We Blog CRM

According to good ol’ First Coffee over there at TMCNet, Lumen Software, a vendor of CRM and commercial open source Saas solutions, has announced it will be employing the PostgreSQL-supported LAPP stack for its open source development platform Lumenation.

After consideration of PostgreSQL and MySQL, which is part of the LAMP stack, developers at Lumen found that the PostgreSQL database offered “a higher level of functionality and handled large amounts of data and traffic better than the alternatives.”

PostgreSQL is freely available for commercial purposes.

SugarCRM Inc., those large specialists in commercial open source customer relationship management software, today announced the opening of its new Northeast regional office in New York. Fifteen-year IT sales and consulting veteran Cameron Jackson will serve as regional vice president of corporate sales to “bolster relationships with its community of customers, partners and developers in the northeastern US and Europe.”

Jackson has been with SugarCRM since 2004. Previously, Jackson was a corporate account executive at Microsoft Corp.; prior to Microsoft, he honed his sales, marketing and advertising skills in a number of senior marketing positions in the high-tech industry.

The New York location represents Sugar’s continued trend of growth and regional expansion. Two months ago, Sugar opened its southeast office in Atlanta, which followed the launch of Sugar Europe in Dublin, Ireland, in March.

Centric CRM, a developer of open-source Customer Relationship Management technology, today announced the company will receive investment funding from Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of good old Intel Corporation.

Centric CRM will use the funds to pursue growth opportunities forecast for the CRM technology industry, “and,” said Centric CRM CEO David Richards, “to expand our sales and marketing activities to capitalize on the rapid growth in our space.”

Centric CRM, Inc. is the developer of an advanced open source CRM system. Under development for almost seven years, Centric CRM now comprises over 2 million lines of code. Its Java/J2EE, web-based, and object-oriented architecture runs on all standard platforms. Centric CRM is a founding member of the Open Solutions Alliance and a member of the Red Hat Exchange.

Intel Capital invests in a range of companies offering solutions targeting enterprise, home, mobility, health, consumer internet, semiconductor manufacturing, and clean technologies. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than $6 billion in approximately 1,000 companies in over 40 countries. In that time, about 157 portfolio companies have gone public on various exchanges around the world and another 187 have been acquired by other companies. In 2006, Intel Capital invested about $1.07 billion in 163 deals with approximately 60 percent of funds invested outside the United States.

Red Hat held its Red Hat Summit 2007 this week in beautiful San Diego, California, and so came quite a few announcements of the development going on at the biggie in open source solutions.

Today (Saturday!) the Red Hatters released the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) into general availability. RHX extends Red Hat’s open source architecture into integrated business application solutions from open source partners built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss platform software.

At the RHX website, customers are promised access to application profiles, user ratings and reviews, free trials and online purchase options for all applications. RHX partners and solutions include those in content management; customer relationship management; enterprise resource planning; messaging and collaboration; business intelligence; databases; backup and recovery; and systems monitoring.

RHX partners upon launch include Alfresco, CentricCRM, Compiere, EnterpriseDB, Groundwork, Jaspersoft, Jive, MySQL, Pentaho, Scalix, SugarCRM, Zenoss, Zimbra and Zmanda.

At midweek came the news that Red Hat had teamed with IBM Corporation in launching an initiative to encourage “the dramatic growth” of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z mainframes.

In touting the combined effort, the big companies emphasized the security advantages of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and System z.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 becomes the first Linux operating system to ship with native support for the functionality necessary to meet the “Common Criteria for Trusted Operating Systems,” including all functionality to enable EAL 4+ certification under the protection profiles CAPP (Controlled Access Protection Profile), RBAC (Role Based Access Control), and LSPP (Labeled Security Protection Profile).

On Thursday, Red Hat announced that the company, together with Sybase Inc. would be releasing a Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) virtual appliance based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization later this year.

Sybase chief marketing officer Dr. Raj Nathan was quoted as stating that “the pairing marks the first time an enterprise data management company has announced plans for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 database appliance.”

The same day, Red Hat and Intel announced a joint program to deliver a Red Hat-branded software platform that supports desktop PCs with Intel vPro Processor technology, bringing “the power of hardware-assisted virtualization to business desktop computing.”

In collaboration with Intel, Red Hat plans to develop, productize and support the necessary software components, including the hypervisor, the Service OS and Software Development Kit.

Beta software is expected later this year and a general release is planned for an unspecified date in 2008.

The Search Enterprise Linux website covered the Red Hat Summit firsthand with a handful of reporters, and did quite an excellent job; well worth a look. Within said coverage is an interview with CTO Brian Stevens, who sheds some light on the suddenly oft-dropped term “virtualization” and the Intel project.

“Our first phase of virtual appliance work is centered around delivering management applications,” said Stevens. “Working with Intel, we want to build into their chip set the underpinnings you need to manage a secure platform via virtualization — to be able, for example, to have Windows as your primary operating system for an end user but to be able to run Linux OS in the background as your management gateway.”

