Company Rebrands to Reflect App Expansion
Open source ERP provider OpenERP, which announced a new name and a $10 million round of funding earlier this year, has released digital marketing software that enables small companies to better compete with larger competitors.
The marketing apps are the latest modules in a software suite that also includes CRM, business intelligence and human capital management. The move into areas beyond ERP is what prompted the Belgium-based company to change its name from OpenERP to Odoo in May.
“We believe we have reached a turning point, not only for Odoo, but for the open source community, which has proven it can not only equal traditional software vendors but surpass them,” said company founder Fabian Pinckaers in a statement.
Among the new features in Version 8, the software's latest release:
- A content management system (CMS) that allows companies to build mobile-friendly websites using unique inline editing and building blocks
- A quote builder with templates for making, sending and getting approval on quotations, complete with the ability to accept electronic signatures
- An e-commerce platform that includes online payment capabilities and built-in cross-selling and upselling features
- Revamped business intelligence that the company says provides a 360-degree view on all business data in the system
- Apps that encompass several areas of marketing, including live chat, survey, events and email marketing
According to the company, “a huge effort has been done on the cleaning of the existing code base,” with just 17,000 lines of Python code added for the new features.
Odoo also recently tweaked its pricing, making the cloud-based software free for companies with one or two users and charging $15 per user for each application bundle. Under the new pricing plan, customers running fewer than three applications will pay less than old fee of $39 per user, while those using three apps pay roughly the same price.
According to Odoo: “Customers can start small, with only one or two applications, and extend later. With the new pricing, the barrier to the entry is lower for new customers. After several months, if the customer wants to deploy more applications, his price will increase according to his usage.”
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