Navision co-founder joins Openbravo board
One of the best ways to see how a company is doing is by looking at the caliber of people it attracts. With that in mind, it's impressive to see whom open-source enterprise resource-planning vendor Openbravo just recruited:
Jesper Balser, co-founder and former CEO of Navision, a leading ERP vendor acquired by Microsoft in 2002, is the newest member of its board of directors.
In addition, Openbravo has hired Cees Poortman, another veteran of Navision and Microsoft, as its vice president of global commercial operations.
The VAR Guy suggests that these hires "speak volumes about growing momentum for open-source applications," and he's right. But it's also a particular testament to the quality of Openbravo's team and its own momentum, something I see regularly as an adviser to Openbravo.
Open source has clearly gone mainstream. It is attracting some of the best and brightest from the proprietary-software world, as they see the writing on the wall for incumbents.
Disclosure: I am an adviser to Openbravo.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I would specifically like to see better multidimensional accounting such that a tool like FRx (which Navision works VERY well with) can be used for financial reporting with OpenBravo.