Magento, the new open source ecommerce platform,  is a promising new entrant that should be evaluated against OFBiz and osCommerce. The Magento project is lead by Verian Technologies, a consulting firm that worked with osCommerce and then decided they could do better by taking their experience and creating a new ecommerce platform.

As Adam Michelson writes in his blog post on the Optaros website, Magento is entering a crowded space of offerings that promise a better ecommerce Web storefront. Magento is betting that even though the ecommerce storefront is a relatively mature space, that it is still an underserved market. They may be correct as there does seem to be a good amount of interest for their production release. The biggest differentiator for Magento from most of its storefront competition is that it is an open source solution offered under the Open Software License (OSL 3.0). There are only a few other well known open source web storefronts, OFBiz and osCommerce being the most well known. OFBiz is more of a framework, and offers capabilities beyond the ecommerce storefront. osCommerce is more focused on ecommerce functionality. Magento’s heritage is osCommerce, so it has an ecommerce storefront and merchandizing focus as well.

Magento is in large part a fresh-start to osCommerce. Magento is composed of a team that knows ecommerce very well, and they have created a solid set of ecommerce capability. Magento’s goal is to be less complex than osCommerce, as osCommerce has grown into a somewhat complex collection of offerings. Of course Magento is much more immature at this point, with far fewer adjunct projects than osCommerce. Magento also offers professional support for customers and a partnership program for integrators. Magento will feel more like a company that has an open source offering as opposed to osCommerce which is more of a pure-play open source community. Magento is also likely to keep the code base under their control, while contributors to the osCommerce platform are from a several corporations including PayPal and Amazon.

Magento offers similar technology as osCommerce as they are both written in PHP. But architecturally Magento is more of a collection of services than osCommerce. In this way, even though Magento is written in PHP and OFBiz is Java, Magento is architecturally more like OFBiz than osCommerce. Magento and OFBiz share a similar architectural approach of being constructed from a collection of underlying services. This allows to leverage the individual services and assemble them to the specific solution you need. In comparison, osCommerce is more of a package-type implementation, and OFBiz allows a bit more assemble. Magento can be deployed as a package for sure, but the core architecture also allows for assembly as well as they have an underlying services model.

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Open Source has been here for quite some time and large and smaller enterprises have learned to deal with it. With developing commercial open source business models and a shake out of who the winners in each category are, software evaluation and acquisition has become easier and less risky. Are you looking for a database? Then typically your choice will be MySQL. An application server? Sure, JBoss should be a safe bet. Business intelligence? Pentaho or Jasper will be the answer. For document management you probably are going to select Alfresco. And the list goes on. Only in a few domains there are many or no clear leaders. The exception is certainly Content Management where some 2’000 plus technologies fight for users, but even there the short list can easily be reduced to 5-8 players and if programming language is a criteria you probably don’t need to look at more than 3. Is Customer Relationship Management different in this aspect? Well, at first sight SugarCRM seems to be the clear leader and it certainly has more downloads and paying customers than most other CRM tools out there. But it caters more for small and midrange customers or for departmental applications than for the large enterprise. And the fact that it is PHP based limits its use in many strongly Java focused IT departments.

There is clearly room for a Java based componentized CRM platform that can be integrated with existing CRM applications as easy as used stand alone. It needs to support open standards and allow for low effort configuration and customizations while still remaining upgradeable. And it needs to be able to compete with the Siebels and SAPs of this world, not in terms of functional richness as nobody can consume all what Siebel is offering, but in terms of being extendable and customizable. While there are Java based CRM technologies out there such as Adempiere, Compiere or OpenCRX none of them is really state-of-the-art in many aspects, be it concerning the integration of the online channel, the features for campaign management and marketing analytics/automation or the quality and adaptability of their frontends. They are not customizable to the extent Enterprises need it. And they have in common that they are not componentized, you either use the whole thing or you take another. And finally the lack the ease of use and low effort install approach that is needed to be effective as an open source vendor. So, who will take this challenge and is there a business case for the “Alfresco” of CRM? I strongly believe so and I can guarantee that VCs do so too if the right team comes with the right plan and ideally at least half of the technology already built. And what has been said is at as well true for the even larger ERP domain.

But remember, commercial open source is at least as much about online marketing and highly efficient and effective sales processes than about software.

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With all the bad press around MS Windows Vista and the frustrations of many users with the user interface of MS Office 2007 OpenOffice.org 3.0 looks to many like the white knight in the office productivity battle. OpenOffice 3.0 (currently in Beta) comes with a number of new features that make it an even better competitor to MS Office than the versions before. It opens MS Offic 2007 files (e.g. ldocx, .pptx) and it offers enhanced compatibility between the different operation system platforms (e.g. Mac OS, Windows, Linux). So the key goal is to allow more people to collaborate, regardless of their platform and their office suite they are using. Interesting for many could also be the new collaboration features when working on the same spreadsheet files with other people or the Solver functionality that MS Office users may know and Microsoft apparently doesn’t offer for MS Office 2008 for Mac OS any more. Many other changes have been incorporated into OO 3.0, from better PDF support to enhanced charting and better compatibility with MS Office. So it could well be that with these recent changes OO 3.0 will receive an even higher rating on EOS Directory than before. And it’s clearly time for enterprises looking for alternatives to investigate again.

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