OpusVL meets former Dragon Simon Woodroffe.

Paul Isaac's, Business Development Manager at OpusVL, took the opportunity to meet one of the original Dragon's Den Millionaires, Simon Woodroffe of Yo-Sushi fame ,for a head-to-head business development Q&A. Business Link sponsored the meeting as part of the Governments' drive to promote new employer tools.

Simon's houseboat, The Trafalgar, moored on the River Thames in Chelsea provided the scenic and comfortable, though occasionally rocking venue.
Simon and other attendees listened intently at how Open Source software has evolved to be a contender in the professional software market where the key difference is in the licensing implementation. Conventional business applications are billed based on the number of installed locations, systems capability or concurrent users. Open Source is a free licence to use the application!

No business can survive by doing something for nothing however, so the revenue generation in Open Source is centered around the consultative, project management, development hours, implementation and training – essentially the customer only has to pay for the technical expertise required to arrive at the business requirement rather than for the privilege of using the application Plus the implementation costs. In addition, Open Source is developed by collaboration. More often than not, when a new application module is developed the resultant code is made available for free for everyone else to use so that the next project has a much shorter time frame to implement and lower cost.

OpusVL is a UK Partner of OpenERP software. OpenERP combines the essential core business functionality of sales, marketing, accounts, HR and management information into a single Open Source product suite. With other 350 modules available a lot of ancillary business operations have already been catered for. So, implementing an OpenERP solution can be a cost effective way to negate the need for license fees.

Paul's interview with Simon is featured in an article in the Daily Mirror week commencing 15th March 2010 and is complemented with a video of the session of the Daily Mirror website.