Maybe you know Odoo from its striking purple color, eloquent CEO or many monthly open vacancies. But the Belgian tech company is more than that. Last summer it acquired unicorn status and the company is increasingly kicking the shins of giants such as Microsoft and SAP. Why Exactly Power Partners decides to build a new bridge between Microsoft and Odoo, you can find out here.
Appstore
Odoo is an open-source software package for enterprise resource planning (ERP) for SMEs. It has more than 7 million users, 90% use the free version, about 10% pay for applications. According to CEO Fabien Pinckaers, Odoo represents only 0.1% of the global SME market, a gigantic market as we also experience at Power Partners.
However, these companies often have different requirements. Odoo tackles this problem by developing its own app store for business applications. Today, there are more than 30,000 apps available, often developed by third parties like us. You can also find our free application in the app store. According to the Power BI website, there are now more than 500 free connectors available and we just added one.
Not because we want to be disruptive, but simply because our biggest competitor is our own community.
Fabien Pinckaers - CEO Odoo in De Tijd
Love-hate relationship
With a free version of its platform, Odoo uses a similar strategy to Microsoft Power BI. You can download the desktop version of Power BI for free and connect to your data yourself to build rich interactive reports. Are you not using Power BI yet? No problem you can get it here.
'And then there is the quality of our product. Traditional players develop software with beautiful dashboards and charts for managers. But most of the time, they're hell for people who actually have to use them. Odoo starts from the user. We want people to spend less time on tasks that you can outsource to software.'
Fabien Pinckaers – CEO Odoo in De Tijd
CEO Fabien Pinckaers does not shy away from the confrontation with Microsoft and other major players. He is convinced that Odoo succeeds where Microsoft (Dynamics) failed. "No one has succeeded in building a fully integrated platform. Microsoft has tried, SAP has tried. They have invested millions. And yet they have not succeeded in their intention," says Pinckaers in De Tijd.
However, there is also another side of the story. The steep rise in new Odoo users brings a new group of business users/data analysts to the surface. More and more users want to analyze their data in specialized BI tools, one of which is Microsoft Power BI. The advantage of such BI platforms is that each user can build their own dashboards and share them with others. Just as the SME market has many needs in business apps, every company also has specific KPIs, benchmarks...
The one-size-fits-all dashboards that are standard in Odoo fall short of the needs of medium-sized companies.
Jules Vandierendonck - Power Partners
Paradoxical Odoo mainly focuses on user-friendliness for the daily user and thus takes market share from large players. Only it focuses so on the input side, that it loses sight for management reporting. Users want to analyze their data in more detail. Often they also want to include data from other systems (think Google Analytics, webshops, Facebook Ads, Exact, Isabel...) in their analysis. This leads people back to Microsoft, Tableau, Qlik... for their specific business intelligence needs.
Conclusion
At Power Partners, we stay away from discussions about which is the best ERP, accounting or planning software. The reality is that a lot of sector (think of transport and logistics) and region-specific software is being developed. In our projects we come across many different data sources.
Odoo's mission is to offer the all-in-one solution to the SME segment. Judging by the spectacular growth, the Belgian company also (at least) partially succeeds in this set-up. The growing number of active users as well as the increasing importance in medium-sized companies, leads to a new wave of professional business intelligence requirements. These users, in turn, end up with platforms such as: Microsoft Power BI, Qlik Sense and Tableau. And so they need each other.
Does your company use Odoo? Would you like to discover how Power BI can help you analyze this data better? Download our Free Power BI - Odoo connector with example dashboard!
