7 October 2021, day two of the unveiling of Odoo version 15.0. Before the improvements and changes to each app were presented, there was Fabien's keynote speech from Odoo's CEO.
It was about Odoo's strengths and the outlook ahead. An excerpt of it follows in this post.
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Why I love Odoo
The number of people involved with Odoo grows as time passes, and with every new version released, as this one was. What is Odoo? What is Odoo worth? Why does it have so many people behind it? He spoke to those questions again.
① Odoo as software
Everyone engaged in a business wants the work to be more efficient and less of a burden. Meanwhile, much of the environment around business today — small and medium-sized companies in particular — has in reality not got far with putting its work on sensible systems.
- operations that have not changed in ten years
- a system was brought in, but the way it is managed is convoluted and hard to follow
- nobody on the staff to draw up a cost-effective picture of the whole system and drive it forward
Solving problems like these, and improving the environment people work in.
That is the software Odoo is.
② The community
Because Odoo is open source — its source is published — developers and users around the world are connected through the Odoo community, praise and criticism alike are exchanged openly and actively, and the product evolves day by day as a result.
Having a community, which few other ERPs do, brings a great deal with it: the range of moves available to solve a problem, the speed of getting them done, and more.
③ Growth
As you will all know already, Odoo is in the middle of rapid growth in users and in revenue.
At this time last year Odoo's head office had around 1,000 staff; it has roughly doubled since, to about 1,800, and the hiring plan for next year is 3,000. The aim is to keep pace with the community's growth while making each new version a step that answers what the market needs.
④ Reach in the market
This may be familiar too, but Odoo now has seven million users. That alone makes it a product with considerable influence. There are 4,100 Odoo partners worldwide, and counting the freelancers and web designers who work beyond them, its reach really is large.
Perhaps… a few too many names were named.
Compared with other ERPs, Odoo is software written from the customer's point of view, open, and friendly to its users. The larger it grows, the more people there are who can say their way of working changed for the better.
And getting this far was unquestionably not Odoo's own doing, but the doing of the community around it.
He thanked them for it, and declared that greater value still is to come.
Odoo V15
This V15 release, too, brought the largest set of improvements yet.
① The main improvements
Where the improvements were most powerful:
- communication and integration inside each app (chat, video such as Zoom and Teams, documents)
- retail information management (purchasing, logistics, maintenance, the eCommerce site — the whole business flow covered in one)
- the website builder (fits many kinds of business, creative, and seamless with the back end)
- accounting (every document accounting touches, digital and managed as information)
It fits many business models, and the flow of information between them runs through Odoo as a single solution.
These improvements bring it a long way closer to what an ERP is trying to be.
② A wider customer segment
Odoo has been seen as suited to small and medium-sized companies, on grounds of low cost and speed of implementation; now that it has reached this scale and this range of features, we expect a serious move into large enterprises to begin.
③ What does not change
Odoo is an ecosystem, and it takes the customer's point of view. That does not change.
What it offers is not the old kind of system built for administrators, but a system for administrators and for users alike.
With as little waste as possible, and at a low price.
It is no exaggeration to say that growing to this scale was possible because the people involved with Odoo have held these as an unwavering vision and moved forward with the same view of them.
In summary
Large strides, rapid growth, and more acceleration to come…
That is where Odoo stands now.
What effect it has on the market is something to look forward to.
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