Openbravo, MySQL: Killer Open Source Combo Coming Soon

Openbravo — the open source ERP and point of sale (POS) specialist — is discussing a partnership with MySQL and exploring the virtual applications market, The VAR Guy learned while walking the aisles at LinuxWorld Expo. Here’s why solutions providers should take notice.

Based in Spain, Openbravo is backed by $12 million in new funding, a growing partner program and a new Ubuntu Linux Server effort. Translation: Openbravo seems to be on quite a roll.

Still, Openbravo has some key challenges. Most customers deploy Openbravo on Windows-Oracle or Linux-Oracle servers. But solutions providers and customers are pounding on Openbravo to offer its software on MySQL, the wildly popular open source database.

Paolo Juvara (pictured), chief products officer for Openbravo, concedes that his company has faced some coding challenges getting Openbravo onto MySQL. But he confirms the work is under way and should be done soon. Openbravo is also working to bring its software to IBM’s DB2 database.

Nice, but Openbravo’s server efforts don’t end there. The company is investigating so-called application appliances. In one potential scenario, an application appliance will integrate Openbravo with Ubuntu Server, running atop a virtualization system such as EMC’s VMware ESX.

Openbravo and Canonical are discussing how to move forward on such a project, which would allow VARs to quickly install and configure Openbravo on Ubuntu, because the virtualization layer shields customers and integrators from many hardware-oriented deployment tasks.

November 14, 2008 Update: : Openbravo has described how/when it plans to more fully support MySQL in this blog post