Developer(s) Consona Corporation License GPL or Privative | Type ERP, CRM Website www.compiere.com | |
Stable release 3.3 / March 24, 2009; 7 years ago (2009-03-24) Operating system | ||
Compiere (pronounced KOM-pyeh-reh, "to accomplish, complete, fulfill" in Italian) is an open source ERP and CRM business solution for the Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) in distribution, retail, service and manufacturing. Compiere is distributed by Consona Corporation and through a Partner Network, a collection of trained and authorized business partners.
Contents
Compiere was founded in 1999 by Jorg Janke and was a top 10 project in Sourceforge from 2002 for 4 years reaching one million downloads and 100 partners in 2006.
In 2006, Compiere, Inc. raised venture capital from New Enterprise Associates with the goal of transforming the successful open source ERP project into a growing and sustainable commercial open source business. In 2007, the company added new executives, revamped engineering and support processes, and expanded its sales and service channels . The Compiere product line expanded to include Professional, Enterprise and Cloud Editions while the company continued to maintain the open source foundation as Community Edition .
Like many commercial ventures built around open source projects, there was a degree of contention between company management (who sought to monetize the investments in R&D, Services and Support) and voices from the community (who desired that Compiere source code and business processes remained free and open as Adempiere at that moment and iDempiere some years later). On June 16, 2010, Consona acquired Compiere, Inc. Terms of the deal were not disclosed .
The application and source code is provided on the basis of the GNU General Public License version 2; this comprises the Community Edition. Also available for a fee is a Professional Edition with more features, a commercial license, documentation and support contracts.
Functionality
Compiere encompasses ERP functionality, but in order to avoid the duplication of information and the need for synchronization, it's organized in a different way. Compiere modules are: Quote to Cash, Requisition-to-Pay, Customer relationship management, Partner Relations Management, Supply Chain Management, Performance Analysis, Warehouse, Double-entry bookkeeping, Work-flow-Management and Web Store. A manufacturing module is being developed within an independent project CMPCS (see external links section).
Architecture
Compiere is a Model Driven Architecture development, deployment and maintenance framework designed with the intention of following changes as business evolves. At any time, customers can change the information structure, adjusting to new information needs. Compiere provides multiple views of business information based on the detail of the actual transactions. This structure allows flexibility and integration of supplemental external information. And since information is presented as views (using Compiere's MVC architecture), they can be changed to meet the needs of the business. Compiere is entirely based on the concept of Active Data Dictionary (ADD). Compiere Data Dictionary contains definitions of a data entity (type, validation, etc.), how it is displayed (label on screens and reports, help, display sequence and position relative to other fields), and the display rules. It also contains security and access rules.
Compiere has been developed with Java EE.
Database independence
Compiere has been criticized for not being a pure open source product because of its dependence on Oracle database (including the free Oracle XE); this is changing now, since version 2.5.2 Compiere is database independent to some extent. The project has released a Database Kit for porting Compiere to multiple databases. PostgreSQL, MySQL and Sybase ports are in Beta status. Compiere can also be run under the Firebird database using the Fyracle extensions, without porting.
Taking advantage of the Database Kit to create a port for the Apache Derby database the ER/Box project provides an integrated all-Java, all open source Compiere distribution. In addition to the Apache Derby database port ER/Box is also capable of running on PostgreSQL.
Compiere also works with the open source alternative to Oracle database, EnterpriseDB. User documentation is still offered on a fee-based accessibility.