email]
>http://lists.ofbiz.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
>

 
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[hidden email]
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