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Nexedi: Status and Roadmap

Presentation of Nexedi status including company, regions, products, market and future roadmap.
  • Last Update:2020-10-02
  • Version:001
  • Language:en

Agenda

  • Nexedi Status
  • Nexedi Roadmap

Nexedi is an international software publisher specializing in Free Software for the Enterprise market. We introduce in this presentation Nexedi's current status and future roadmap.

Nexedi Status

Nexedi is now nearly 20 years old. It grew from a single person business specializing in open source ERP to a group of companies with a wide product line and international footprint.

Nexedi - Profile

Nexedi World Map
  • Largest Free Software Publisher in Europe
  • Founded in 2001 in Lille (France) - 35 engineers worldwide
  • Enterprise Software for mission critical applications
  • Build, deploy, train and run services
  • Profitable since day 1, long term organic growth

Nexedi was founded in Lille area (France) in 2001. It is now probably the largest Free Software publisher in EU with more than 10 products and 15 million lines of code.

Nexedi staff includes 35 engineers located mainly in France but also in other EU countries, Russia, Asia and South America.

Nexedi business model consists of building and deploying large scale Enterprise systems (ERP, Big Data, Cloud), train users and then ensure smooth operation of the system during 10 to 20 years through preventive maintenance and support services.

Nexedi systems are hosted on premise or in the cloud. All generic source code is public. Cource code which contains trade secrets is shared with customers only.

Nexedi's organic growth does not depend on any investor. Nexedi has been a profitable company since day 1. 

Nexedi - Clients

Nexedi References and Map

nexedi.com/success

Nexedi clients are mainly medium to large size companies and governments, looking for scalable enterprise solutions such as ERP, CRM, DMS, data lake, big data cloud, IT infrastructure automation, etc.

Due to its highly flexible and generic nature, Nexedi software is used in very different industries: aerospace, automotive, chemical, pharmaceutical, mechanical, government, banking, etc. Adapting Nexedi software to a specific industry or region can be achieved in much less time than with competing solutions. This explains why Nexedi does not focus on any specific region or industry. It also explains why Nexedi has been able to transfer success in one industry/region to another industry/region.

Nexedi success cases include the converged e-commerce and billing platform of Big & Go ETC operator (France) with up to 100.000 invoices generated per hour. It also includes the management ERP of two group companies of Kyorin pharmaceutical (Japan), management ERP of TerraSar-X mission at Airbus (Germany), main ERP in various PSA factories, ERP of Sankei Chemical (Japan), accounting platform of Ekiho house construction company (France) and trading platform of Micro (China).

Nexedi is the supplier of the cloud technology of Teralab (France), one of the few successful sovereign clouds in Europe with a strong focus on big data and AI.

Nexedi is the supplier of the big data collection ad processing platform of Woelfel (Germany) which is used for predictive maintenance of wind turbines, vibration detection in vaults, noise detection in airports and also sensor management for smart city in Bavaria.

Nexedi - Free Software Stack

Nexedi Software Stack

stack.nexedi.com

Nexedi software is primarily developed in Python language, with some parts in Javascript language.

Nexedi stack covers three different areas: infrastructure, application and front-end. Through Nexedi stack, any company could actually replace traditional proprietary software or public clouds with a consistent, cost efficient, flexible open source / Free Software alternative developed by an international team and exempt of backdoors.

Historically, Nexedi is an open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) company. Nexedi developed ERP5, one of the first open source / Free Software ERPs. ERP5 was awarded in 2004 "Best ERP Implementation by Decision Informatique Professional Magazinest". ERP5 coverage was slowly extended to cover further areas including Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Document Management (DMS), Manufacturing Execution (MES) and Industrial Big Datalake. The extension of ERP5 lead to develop a high performance distributed transactional database (NEO), a document conversion server (cloudooo). It also resulted in to a new big data software product, Wendelin, which is a version of ERP5 with special extensions for out-of-core data processing in Python.

Since 2009, Nexedi has developed various technologies to automate the mass deployment and operation of ERP5 instances for its customers with a strong focus on resiliency . This resulted in a software called SlapOS which can automate the operation of any complex cloud but also automate the deployment of edge computing solutions, network management of 4G/5G networks and any distributed computing infrastructure. In order to ensure reliable operation of SlapOS, Nexedi created re6st, a resilient software defined networking software that can circumvent network outages often found on internet backbones, especially in China. Nexedi created caucase to add Zero Knowledge to SlapOS and shacache to add resiliency to open source code repositories.

