As I’ve discussed before , the CRM topic often gets bad press because of the failed implementations that many of us have experience of, as well as the focus of standard products which offer sales relationship management and pipeline management for the firm rather than added value for the customer. There are good products around which offer a better mix of functionality, and in any case the basics customer database and contact management facilities these product provide are needed by most businesses.
With commercial products available like Goldmine, Sage CRM , Oracle/Siebel at the top end, or SaaS offerings like Salesforce or Rightnow, one of the issues that can get in the way of a successful implementation is the licence model itself. This is particularly true for the small business. The real benefits of this kind of product accrue when everyone in the organisation has access to a common database, but for the small business watching the budget, a few more copies of the software or subscriptions to Salesforce for those occasional users may well be beyond the budget or difficult to justify.
This is where an open source licencing model adds real benefit. One of the barriers to a successful implementation is removed, so everyone in the organisation can be given access, even if their use of CRM is very infrequent. But those customer interactions they are involved with will be captured inside the system, and so the chances of everyone using the system properly and the project succeeding are improve. Of course, open source software isn’t “free”. You will still need to pay for the product to be hosted, supported, and for proper training, even if you allocate resource from your own organisation and take a DIY approach.
We’ve been looking for a partner for our organisation to provide exactly this kind of CRM component for our clients, and in turn their clients. I’m delighted to report we have secured a partnership with Yorkshire based OpenCRM. They have a function rich product supported by a good developer community, as well as accessing a number of different open source projects. The only provide their solution on a hosted basis, and so the business model fits well with our other SaaS based offerings. They also have off the shelf tools for integration with our other products, as well as Outlook. We’ll be offering other options as well, but we know OpenCRM open source approach will go down very well with our customers.
Technorati Tags : open+source, OSS, SaaS, CRM, ERP, Salesforce, SugarCRM, Siebel, Goldmine, Sage, OpenCRM
