Norbert Wessel interview

What's your daily job, and how is it related to open source ERP?

My daily job is to sell the idea of ADempiere as open source ERP to potential customers, consulting and key accounting. In fact there is not s single minute at day where I am not dealing with open source ERP.

You are specialised in Adempiere, which started as a fork from Compiere. Was it a good thing to fork?

No doubt, yes it was. The fork lead to ADempiere which is 100% free and open and driven by a rich community. ADempiere as project keeps growing because it is open and that rewards the good decision to fork.

Are companies using Compiere and Adempiere of the same opinion?

Many companies that used Compiere before have migrated to ADempiere. Let this speak for itself.

How is Adempiere development organised? It seems to be quite structured.

The project is organized in a way that allows developers to comit their code easily to a development branch. To ensure quality we do have a commit comittee that decides which contributions are to go into the stable branch. ERP-Systems have a high demand of stability and we try to maintain a organisation that ensures that.

Does this organisation reassure companies, and does it make it easier for them to adopt Adempiere?

The organisation can work as backup when a customers needs further support that he might not get from his service provider.

Does this organisation still allow for easy integration of new contributors?

Our project head, Red1, alway says "Information is free. People are not. Contributors are priceless."

Contributors are welcome and that is the reason why all roles are being elected. This gives proven contributors an easy and transparent way to join the project.

Furthermore each new contributor is assigned to a mentor that helps him to learn how the project works.

Although there's an organisation, there's no single company behind Adempiere. Does this have impact on the quality of support available for Adempiere?

The quality is as good as your service company where you bought it. If you are not happy you are free to switch to another ADempiere service provider. This natural competition increases the quality of support and reduces the cost in comparison to a vendor-based support.

What companies does Adempiere target? (by business type and by size)

10 to 250 employees in industries like wholesale and service.

Is there competition with other open source ERP solutions?

No, I do not think so. The competition is more towards proprietary ERP software.

Actually, there is a good climate between the projects. For instance, I meet people from OpenBravo, Ofbiz or SQLLedger regularly at exhibitions and have nice talks with them because they are nice people.

Only Compiere do not like to talk with us.