The 451 Group's senior analyst Martin Schneider summed it up this way in that same article: "The reality is that the people who do all the work [in ERP deployments] are in-house teams or system integrators, not the commercial software vendors. The availability of open source points out that disconnect in the value chain. It’s almost a miracle that SAP got as big as it did; they’re just selling a skeleton.”

And as Gartner research director Laurie Wurster notes, open-source ERP should have increasing appeal because of the wave of ERP consolidation.

When will we reach the tipping point where a large number of CIOs at midsize companies, and even at larger enterprises, can get their heads around using open source ERP? That's still to be determined. But consider the larger open-source picture in enterprises today. Many CIOs already run virtualized servers based on Linux for some core enterprise apps. They've developed in-house development expertise and security knowledge around open source. They've made open-source SugarCRM a success. In other words, they've done some of the prep work necessary to weigh and plan an enterprise's move to open-source ERP.

Here's one other hint: Rangaswami works for this little company called British Telecom. Bailar, who will be inducted into the CIO Hall of Fame class of 2007 as part of this week's conference, used to run IT for Capital One and before that, for NASDAQ. It's not just the CIOs of midsize or smaller companies who see why a solid open source ERP solution would be a hot technology development.