Red Hat is said to be the world’s leading open source solutions provider and is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with 51 satellite offices around the world.

Open source customer relationship management software provider SugarCRM Inc. has announced the Customer Self-Service Portal and Knowledgebase for Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise customers.

The setup seeks to assist companies in improving communications with customers while reducing costs by enabling self-service in key CRM business processes.

SugarCRM’s Customer Self-Service Portal promises to allow firms to provide self-service capabilities in key marketing, sales and support activities. Such functionality “allows non-technical users to create and deploy Web-to-lead forms; enables users to log and manage support cases online; and gives users the ability to manage subscriptions to company communications in an automated fashion.”

Particularly touted functionality in the release includes case self-service; Account Updates; web-to-lead forms; subscription management; knowledge search; a branded user interface; and Sugar Studio Integration, which essentially means that the SugarCRM administrative environment.

In the knowledge base, SugarCRM asks you to look out for content authoring and management; FAQs management support; a “Wikified” (Is that really the word?) user interface; file management; full-text search; user ratings; and workflow approvals.

Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise On-Site are available for $275 and $449 per user per year, respectively. Sugar Professional On-Demand and Sugar Enterprise On-Demand are available for $40 and $75 per user monthly, respectively. Sugar Customer Self-Service Portal pricing varies depending on number of users.

SplendidCRM Software, Inc., a provider of open source Microsoft .NET-centric Customer Relationship Management solutions has announced the launch of an upgrade to its flagship platform SplendidCRM.

Splendid version 1.4 is being touted especially for its incorporation of “key .NET 2.0 technologies,” namely components which allow system integrators to add user-customizable features including AJAX to applications.

Founded in 2005, SplendidCRM Software provides a .NET-centric, open-source, customer relationship management application licensed under the SugarCRM public license.

At SaaScon 2007 in Santa Clara, California, last week, there was much buzz about the future of the industry with regard to open source software. One particular speakers panel session was entitled “Tapping into Open Source for SaaS” and sought to examine “how open source software and Software as a Service models are rapidly converging to create the business model of the future.”

It’s a good time to be in the open source SaaS biz, then, as panelists SugarCRM chairman/CEO/founder John Roberts, president/CEO William A. Soward of Adaptive Planning, and SpikeSource’s Joaquin Ruiz would surely agree.

And recent figures would bear out this confidence in the market, for it appears that while SaaS is growing steadily particularly among SMBs, open source programs are winning over customers in heretofore uncovered areas.

A study recently released by IDC, The Adoption of Software as a Service in Small and Medium-Sized Businesses: Perception Versus Reality, analysed results from the company’s 2007 survey of 614 small- and 418 medium-sized businesses in the United States.

Most pointedly, the study showed Software as a Service’s strong growth potential, with 5.1 percent of PC-owning small firms and 15.2 percent of PC-owning medium-sized firms planning to move forward with a SaaS solution within the next twelve months.

Survey authors caution, however, that specific solutions will be driving this growth, as few firms show attraction to SaaS in general. This is where open source programming can fill SMB needs and make a little money in the process.

Interestingly enough, open source SaaS is already making serious headway in Europe and the wedding of the two is on honeymoon in Asia (more on this momentarily), but interest in the United States lags.

In Europe, folks figure this has mostly to do with Oracle/Siebel’s dominance in the American CRM software market. With firms like SAP and Salesforce.com chipping away at that lead, however, US business are certain to come around soon enough.

Inspiration to make the challenging switch to open source software may have been provided earlier this month by Lumen. While smaller companies such as Iona Technologies and Aras have switched to an open source business model, Lumen’s size should cause more of a ripple effect toward the software biz.

Lumen hosts a SaaS platform currently used by over 200 commercial customers with 150,000 users and is reportedly the first PHP platform to focus on SaaS developers. Lumen explicitly markets its product as making possible as an alternative to proprietary SaaS development platforms such as AppSpace and Microsoft’s OfficeLive.

Lumen is targeting its platform at PHP developers (reportedly a gang of some five million-plus) wishing to provide SaaS to end-users, but want to develop with open source standard tools running on a Linux Apache/PostgreSQL/PHP server stack. The Lumenation SaaS application server and software development kit is free, and creators of web-based desktop applications are encouraged to download pre-developed application frameworks for SMB, enterprise and educational end-users to the site.

What does this mean? It means that Lumen may have officially, um, consummated the “marriage” between open source and SaaS for American audiences. It also indicates that the chief stumbling block for open source hawkers, that simply of innovation, may have been overcome despite the lack of success by ActiveGrid’s attempt to become a mainstream-level PHP application server.

The Lumen plan may well be the end result of the evolution of commercial open source software that began with Red Hat and MySQL and continued through SugarCRM to hint at becoming what more than one outlet has called “a disruptive force.”

