Odoo: The New OpenERP

Moving into new territories, beyond ERP.

OpenERP is moving into new territories, beyond ERP. Over the past weeks, we released an open source CMS, a disruptive eCommerce and a Business Intelligence engine. Integrating your sales floor with inventory, accounting and manufacturing plant is one thing. But we think modern companies deserve more than this.

Great companies should integrate all their sales channels: point of sale, eCommerce, inbound sales. Great companies need to have strong inbound marketing activities linked to a 360° reporting engine and to their CRM. Great companies need their project management application linked to their timesheets, financial and accounting applications.

With 3.000+ apps, OpenERP is unique. No other product allows such a level of integration out-of-the-box. For these reasons we think it's time to differentiate OpenERP from traditional ERP players. There is no comparison anymore.

So, we renamed the product and company into "Odoo".

Why Odoo?

We needed a brand which is free of constraints. We wanted a brand that allows us to release ERP applications like sales, accounting, inventory, procurements. But the brand should also fit with our latest apps like website builders, e-commerce, point of sales or business intelligence. Odoo is growing so quickly that we also expect to release stuff we don't even think of today. Applications that are not compatible with the perception the people have of an ERP. If we need to build sky-rockets to empower our users, we will do it.

Odoo is a suite of business apps, not only an ERP. 200.000 users are using one application only. To break this "one big block" image of traditional ERPs, we wanted a name that we can compose to create names for every standalone application.

Choosing the right name is hard. To find the perfect name, we analysed the names of top internet companies. We discovered a direct correlation between the company valuation and the number of 'O' in its name. The graph below shows the average valuation of the top 10 internet companies according to the number of 'O' in their names.

With three 'O' in its name, 'Odoo' is in phase with our ambitions.

The design process

To create the logo we worked with dozens of designers. Here are a few of their propositions.

To define guidelines for the new brand, we went for a "website first" approach. We designed the perfect website using Odoo CMS directly. This became the reference for the style of all others materials: business cards, roll-ups, t-shirts, powerpoint presentations, etc.

About the strategy

We removed the words "Open" and "ERP" from our name. But Odoo is and always will be fully open source. Our open source business model is unchanged. Our commitment to an open software and community remains. And it's the same for ERP; Odoo's key priorities are still management applications like accounting, project management, crm, inventory, etc.

For partners and community members, you should read the FAQ related to the name change.

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