Open-source ERP vendor Compiere gets US$6M funding

Compiere has secured its first external funding to the tune of US$6 million and is planning to relocate its headquarters, the open-source midmarket business applications company said Tuesday.

The vendor makes the open-source integrated ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) Compiere software that can be used on-premise or can be hosted. In a different take on the traditional open-source model, the company focuses on developing and supporting the software, leaving product distribution to its 70-plus global partner network. There are currently about 240 paying Compiere customers, along with more than 1 million downloads of the open-source software.

Compiere plans to use the funds from venture capital investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA) to enhance its software to better serve its partners' needs, said Jorg Janke, founder and chief executive officer of Compiere. In particular, the company intends to expand its manufacturing and CRM capabilities. Previously, the Compiere software was more heavily weighted toward providing ERP functionality.

Currently employing fewer than 10 people, Compiere looks to hire more staff and move from Portland, Oregon, to California's Bay Area, Janke said. The main reason for the move is to have access to a larger pool of skilled ERP developers, he added. Compiere is looking at real estate in Silicon Valley and hopes to relocate within a month.

In the midmarket space, Compiere competes with Oracle in terms of the technology it acquired from J.D. Edwards and Microsoft with the software it gained through buying Great Plains Software and Navision, Janke said.

Compiere's software runs on Linux, Windows, Macintosh and Unix and supports Oracle's database. Janke expects to add support for the open source Apache Derby database in July. Derby is based on the Cloudscape database that IBM made available to the open-source community last year.

After Derby, Compiere next plans to support IBM's DB2 and later Microsoft's SQL Server, Janke said.

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