Indeed in the Asian business world, open source, SaaS and the interplay between the two have moved beyond “disruptive force” status and into the mainstream. IDC Asia-Pacific has released numbers showing that some 83 percent of the Eastern market has exposure to open source software. SaaS penetration has seeped into approximately one-quarter of the Asia-Pacific software industry and this number is growing steadily.

Meanwhile, in Europe, proprietary software daily comes closer to a dodo’s fate, with open source blowing the traditional stuff out of the water. It seems ever more clear, though, that open source SaaS can’t fail to make headway in the United States; the only question is how quickly the inevitable may happen.

Here, that big problem of innovation comes up again but in a different sphere. Could it simply be a question of marketing? One observer remarks that perhaps open source companies should simply cease calling themselves “software companies” in order to more effectively impart the mentality of a new technological paradigm in the ‘States.

The “Software as a Service Perceptions Survey” undertaken by managed web hosting provider Rackspace shows that the Great Unknown lies between open source SaaS adoption and the SMBs who could be using the stuff. Among the revealing statistics were figures that showed that nearly 36 percent of responding SaaS customers were unaware of uptime guarantees provided in the SaaS vendor Service Level Agreement and 49 percent of enterprise Software as a Service customers do not know where the infrastructure behind their SaaS application lies.

Just as importantly, though, survey respondents showed high enthusiasm: 51 percent of respondents currently employed at least one SaaS application and 72 percent of those users were considering additional SaaS applications. And 69 percent of respondents believe SaaS is the preferred software delivery method of the future.

Without further education on such systems, the adoption of open-source technology will be stalled. But not for long: Wide-ranging adoption of open source SaaS can’t be too far ahead; its time is clearly coming and coming quickly.

Ubuntu commercial sponsors Canonical Ltd. have announced the release of Ubuntu version 7.04. Ubuntu is the award-winning Linux distribution for the desktop, laptop, thin client and server which brings together the best of open source software every six months.

Features touted in the Ubuntu 7.04 desktop edition include a ground-breaking Windows migration assistant, further wireless networking support, and improved multimedia support.

Specialized versions of Ubuntu known as Kubuntu and Edubuntu were also released.

(Hark! Is that a gauntlet i hear, about to be thrown?)

“In the coming months, many individuals and businesses will be making the decision to upgrade their existing computer systems and their operating systems,” proclaimed Jane Silber, director of Operations at Canonical Ltd.

Press material informs us that Canonical was launched in October 2004, is headquartered “in Europe” (O yeah, that country!) and today has “millions” of users “around the world.” Ubuntu “aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the centre of a global open source software ecosystem.”

Arkona, Inc., a dealer management on-demand system provider, has endorsed the interestingly named AskPatty.com, Inc., an automotive website for women. Ask Patty provides a turnkey sales and marketing certification program to dealerships to enhance customer loyalty.

As part of the agreement, Ask Patty will make available its full marketing program, dealership training, and certification to Arkona dealers. The Ask Patty agreement seeks to augment Arkona’s line of marketing tools for dealers, which currently includes Arkona’s CRM and eMailSync products and the Arkona Allegiance customer loyalty solution.

Patty’s statistics show that women purchase over 50 percent of all vehicles sold in the United States annually and influence 85 percent of buying decisions, representing total spending of over $80 billion.

Ask Patty provides women consumers an opportunity to send questions about car buying, selling, repair and maintenance to a panel of expert automotive women and is a safe online place to share and discuss their car buying experiences. Women can submit posts directly to the Ask Patty website or can even blog.

The Ask Patty advisory panel is headed up by NASCAR driver Deborah Renshaw and is comprised of women who hold various leadership positions in the automotive industry. AskPatty.com is a member and 2006 corporate sponsor of the Women’s Automotive Association International based in Detroit, Mich., is on the Women’s Board of the Car Care Council, serves as a SEMA member, and is a member of the SEMA Business Women’s Networking Group.

Founded in 1996, Arkona is a public company specializing in on-demand automotive and powersports management solutions.

SugarCRM Inc. kicked off its week with the opening of a brand-spankin’ new southeast office in Atlanta, Ga. SugarCRM also announced that 11-year CRM veteran David Gearhart would be serving as regional vice president in the office.

"I’ve been working in CRM for quite a long time and am excited to join SugarCRM because of the enthusiasm and customer loyalty at the core of the company and in the hearts of its three co-founders," said Gearhart.

The expansion follows last month’s grand opening of Sugar Europe in March; company figures show that about one-quarter of SugarCRM’s commercial customers are located in Europe and more than 30 percent of Sugar Open Source downloads take place in Europe.

Recently, SugarCRM was named CRM Magazine’s 2006 Rising Star and received Selling Power Magazine’s Sales Excellence Award for CRM Implementation & User Adoption, Customer Inter@ction Solutions’ 2006 Product of the Year and was named one of AlwaysOn’s 100 Top Private Companies.