HOUSTON BUSINESS REVIEW

COST-EFFECTIVE IT: THE COMPIERE DIFFERENCE
By Richard Sonnier

Houston Business Show Commentator Richard Sonnier, of the Information Technology Services firm Nimble Services, provides weekly information on our show about information technology issues. Mr. Sonnier can be reached at 281.445.4800 x 250 or via email.

This week I will continue to discuss Compiere, a free and complete business application.

Compiere History

The Compiere software was written for Goodyear Germany and has been running in production "since March 2000 in the headquarters and branches of the tire retailer." It was an improved version of a previous software package developed by the same principle author in early 1980's. Thus, the Compiere software represents over twenty years of experience in business software. The software is developed and supported by ComPiere, Inc. ComPiere, Inc. is a private company based in the USA.

How is Compiere Different?

Beyond it being open source, Compiere is very different from other business applications. Standard business applications focus on functional pieces of the business. For example, QuickBooks does business accounting. If you have QuickBooks and want to manage your sales and marketing with a customer relationship management (CRM) application, you must buy another software package like ACT! This results in the duplication of customer information and inefficiencies in your business.

Compiere is truly integrated so that all your business information is stored and accessed within the Compiere application. For example, CRM is simply built into the system. Compiere achieves this integration by implementing business processes and not business functions. At its core Compiere is based on relationship management and the associated information for the relationships. Compiere stores all this relationship information in its database so that more of the application functionality is actually stored as data (sometimes called metadata). This architecture allows fast implementation, and everything in the system can be changed when needed. A business can go production with Compiere in a few weeks.

Compiere is a safe business system and designed to be 100% available to the users. Since any computer system can have failures, Compiere is designed to handle any failures safely. The software detects when things go wrong and allows you to recover quickly.

The most amazing and important aspect of Compiere results from its design as an integrated set of business processes and the integrity of its data. With Compiere you can change the structure of the system at ANY time so that as your business and business processes change over time, you just change the Compiere system, too. Compiere will re-post any transactions if needed by the change. QuickBooks just cannot do this. With QuickBooks if you need to change your accounting to meet some business requirement, you start over. Most other business systems are similarly rigid. Thus, Compiere is more flexible than other business software and can adapt to business changes far better.

Recommendation

Go to Compiere.org and check out the world's most popular open source application for business. Next week I will finish my discussion of Compiere.