| By Christophe So |
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| September 25, 2009 01:15 PM EDT |
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Fabien Pinckaers make programs for businesses since the age of 13. Now at the age of 30, he developed his company, Tiny Sprl. It was established in 2002 while pursuing his studies in civil engineering at UCL (Louvain-la-Neuve). The story is beautiful and has only just begun. The history of this company is making on the cover page of the magazine "Trends Tendances" titled as "New Bill Gates is Belgian", dated Thursday 16 June 09.
Fabien Pinckaers has also developed several large scale projects, such as Auction- in-Europe.com, which become the leader in the art market in Belgium. He is also the founder of the LUG (Linux User Group) of Louvain-la- Neuve, and of several free projects like OpenReport, OpenStuff and Tiny Report. Educated as a civil engineer (polytechnic), he has won several IT prizes in Europe such as Wired and l'Inscene. A fierce defender of free software in the enterprise, he is in constant demand as a conference speaker and he is the author of numerous articles dealing with free software in the management of the enterprise. He is the author of the book "Open ERP - Pour une gestion d'entreprise efficace et intégrée" at Eyrolles.
Main attractive principles of open source software are: free access of codes and allowing to adapt at will. Open ERP now includes 500 modules of different kinds: accounting, finance, stock management, manufacturing, services management, crm, document management, direct marketing, ecommerce, point of sale, payroll, ... This catalogue has grown much more quickly than proprietary software: "In three and a half years, Open ERP has 42 accounts for 31 countries, Fabien Pinckaers figure, an proprietary software would have needed 10 years to get the same result. Today, it continue to reply to only 10% of requests we receive as there is a bigger demand then the current offer on the product. It currently employs 85 people, including 15 in Belgium and the balance in India.
Free licenses does not mean totally free, since we pay for software installation, training and for possible adaptations and not to mention maintenance. This annual service, billed by the proprietary software companies about 14% to 20% of the license ensures the sustainability of the program, updates and assistance in case of bug or worried. Another criticism against the publishers of free software: their size, considered too weak in the face of proprietary software giants.
Open ERP offers 2 different products:
The first one is dedicated to small enterprises (<30 employees). It's a self-service and low-cost offer with a unique price that include: the hosting, maintenance, support, training, Open ERP modules and migrations.
The second one is a service offer. We have customers from 20 to 2000 users on this offer. As an example:
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Government: Financial Administration of Vaud
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Education: ENA (Ecole Nationale d'Administration)
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CRM: Chamber of Commerce of Belgium
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Industries: Whirlpool
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Food: Groupe Costes
The company is developing so far in cash and remains small: less than 1 million sales in 2008, 700,000 Euros for the first six months of 2009, according to Fabien Pinckaers. Should be a few million of funds to hire teams of marketing and development and provide a more professional. Tiny has already been approached by investors French and British, but had declined.
If free software spreads in this market, which is already very busy with Microsoft, Sage, SAP, Oracle, etc.., Open ERP has a chance to be a good choice. Looking at this, coming days are going to be tough for proprietary software.
For more information contact to : sales@openerp.co.in
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