Re: Clear competitive advantage

You have gotten some answers on the other thread but I think a general historical look may be helpful.

On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 9:40 AM, Brian Wolf <..hidden..> wrote:

Anyone in sales knows that the key to moving a prospect to buy isn't price. Because if it were, no one would buy a Lexus when they could buy a Chevy instead. Lexus sells because it it perceived as having an entirely different value. It is all about articulating a clear competitive advantage; showing why our product more closely fits their needs; presenting greater value.

I'd like to collect from everyone a list of reasons why they chose to run their enterprise (large or small) on LedgerSMB. Just one sentence will do. What motivated you to run with LedgerSMB (instead of Quickbooks, Quickbooks online, Sage, Great Plains or whatever)?

Before the fork, SQL-Ledger had made significant inroads simply by being the first major open source accounting solution with a wide-ranging feature set of this sort, which was web accessible, etc. This has been eroded somewhat by other players like OpenERP.

The major thing we have focused on in the fork and beyond has been our response to security issues (the reason for the fork and so forth). This was a major factor in our uptake.

Every major release we move forward on security significantly. This is not slowing down in 1.4.

Other major advantages today are internet accessibility and customizability, and the ability to easily interoperate with other software. Compared to quickbooks, we don't have a payroll module yet and having the same geographical coverage they have will take some time, but we are far more customizable, and we are internet accessible even when self-hosted. Compares to QB and Great Plains, it is far easier to integrate with other software in the database. I don't have a lot of experience with Sage ERP 500 other than moving one customer from this software. Sage ERP 500 is better than we are feature-wise, and has good interoperability, but we don't have forced upgrades, and we have a more open community in terms of supporting older versions.

Long-term we are trying to build an ERP platform probably in the vein of Sage or SAP.

Hope this helps. This is largely my view based on my customers' experiences.

Best Wishes,

Chris Travers