SugarCRM has made a lot of in-roads in the world of customer relationship management. The product has received a lot of support because of its very customizable nature and flexibility compared to other solutions such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics. SugarCRM is now hoping  to expand that flexibility even further, this time to your BlackBerry. SugarCRM has recently received an additional $20 million in venture capital to develop this application and it’s certainly raising some eyebrows in the CRM world.

The $20 million in funding came from investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International. SugarCRM will be using this money to fund research and development and support its expansion in the CRM market. Specifically SugarCRM is hoping to hoping to garner additional growth in both Asia and Europe. The CEO of SugarCRM, John Roberts, made the following statement at SugarCon about the funding, “the funding will allow SugarCRM to accelerate its goal of moving CRM from a proprietary lock-in model to an open, value-based model.”

For their new mobile software, SugarCRM is partnering with iEnterprises, which is a wireless CRM consulting firm, to deliver information stored inside of SugarCRM  to mobile users. There’s currently a produced called Mobile Edge Express that provides some of this functionality to users by iEnterprises. It can be downloaded freely online. SugarCRM and iEnterprises hope to develop this tool even further and provide a robust means for SugarCRM users to access their CRM data from any blackberry device.

Tweet Read More →

In the last few years there have been a number of open source groups which have created free and inexpensive open source alternatives to many of the major business productivity tools available to companies. There’s Open Office to replace Microsoft Office, Yahoo’s Zimbra to replace Exchange, SugarCRM to replace Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce.com and other proprietary CRM solutions, GIMP to replace Photoshop and a number of other great open source alternatives that allow companies to do many of the same things they can do with expensive commercial software tools for next to nothing.

Open source software often gives much better bang for your buck, unfortunately if you don’t have a very tech-savvy IT guy, these solutions can be somewhat difficult to implement. Recently the South Dakota Board of Regents was evaluating new course management tools and their first decision was to rule out open source solutions because they simply did not have the Linux expertise to make good use of any of them. Many companies and organizations find themselves in similar dilemmas. There’s great software out there to use, but no one in the company or organization knows how to implement it. So what do you do?

Many organizations choose to opt for the proprietary solution that comes with great support and installation help and end up spending much more money than they need to. Instead of caving in and paying full price for proprietary software, instead consider getting an IT consultant to help your company leverage open source software. There are many companies which are called Application Service Providers (ASPs) that can do the setup of the servers, installation of the software, and manage it for you for a very low price. For example, DataSync offers a complete Zimbra-based email solution that’s much cheaper than Exchange and is technically superior as well. DataSync also offers a superb SugarCRM Hosting service that’s much less expensive than SalesForce.com.

DataSync and application hosting companies like it can help your company leverage the great open source applications available and you don’t need any of the advanced technical know-how to make it happen. It’s still a lot cheaper than proprietary software, and you get all of the great benefits of using open source tools.

If you’re looking to host Desktop Application, you might want to find a more traditional IT consultant. Chances are any for-hour IT consultant can help you install GIMP, Open Office, and desktop applications like that for a relatively low one-time fee. It’ll be much cheaper than paying for expensive proprietary solutions.

Just because your small or medium sized business doesn’t have an open source technologist on staff doesn’t mean that you can’t make use of these great pieces of software. Application service providers and IT consultants can help you leverage these great software solutions for next to nothing.

Tweet Read More →