All Nexedi software share the same user interface which is now based on high performance HTML5 Progressive Web Application (PWA) technologies. Thanks to the decision of creating an in-house Javascript framework at a time when neither Google nor Facebook had yet released anything equivalent, Nexedi enjoys a very stable development process. Unlike other software publishers which rely on famous Javascript frameworks, Nexedi is not faced with the recurring problem of having to redevelop all its user interface every 3 years, changing framework or circumventing performance issues on less poweful terminals. JIO provides storage independence and offline support. RenderJS provides a component model for user interface rendering that can support hundreds of fields in a single page with good performance. OfficeJS provides an appstore to publish HTML5 applications used by Nexedi and beyond. CribJS, WebRunner and NayuOS constitute the Web native development platform.

Nexedi - Group Companies

Nexedi is a group of companies.

The holding company - Nexedi SA - is incorporated in France and is also the group headquarter. It focuses on Entreprise Free Software markets based on ERP5, Wendelin oir SlapOS. Its business model consists of initial implementation services and maintenance services.

Subsidiaries in Japan (Nexedi KK), Germany (Nexedi GmbH) and China (Nayu Shanghai) focus on the same type of Entreprise Free Software marke in their respective countries.

VIFIB SARL provides cloud operation management services for public cloud or private cloud. It also provides Rapid.Space public cloud service outside China. It is a wholy owned subsidiary of Nexedi SA.

Xunkongjian is the sister company of VIFIB SARL in China. It has no capital relation with Nexedi SA nor VIFIB SARL. It also provides Rapid.Space public cloud services in China with all licenses granted by Chinese governement.

Nexedi SA has a minoriry share in ClearRoad, the first company in the world to provide a clearinghouse for road usage charging in the USA, a new way to manage road congestion by making drivers pay for creating congestion.

Nexedi SA also has shares in Tylia Invest, an equity crowd-funding company. However, due to its non-strategic nature, Nexedi SA is planning to sell those shares.

Nexedi - Figures

  2016 2017 2018
Income (Global) 3,005,000 € 3,388,000 € 3,655,000 €
Sales (Global) 2,155,000 € 2,823,000 € 2,967,000 €
Sales (France) 1,652,000 € 2,148,000 € 2,357,000 €
R&D (France) 951,000 € 905,000 € 973,000 €
Profit (France) 281,000 € 341,000 € 304,000 €
Staff (Global) 32 33 34
Staff (France) 24 25 26

Nexedi business model is characterized by growing sales, stable profits, strong R&D and steadily growing staff. Due the the intense R&D activity, part of our income derives from government project that can not be accounted as sales yet present the same nature in terms of daily operations. Moreover, Nexedi benefits from the favourable tax system in France for tech companies, something which is not well known outside France.

Nexedi - Markets

  2016 2017 2018
ERP5 Industry 493,922 € 511,119 € 657,330 €
Service 1,097,228 € 1,494,873 € 1,489,257 €
Other 172,219 € 131,344 € 122,574 €
Wendelin 145,224 € 301,800 € 321,800 €
SlapOS 85,788 € 140,130 € 244,507 €
OfficeJS   58,200 € 18,400 €

Nexedi's main market is ERP5 with management applications that often related to invoicing or manufacturing. This market is fairly divided between industry, services and others (NGO, government).

Nexedi's second market is Wendelin with applications in the field of industrial big data processing based on machine learning or signal processing or physical modelling. It is an emerging business that closely folows the growth of Industry 4.0 in the world. Wendelin was presented at Fraunhofer IAO in Stuttgart in 2018 with applications in wind energy, construction and preventive maintenance.

The third business of Nexedi is SlapOS with projects in the field of datacenter automation, cloud management and edge computing. SlapOS has been recently adopted in China by Xunkongjian. SlapOS market is expected to grow with applications in the field of industrial automation and software defined radio.

Nexedi Roadmap

Nexedi's roadmap consists of levering the unique strengths of ERP5 to reach new markets which require converged applications while initiating the growth of SlapOS ad provide a solution to growing concerns posed by existing cloud platforms.

ERP5 & Wendelin: I4.0 Convergence

Application convergence is a long time strength of ERP5. Instead of having to operate multiple systems with multiple interfaces which complexity grows non-linearly, ERP5 provides a single scalable database and application framework to integrate all aspects of business applications under the unified JIO interface: ERP, CRM, DMS, Web (e-commerce), Project, Big Data and now MES. This makes ERP5 one of the best platforms for Industry 4.0 projects which combine traditional human management with data streams collected from the Internet of Things.

