Despite Digital India, GST formalisation, and UPI, most Indian MSMEs still run on WhatsApp groups, spreadsheets, and whatever tool someone in the office happened to find first. That is slowly changing, and open-source, modular ERP(Enterprise Resource Planning) is a big reason why. Odoo Experience India 2026, scheduled for 11 and 12 September at Mahatma Mandir in Gandhinagar, looks like the clearest sign of that shift yet, with roughly 25,000 attendees expected and more than 200 talks on the schedule. The scale matters because of who has been left out of the digitisation story so far. India has more than 59 million MSMEs 1 .
They contribute close to a third of GDP and employ hundreds of millions of people, and yet most of them are still working with software built for a completely different kind of business, or with no software at all. While the rest of the world argues about agentic AI, a large share of Indian small businesses is still trying to get its basic bookkeeping in order. Cost is the easy explanation, but that isn’t the whole picture. Enterprise ERP is priced for enterprises. The deeper issue is fit. A ten-person garment unit and a fifty-person online retailer share almost nothing operationally, yet most ERP rollouts still force both through the same template built for a company ten times their size.
