ERP Opening To Open Source

One well-known name and one relative newcomer have designs on the enterprise resource-planning world, and will use open source technology to take on the entrenched powers in the industry. Most people familiar with ERP know of PeopleSoft, and its co-founder Dave Duffield. Probably far less know the name Michael Frappier of SQLFusion. They both want to make the stratospheric reaches of ERP more attainable for small to medium businesses. Duffield's We've taken a revolutionary approach to technology that includes open source, object-oriented techniques, XML, and web services. This next generation approach will result in applications that are highly adaptable, easy to use, and less expensive to deploy and manage. Duffield has some former PeopleSoft folks along with smart people from other firms in his leadership team. Ex-PeopleSoft vice chairman Aneel Bhusri is Workday's other co-founder. Duffield's displeasure at Oracle's hostile takeover of PeopleSoft may manifest itself in the new software-as-a-service venture being developed at Workday. It is too early to think about where Larry Ellison may be on Duffield's "to-do" list, but building support among small to medium businesses (SMBs) would be a prudent step for Workday. Lawndale, CA-based OpenSourceFusion project, aimed at those SMBs. Currently they have made four tools available at OpenSourceFusion, with the idea of permitting users to mashup a selection of applications to suit their needs. Frappier mentioned here.") Drag this to your Bookmarks. Add to document.write("Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.