"When Beija-Flor Jeans started outgrowing its Intuit QuickBooks software last year, the company started looking around for something more robust to help mange its growing accounting, CRM and inventory management needs.

But rather than spend big bucks on a commercial enterprise resource planning suite, the company decided to try open source technology from OpenERP, a relatively little known vendor based in Belgium.

Six months later, it's a move that appears to have paid off, says co-founder Kathy Moca, president and co-founder of Beija-Flor, a small business that supplies Brazilian-made jeans to about 300 boutique stores in the U.S.

"It cost us less than half of what it would have cost if we had gone with a commercial solution," she said. And it has been much easier to customize and mold OpenERP to their needs than it would have been possible with a commercial product, she said.

OpenERP is hoping that such customer experiences are what will help propel the company to the same sort of success in the U.S. that it claims to have had in Europe and Asia.

The company recently opened its first office in the U.S. as part of a broader expansion strategy that is being fueled by a $4.2 million investment by a European investor in April.

It aims to set up a network of partners to help customers integrate the software into their business environments.

Earlier this week, OpenERP rolled out a new, more modular version of its software that allows companies to download only the specific components they need, instead of the whole suite as they needed to until now.

OpenERP is written in Python and integrates a full range of business applications such as CRM, purchase management, manufacturing, warehouse management, accounting and human resources.

OpenERP has separate server and client components both of which are available for free under a GPL license. The latest version, OpenERP v6, allows customers to download just the applications they need and quickly add more as needed."

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