opentaps In The Cloud, a new service which delivers the opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM system on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) platform, offers businesses the flexibility and control of open source software with the low-cost, easy-to-deploy and -maintain infrastructure of Amazon EC2.

With this new service, businesses of all sizes can get up and running with a full-featured ERP and CRM system in as little as 15 minutes, and the ongoing costs are as low as 25 cents per hour.

Businesses of all sizes now have a new choice for business management software that’s flexible, easy to deploy, and low cost: the new "opentaps In The Cloud" service from the opentaps Open Source ERP and CRM project. This new service delivers opentaps on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), thus combining the flexibility of open source software with an easy to deploy, easy to maintain, pay by the hour cloud computing.

In a YouTube video, Si Chen, the project manager of opentaps, shows how the entire process of setting up opentaps in the Cloud, from starting up the AMI to loading data to creating orders and invoices with the new system, takes less than 15 minutes. The ongoing costs of opentaps In The Cloud, including hardware and infrastructure, are as low as 25 cents per hour.

The opentaps In The Cloud service offers pre-built instances of the opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM software as Amazon Machine Images, or AMI’s. There is no need to purchase or configure any new hardware or to download and install opentaps. A user only needs to launch an opentaps In The Cloud AMI to get access to a pre-configured system. He could then customize it with company-specific information, load data such as products and customers, and start using opentaps for everything from managing customers and sales to taking and fulfilling orders and getting real-time financial reports.

With this new service, businesses looking for Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management software can avoid the high cost and lengthy effort required for configuring and installing software in a traditional data center. At the same time, they could also avoid the lock-in and lack of flexiblity associated with typical cloud-based offerings. Because opentaps is available open source software, businesses have full access to its source code, so they are be able to customize the software to their own needs. Finally, businesses have full control of their data when using open source software such as opentaps.

"opentaps has always been a powerful, feature-rich ERP and CRM system, and we’ve made it easier to deploy and implement than ever before with the new ‘opentaps In The Cloud’ offering," notes Si Chen, project manager of opentaps.

opentaps helps companies manage sales pipelines, customer relationships, and the sales and quoting process in CRM; inventory, shipping, and manufacturing in the Warehouse module; Accounts Receivables, Accounts Payables, general ledger, and financial reports in Financials; suppliers and purchasing in the Purchasing module. There are also fully integrated online ecommerce, point of sales (POS), project management, and human resources which are developed by the open source community and included with opentaps.

For more information about opentaps, see http://www.opentaps.org/

For more information about opentaps In The Cloud, see http://www.opentaps.org/cloud