Reconnecting on LinkedIn with old contacts from my time at OcioJoven I found one of them working at Openbravo, a very interesting company, for 2 reasons:

1) ERPs are the next important frontier for opensource

Opensource has revolutionized many segments of IT in the last 10 years, ERP is probably one of the last big profit pools that still waits for its large opensource paladin (like LINUX, MySQL, Apache, php, sugarcrm etc…. in their segments).

Openbravo has achieved the number 1 spot on largest opensource directory SourceForge among 130.000 other projects!!! (although only temporarily)

They were featured in Spain’s largest newspaper this weekend: http://www.elpais.es/articulo/red/Openbravo/alcanza/63/000/descargas/sistema/gestion/empresarial/elpcibred/20061109elpcibenr_3/Tes/

2) Spanish technology projects with global ambitions and opportunities are quite rare

The other day I was discussing this with our old sys admin from OcioJoven. He was telling me how Spain is always the worst in EU in terms of tech adoption and how Spanish start-ups have bad access to capital and difficult exit paths. I was trying to put a positive light on Spanish inventiveness and how the younger generation is taking up mobiles or IM, but I guess he is right, and Spain is not the optimal environment for tech startups.

There are only a few notable exceptions (Panda Antivirus, Anyware, FON, etc.) but Spain needs more initiatives like this to avoid commoditization in the global marketplace.

Good luck to this Spanish technology project!