For now, Big Data projects are marketed under the "Wendelin" brand because they are considered as essentially different from traditional ERP5 projects. However, in recent markets, big data and ERP are becoming just two faces of the same management project. Within 10 years, every ERP5 project will include its share of Big Data, just like all current projects have their share of Web and document management.

Industry 4.0, with an exepected market of USD 156.6 billion by 2024, will represent 50% of the growth of ERP5 sales through projects that combine all current aspects of ERP5 with big data and scheduling of sensors or actuators on the factory floor. Nexedi thus expects a growth of 50% of its combined ERP5 and Wendelin sales by 2024.

Nexedi does not expect however short-term convergence of ERP5 with social network systems (SNS) due to the complexity of interfaces and to the existing habits of users on their smartphones. Also, most APIs of public SNS are lremoved as soon as they become successful: no sustainable system can be built on top of SNS APIs. SNS will thus be adressed through ad-hoc interfaces and Web based notifications. JIO is expected to play a key role in providing a unified access to the different SNS platforms.

OfficeJS: Modularity

Developing with ERP5 or SlapOS requires extensive training. This is sometimes not possible in regions with high turnover. However, every user of ERP5 needs some flexibility and ability to create its own reports and or applications without compromising the consistency of their ERP5 system. Development of such reports or applications should be simple enough to be taught to a beginner developer in a matter of days.

This is the role of OfficeJS HTML5 appstore: small applications that need to be used online or offline can be developed indenpently of ERP5 using RenderJS (or any other HTML5 framework). Resulting HTML5 application communicates witth ERP5 through  JIO for for data access to ERP5 or to other sources of information (cloud storage, social networks). JIO built-in synchronisation can then be used as a standard way to interface ERP5 with other systems.

The key point of OfficeJS is that all development happens outside ERP5, possibly by different developer teams. This provides extra scalability to Nexedi by splitting tasks between core ERP5 developers and HTML5 developers.

SlapOS: Unification

SlapOS will continue to be used as the unified platform to deploy any Nexedi system. It will be extended to cover a wider range of device. 

For now, SlapOS is mainly deployed on servers to host server based applications.

It was actually deployed some years ago inside a 777 flight of JAL between Paris and Tokyo, serving real time web content during the journey. It was also deployed on base stations to provide 4G or 5G radio networking.

We expect SlapOS to be used in the future on smartphones, drones, satellites, robots, sensors, actuators, etc. using the same unified service description approach. We also expect SlapOS to adopt and OPC-UA profile for further integration with Industry 4.0 environments.

Rapid.Space: Growth

 

SlapOS commercial growth is planned to come from the Rapid.Space Hyper Open Cloud service. Rapid.Space is a high performance, low cost cloud infrastructure that provides: big servers, cluster databases, reslient VMs, CDN, IoT buffering.

It is available in Europe (France, Germany, Sweden, Nertherlands) and in China. It is based on SlapOS cloud operation management Free Software created by Nexedi. It uses Open Compute Project (OCP) servers and switches, the same as the ones used by Facebook, Azure, AWS, Yahoo! Japan, Tencent, JD.com, etc.

Unlike its competitors, Rapid.Space publishes everything:

Rapid.Space will focus - as Nexedi does with ERP5 - on the Entreprise market. Its services complement European companies such as OVH and Hetzner. It will offer professional services that can match US or China based cloud servcies, but at a much lower price and without any form of shackles or bacdoors. Rapid.Space is expected to contribute 1,000,000€ to Nexedi yearly turnover by 2024.

Nexedi - Forecast

(tentative figures) 2017 2018 2024
ERP5 / Wendelin
+ OfficeJS
Industry 511,119 € 657,330 € 1,000,000 €
Converged 360,000 € 340,200 € 1,200,000 €
Service 1,494,873 € 1,489,257 € 1,800,000 €
Other 131,344 € 122,574 € 150,000 €
SlapOS 140,130 € 244,507 € 1,000,000 €

Nexedi market forecast is that converged applications will reach the same level of sales in 2024 as service or industry. The other major growth will come from SlapOS customisation and maintenance of services deployed on Rapid.Space infrastructure.

Thank You

  • Nexedi SA
  • 147 Rue du Ballon
  • 59110 La Madeleine
  • France
  • +33629024425

For more information, please contact Jean-Paul, CEO of Nexedi (+33 629 02 44 25).