Open source software (OSS) vendors are reporting spectacular growth in a year when many businesses are offering excuses about the economic downturn. So, how does it matter to you as a SMB? A well known quote from investment guru Warren Buffett is “One of the lessons your management has learned – and, unfortunately, activepieces sometimes re-learned – is the importance of being in businesses where tailwinds prevail rather than headwinds.” As a small business, you want to take advantage of the tailwind, whenever you can, so that you sail faster towards your goals.
xTuple ERP Doubles Customer And Partner Base
Norfolk, biztrophy VA based xTuple is a vendor of Business Suites, also known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. xTuple announced a very successful 2009 despite tough market conditions. They doubled their customer base by gaining over 100 new commercial customers and doubled their partner base as well. The free OSS PostBooks edition has been downloaded over 320,000 times and they have seen a dramatic acceleration of their global user community to over 20,000 active members. This is the prospect pool from which their paid support customers will emerge.
GroundWork Increases Customer-base by 105 Percent
GroundWork Monitor Community Edition is free OSS for monitoring the data center, plusiliminus suitable for small medium businesses. Groundwork reports outstanding growth in 2009, increasing its customer base by 105 percent.
Sugar CRM Adds Over 2000 Customers And 50 New Partners
Sugar CRM recently announced that it enters 2010 with record momentum across revenue, community partnerships and international growth. They reported adding over 2,000 commercial customers and securing over 50 new partnerships. They also expanded their international reach during 2009, conducting transactions in over 75 countries. In addition, Openbravo, sanidad vendor of open source Business Suites (ERP) as well as Point of Sale (POS) software, announced successful growth of its global partner community, editorlistings which includes over 100 partners across more than 40 countries. Also, in early 2010 they reported reaching 1.5 million downloads. JasperSoft, a vendor of open source business intelligence solutions, sportis expect to reach 60% growth despite the down economy.
Take Advantage Of This Open Source Tailwind
It is fairly obvious that the wind is blowing in the direction of using more OSS for cost saving, have flexibility in modifying the software to the special needs of your business and in automating your operations for better customer service. Isn’t it time you leveraged this open source tailwind to reach your revenue businessresource and profitability goals too?
