Open Source Expertise also for Enterprise Portals
Westernacher Products & Services AG of Stuttgart is now a GOLD partner of Liferay Portal, the leading provider of enterprise Open Source portal technology. This partnership enables Westernacher to significantly extend its service offerings in the Open Source market.
Westernacher’s current Open Source customer list includes municipal utilities in Munich, Merck, Paul Hartmann AG, Porsche, Diocese of Wuerzburg, KLM / Air France, and more. Each solution is tailor-made for each company, but also have something in common: all solutions use ‘best-of-breed’ enterprise Open Source software, integrate content from multiple back-end systems, and provide workflows that work with the company’s current IT system.
Open Source has been a success story for Westernacher and its customers since 2006, when Westernacher Products & Services AG decided to adopt innovative solutions based on Open Source technologies into its portfolio. This was the beginning of Westernacher’s Alfresco partnership and rising success in the Open Source market.
In response, customers were sceptical and had questions: Are support and warranty regulated? Is Open Source stable? Is it user-friendly? Does it fit into existing large, professional IT infrastructures? Today, Westernacher can respond to these questions with a resounding “yes”, based on our many successful projects. And Open Source is capable of much more than that.
A key argument for Open Source is the elimination of license costs, which is especially important when implementing solutions with many users. At first, customer interest was often driven by price. But Walter Buettner, CEO of Westernacher Products & Services AG, says this is not enough: "Price is an important argument, but crucial is system performance, and customers are beginning to recognize this. Open Source also offers great advantages, like the ability to integrate into a complex software environments. Open Source can choose the best systems and connect them completely independently from the manufacturers, based on modern standards. The possibilities are endless!"
More and more companies are choosing Open source as a strategic platform, and this trend was the reason for Westernacher to focus on Open source systems. Walter Büttner: "The market recognizes that platform-independence is an excellent base to create innovative, integrated solutions. And the market knows there are various quality levels in Open Source solutions. We therefore consistently use ‘best-of-breed‘ to meet our clients’ needs".
The variety of integrative Enterprise solutions can vary as much as the companies who hire Westernacher to design, develop, implement, support and maintain these customized solutions. In one case, Westernacher included corporate guidelines as a company-wide tool to maintain the corporate identity with over 30,000 users at Merck. In another case, a knowledge management solution supplied 8,000 users with reliable information about products, processes, procedures at Stadtwerke Munich. Open Source is the tool of choice for major critical business functions, e.g., at Paul Hartmann AG, where Westernacher implemented an innovative, open source based contract management.
Westernacher uses Open Source as a technology to customize implementations and their developments. The master data management application of Wuerzburg's diocese is based on Java, Hibernate, Spring, and ExtJS. In addition, Westernacher realized solutions based on existing Open Source systems. Besides its Enterprise Content Management solutions based on Alfresco and Enterprise Search based on Lucene and Solr, Westernacher also offers portal solutions based on Liferay.
The combination of these technologies and systems, complemented by extensive expertise in areas such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), enables Westernacher to design complex solutions integrating ERP, ECM, portal, enterprise search, SOA and workflow systems. "With this step, we consistently emphasize the strategic direction of Westernacher. We provide integrated enterprise solutions with the highest customer value and attractive ROI based on innovative open source products," Walter Büttner continues. Open Source is helpful in many ways, but it is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. Westernacher has many years of experience linking proprietary products of well-known manufacturers with Open Source applications to create sustainable, complex solutions.
Westernacher has been an official Liferay partner since July 2010, and is the only Liferay Gold partner in Germany, which particularly pleased our Open Source specialists. Says Walter Büttner: "Our major success as a provider of Open Source enterprise solutions in Germany is the basis for this achievement. We will continue our successful positioning with the Liferay partnership."
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