Small Businesses Ride The Open Source Tailwind To High Profitability

Commercial open source vendors are reporting spectacular growth in a year when everyone else is offering excuses about the economic downturn. So, how does it matter to you as a small medium business?

A well known quote from investment guru Warren Buffett is "One of the lessons your management has learned - and, unfortunately, 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, VA based xTuple is a vendor of Business Suites, also known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. They took a big gamble and released the source code for their community edition, PostBooks, in July 2007. They license the Standard and Manufacturing editions with additional features and support. 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 open source 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 future paid support customers will emerge.

GroundWork Open Source Increases Customer-base by 105 Percent

GroundWork Monitor Community Edition is free open source software for monitoring the data center suitable for small medium businesses. Recently they also reduced the entry price drastically for the Enterprise Quickstart using which small medium businesses can monitor up to 100 devices. As a result of these steps, 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 technology and value-added reseller (VAR) partnerships. They also expanded their international reach during 2009, conducting transactions in over 75 countries and opened a European headquarters.

In addition, Openbravo, vendor of open source Business Suites (ERP) as well as Point of Sale (POS) software, announced successful growth of its global partner community, which includes over 100 partners across more than 40 countries. In early 2010 they reached 1.5 million downloads. Also, JasperSoft, a vendor of open source business intelligence solutions, reported a solid year of growth despite the down economy. "Business is strong and as we conclude our year at the end of January we're expecting to see 60 percent growth year over year," they said.

Take Advantage Of This Open Source Tailwind

It is fairly obvious that the wind is blowing in the direction of using more open source software to keep costs down, 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 and profitability goals too?