Starting a business from the ground up has been a very learning-dense experience and certainly overwhelming at times. Learning all the various administration softwares was pretty strait-forward. We've administrated a cornucopia of softwares in the field. Keeping up to date with their status and getting them to play nicely together is a whole different challenge. In our experience, some enterprises exhaust tremendous resources having to create some sort of middle-ware, be it by code, or human for systems to share information.
This lead me to think back to my experience in established corporate sector. Oracle is the main player there. They have all sorts of applications and solutions in their ecosystem centered around their database solution. All built to communicate flawlessly to avoid any interruption in business. We're talking seconds of outage could cost millions. RIP their engineers.
So my question was, is there a FOSS (Free and Open-Sourced Software) solution for this EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY expensive corporate solution?
Side note: If you're not familiar with FOSS software, a good example is GIMP. Its a free image manipulation program along the lines of photoshop and has allowed artists to produce commercial grade content at no cost, no subscription, and no restrictions for over a decade now. This is the spirit of FOSS solutions, because at the heart of it, these solutions are just the same program with a different coat of paint. Business functions have not changed from time immemorial.
My search lead me to Odoo. Oh man, every solution we need is in this ecosystem, all beautifully orchestrated and customizable. CRM, Accounting, Helpdesk, Websites, Project Management, Inventory Management, E-Learning, Live Chat, POS, and much, much more.
So what's the catch?
Odoo makes its money with integration services. Moving business systems takes time, money and certain kind of meticulousness. Luckily, we have implemented this into our functions early and our experience as systems engineers has made it fairly seamless. No more external APIs and connectors!
They also have a cloud service that you can pay for if you prefer not to host your database on-premise.
TLDR;
Our customers will enjoy enhanced responsiveness and enterprise-grade service with our Enterpise Resource Planning integration!