I just finished attending my first ever Odoo Day in my hometown, Rajkot. I have been intrigued by Odoo for a while now – their Python monolithic approach (without using sane-default Django), their steadily growing marketshare and especially their popularity in the Indian market.

I saw an ad about their “Odoo Business Day” on instagram a couple of months ago and signed up without knowing much about the event. The event was hosted very professionally in a nice hotel, and the turnout exceeded even the organizers’ expectations (if I would have to guess, I’d think close to 500 people attending, more than there were chairs available). The agenda was simple: first, a presentation by Odoo to market their cloud offering and demo how it can help businesses, followed by Q&A. Then, a presentation by one of their Gold Partners, Emipro, based in Rajkot about their apps and custom integrations. Lastly, networking and dinner (to be honest, I bailed before this last part, I have a date night with the missus).

Some quick thoughts after the event:

• Based on the turnout alone, it’s clear people are interested in Odoo. I’m guessing the audience was about 40% business owners, 40% developers and 20% people for the free dinner.
• Based on the quality of Q&A, most people still have a long way to go before they understand cloud hosted software and total costs of implementing an ERP. The biggest problem was the activation energy required to try things out. The Odoo rep mentioned their free trial multiple times, but I guess the average user is too intimidated to even try out a module.
• Developers are very much interested in scoring a job at Odoo, or an Odoo partner. Odoo can really capitalize on this interest by offering a developer portal focused on beginners and maybe even sponsoring remote hackathons.
• The demos had at least 3 separate points in time when the installation errored out (without the presenter deliberately trying to demo an error). The presenter also got confused which app/module to use for a particular use case at least a couple of times.
• Maybe a good idea shared during Q&A: Odoo apps for an education institute.