“OpenSales was founded in 1998 by the Ferber boys, Rob and
Glenn. (Actually, the two are not related; they simply share the
same last name.) Rob was previously with eToys and Glenn was with
American Digital Media. Crater joined the firm as CEO in December
of 1999.”
“Currently, the company’s primary software offerings are
OpenSales AllCommerce and OpenSales Retailer. Both are written in
Perl, covered by the GPL, and available for download from
OpenSales’ developer site. The company’s business model, of
course, is to give away the software and sell service.”
“Crater’s background is in traditional software and services.
She cut her management teeth with Oracle, where she ended up as a
VP managing two divisions. She also served time with Liberate.com
and Netscape before joining OpenSales. But she is sold on open
source, primarily because it gets software to customers at a much
lower cost than the traditional business model does.”
“One firm buying OpenSales’ services at present is NutriPeak,
the second largest distributor of sports and health nutritional
supplements in the world. NutriPeak’s rapid growth, sparked by its
acquisition of a chain of stores in California and another
e-commerce firm, has left it with two sales channels: one for
online sales and one for brick and mortar purchases. Quite
naturally, NutriPeak’s goal is to come up with a single system to
handle both chores, and that’s where OpenSales comes in.”