We Blog CRM

At last year’s Dreamforce, we saw just how aggressive SugarCRM could be when they staged a guerilla marketing attack. Well, it seems the open-source CRM provider is aggressive in all aspects of business, as they reported a record year in 2009.

While the majority of companies struggled to bring in money—and stay afloat even—SugarCRM had a record year in revenue, customer base, community, and partner development. They added a reported 2,000 commercial customers last year, and 50 new value-added resellers; these new VARs extend SugarCRM’s reach to over 75 countries as well.

Larry Augustin, who took the Sugar helm toward the end of last year, expressed excitement about the company’s current standing, nothing it leaves them prepared for a great 2010. Last year, Sugar partnered with Microsoft to provide Sugar applications on Windows Azure, and they also released their Community Edition on Amazon EC2. Putting the Community Edition on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud allows developers to access, test, and develop Sugar code, making it all the more accessible.

Like any good CEO, Augustin also conveyed excitement about new products coming out in 2010, and Sugar already seems poised to wow customers with new editions. Jigsaw reported recently that the SugarCRM platform is one of the three most-used CRM products globally. In addition, with many predicting that private clouds will be discredited—but not eliminated—in 2010, Sugar will likely be a top choice for public deployments.

Another coup for the cloud: SplendidCRM announced this week that their latest version of Community Edition will run on the Microsoft Windows Azure platform.

SplendidCRM develops Microsoft-centric CRM solutions for open-source users, so the Azure connection is not entirely surprising. Splendid can be installed to run the database in SQL Azure with the web application running locally, and can also be set to run the database in SQL Azure and the web app in Windows Azure. The goal, of course, is for costumers to cut costs while enjoying increased functionality and quick deployment.

The Microsoft Silverlight 3 Toolkit has also advanced SplendidCRM’s product, as continued incorporation of the environment has recently replaced the previous flash-based and hand-made charts. And the latest incarnation of Splendid’s query engine has been optimized to handle millions of records by employing a custom paging program. Another new search improvement is the added ability to search for duplicate records and merge duplicates into a single record.

SplendidCRM has been tested on all current variations of Windows, and while reviews have not been issued yet, it will be interesting to hear what Windows users think of these new improvements.

The idea of owning the code to your software, being able to tinker with it and customize it is a powerful motivator for most companies employing a self-respecting IT staff. Open Source offers a tantalizing promise of free/cheap software that can be personalized to your requirements. Simplicity is another advantage; sometimes companies are looking for something that does not have too many bells and whistles in it.

Two big enterprise customers of open source CRM are H&R Block which uses SugarCRM and IMA Financial Group, which uses Concursive. Since most of the code is open, the applications tend to be very customizable, run on any platform, and have a good, if not all-encompassing, feature set. SugarCRM, the largest player in the category, has added more mobile features than many of its commercial rivals.

Zip realty has picked the open-source, Yahoo-owned Zimbra, an e-mail, calendar and chat (instant messaging) client. The company chose Zimbra over other products including Google apps because of its open source architecture that will enable it to work smoothly with the existing applications that Zip Realty uses.

The new messaging client is facilitating communication between customers and real estate agents. the information fed at the front-end can be easily assimilated into the CRM system.

SugarCRM has announced its CRM Acceleration World Tour which will commence in Atlanta on Thursday, April 10th and cover 15 cities across 10 continents. The tour will cover Boston, Chicago, Miami, New York City, Frankfurt, London, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto. It is being sponsored by IBM and RIM. The objective of the CRM Acceleration sessions is to help businesses learn more about the manner in which they should devise and implement CRM strategies. These intense one-day sessions include presentations from CRM visionaries, in-depth product sessions, real-world demo scenarios, expert panels and customer testimonials. The presentations cover both the business and technical aspects of the software.

“CRM Accelerations help companies cut through the time-consuming, and often frustrating, process of evaluating and implementing customer relationship management technology,” said John Roberts, chairman and CEO of SugarCRM. “In just one day executives can see the product in action, formulate a deployment plan and meet the right people to accelerate their CRM strategy.”

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Vtiger has released vtiger CRM 5.0.4. The new release comes feature-packed and with a number of improvements such as better security, upgraded UTF-8 support for foreign languages, email enhancements include SSL support and rich text mails, you can also export records selectively.

