The first ERPNext Conference was held in 2014, nearly a decade ago when we were small and folksy. It was held at a small community hall in a leafy Mumbai neighbourhood where a about a hundred people showed up and talked about various topics from open source to feature requests. My memories include having filter coffee at Cafe Madras next door with the few community members that showed up and the weirdness of meeting people whom you knew only virtually via email or chats. At that time ERPNext was everything we talked about. While we did have a hosting platform in place, it was just a bunch of python scripts managing a few hundred sites.
Fast forward to 2023 and the community has grown multi-fold. This conference will be attended by 500 people in a large auditorium with stalls for partners. Frappe has now moved beyond ERPNext to several projects including FrappeHR, Cloud, Books, Insights (Business Intelligence), Gameplan (team collaboration), Helpdesk, Learning Management and much more. Over the last 9 years, we have deepened and expanded the platform and the ecosystem. Beyond ERPNext users, there are now more than 100 companies providing services for the Frappe ecosystem, and at least half a dozen companies that are building new products on the Framework. There is a new UI layer on top of the Framework that can help you build world class apps. While we have not exactly set the world on fire (yet), there is enough to let us dream about it.
The conference energy is not fully “business oriented”, neither is it about “anti-capitalism”. This is a big-tent where there is place for all kinds of people. If our heart is about freedom, then our muscle is about delivering value to customers. We have been able to do both without compromising on either dimensions. Everything we do at Frappe is 100% open source, and in the same breadth we obsess about giving the best experience to paid customers. Frappe attracts both Free and Open Source (FOSS) enthusiasts who truly believe in software freedom and the ability to host and manage your own software to hard-core business folk who want a world class system for their business. In between, there are several small business and freelancers who help companies use and implement ERPNext.
The sum total of all this is incredible energy, that keeps on increasing with every passing year. Whether you are the CTO of a new generation tech company or a business leader looking to modernise your infrastructure or a non-profit looking to drive efficiency and transparency, there will be so much you can discover. Open source and Frappe may not be the most dominant platform, but the storm is slowly gathering. The canvas ranges from hosting your apps on Frappe Cloud, to using Frappe Framework to build all of your internal apps, to using several pre-built apps on the platform including an industrial grade financial management and supply chain management system.
As long as we can keep surviving and improving at this rate, open source and Frappe is unstoppable. It is a matter of time till the trickle turns into a flood. A decade down the line, when it finally happens, you will be able to tell yourself - "you were there”.
See you at Frappeverse 2023 on 8-9 Sept in Mumbai! Book your tickets now
