Posted by
Nicholas Ochiel on
Aug 04, 2005; 7:43am
URL: http://ofbiz.116.s1.nabble.com/OFBiz-Dev-Update-on-ERP-Tender-tp165807.html
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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