The new product comes with a cool theme selected by the vtiger community, a nice aspect of community effort characteristic of the open source movement. CRM functions offered by the new vtiger CRM 5.0.4 include Sales Force Automation, Customer Support & Service, Marketing Automation, and Inventory Management, Security Management, Calendaring, and E-mail integration with Outlook and Gmail.

The new version addresses more than 900 small and big issues and suggestions for improvement put forward by the vtiger community.

Learn more here.

Open source has significantly altered the tech landscape in that the space is now more open to new ideas and collaborative effort. The spread of open source has also made it easier for smaller companies to deploy technology for boosting business. The CRM business application space has also benefited from the competition that open source vendors are providing to the established behemoths. Open source CRM products like those from Daffodil and SugarCRM are capable of matching established proprietary software in terms of functionality and integration. Commercial open source has developed an excellent support system for its customers.

The CRM space is divided into three main spaces, designated by the size of customers. Enterprises are serviced by the larger players that cater to several industry verticals and provide domain-specific features. Their drawback has been the high costs of licensing and the surfeit of features of which only a selected few are used regularly. SMBs are catered to by another set of CRM vendors that promote their focused set of features as their strong point but vendor lock-in is an issue here. The third category is of businesses that prefer the SaaS route to CRM to escape licensing fees. However, factors such as an increase in the TCO with time and external data ownership are issues with SaaS.

In such a scenario, open source CRM is an attractive option as they offer a broad range of core functionalities and cover several verticals. Open source CRM is particularly well-suited for SMBs that wish to test the CRM waters before taking any major policy decisions regarding the deployment of a CRM solution.

An excellent piece here on the open source angle to CRM.

Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), a self-styled “vendor-neutral consortium”, is based in San Francisco and its avowed mission is to generate awareness about and further the cause of interoperability between open products and their adoption. According to the findings of its 2007 Customer Forum Series, the key concern for customers and channel partners who are placing their faith in open source is interoperability between open source products.

The consortium intends to “out-Microsoft Microsoft” by strengthening collaboration between its member customers and channel partners and help them overcome interoperability issues.
Open Source CRM and ERP applications are increasing in popularity and so are applications such as the application server Jboss, the commercial databases MySQL and Postgres, and the Eclipse development platform.

OSA also announced an interoperability prototype called Common Customer View (CCV), probably the first of its kind, which ambitiously aims to integrate diverse front-office, back-office and planning applications so that company employees can view a well-rounded image of the customer and base their selling and marketing plans on it. CCV was built and tested with products from companies such as Adaptive Planning, Centric CRM, JasperSoft, Openbravo, Talend and Unisys.

SugarCRM has added new capabilities to its CRM offering, these include new customization features, on-demand capabilities and an AJAX email client. Sugar 5.0 underwent three rounds of beta testing that involved 30,000 users. SugarCRM is doing its bit along with Microsoft, which has released CRM 4.0, to add spice to the CRM market and get people interested in their New Year offerings.

Sugar 5.0 purports to be much more user friendly and will even enable non-tech users to build custom modules and this could be a handy tool for SMBs. This said there are chances that this new feature may present implementation challenges. A new simplified interface will enable non-techies to edit and rearrange custom dashboards without asking the IT department for help. Automatic upgrades and the freedom for the user to oscillate between on-site and on-demand versions are other features of the new Sugar 5.0.

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The news about Oracle today is reading like a press-release version of that 2001 Japanese cinema classic, Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack.

The software behemoths aren’t destroying Tokyo with fire breath and the like, but there is a lot of bellowing and stomping going on involving three of the biggest names in the biz.

Computer World is running a bit more on the software lawsuit of the year, i.e. Oracle v. SAP AG, with SAP reportedly now hoping to settle with the big O. Oracle v. SAP, a case “about corporate theft on a grand scale, committed by the largest German software company,” in the opening words of the complaint.

Oracle originally brought the lawsuit against SAP in the US Federal District Court in the Northern District of California on March 22. The lawsuit alleged that King Ghidorah – i mean, SAP was guilty of violations to the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, Unfair Competition, Intentional and Negligent Interference with Prospective Economic Advantage and Civil Conspiracy, i.e. they ripped off Oracle data. Read more