Services-based e-commerce goes open source
By Rodney Gedda
,
Computerworld
, 08/24/2006
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An open source e-commerce platform, claimed to be one of the first to support services and products in one application, will
be released in beta this week.
Damian Hickey, managing director of Brisbane-based software company osCommRes, said a fork of OsCommerce, in Version 2.0,
is one of the first among e-commerce systems globally to be services-oriented.
"People are really product-oriented," Hickey said, adding that osCommRes is suitable for predictable services and high-end
business-to-business.
"Professional people who contract out their time buy products online and expect that customers of a business will also buy
online."
Since forking OsCommerce in October last year, osCommRes has received private venture funding, grown to 17 staff in Australia
and India, and claims more than 10,000 downloads.
With 11 developers, osCommRes is released under the GPL. Hickey admits it was a "big risk" in not adopting a dual licensing
strategy like other open source companies, but believes it will result in a more active ecosystem.
The original impetus for the idea came when Hickey's wife's business was expanding too quickly and could no longer service
customers with spreadsheets.
"The single largest point of differentiation is that e-commerce is about products - except for our software," he said. "You
can mold in services and products - like book a tennis court and buy a set of tennis balls in the same transaction."
OsCommRes features an API to allow third-party plug-ins, integration with the Typo3 content management system (CMS) to allow
access to digital resources via subscription, and automated marketing with SMS, he said. Some 30 different reports can be
generated and the call center function allows businesses to copes with phone sales.
"It doesn't have a CRM link yet, but we're about to integrate with SugarCRM so people can purchase via Sugar," Hickey said.
"It's built on LAMP [Linux Apache MySQL PHP] and it is moving to MySQL and PHP 5 because we want to bring in stored procedures."
Hickey said the company decided to do something difficult and time-consuming, but it can now see the payoff.
"Open source software development is exploding; feedback we're getting from customers is they are happy it is open source,"
he said.
OsCommRes' business model is to perform customization of the software for businesses and to become a provider of on-demand
software, gaining a commission on sales transactions.
Music group Ten Tenors is a customer and Queensland University of Technology is looking to implement it as well.
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