Welcome to HotWax Media

HotWax Media CTO, David Jones, presented in a technical session at Sun's JavaOne 2007 conference in San Francisco, California. Jones was joined by Ean Schuessler, CTO at Brainfood, Inc., as well as Bruno Souza from Sun Microsystems. The session was entitled "Apache OFBiz: Real-World Open Source Java Platform ERP," and centered around Apache Open For Business (OFBiz) as a complete enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that is written in the Java programming language and ready for industrial application.

Beginning with a look at the origin of OFBiz (including Len Silverston's universal data model work) the group then examined OFBiz's sophisticated infrastructure for managing e-commerce, catalogs, promotion and pricing, orders (sales and purchase), customers (customer relationship management), fulfillment, accounting, manufacturing, work efforts, and content.

The presentation also discussed implications of an open source universal data model, including:

• Gains in productivity from using preexisting code versus the inherent challenge of learning a large system
• Cause to reconsider build-vs-buy based on high-quality open source ERP
• Potential benefits of sharing best practices with vendors, suppliers, and even competitors through source code

The session concluded with a demonstration that was rooted in actual implementation and application, focusing on how off-the-shelf OFBiz functionality can be modified to handle some specific business problems, including:

• An ERP system created to provide knowledge and system management for a large construction company with more than 8,000 employees, 35,000 home starts each year, and $7 billion dollars in annual revenue
• CMS and CRM models for a 14-city technical conference
• A legal contract management system built with the OFBiz workflow management system

As the participants left the stage, a sense of imminent global domination by OFBiz of all business processes for the open source Java platform was palpable to all in attendance.