SugarCRM Inc., a provider of open source CRM applications, and Olliance Group, an open source consulting firm, have announced an open partnership to help SugarCRM clients, and I quote openly, “understand the value of open source Customer Relationship Management solutions and incorporate them into their technology roadmaps.”
The Olliance Group and SugarCRM partnership offers a complete consulting and technology solution package for enterprises evaluating or running open source business applications designed, evidently, to really open things up.
SugarCRM plans to announce their new release, Sugar Professional 3.0, later this month at the MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. SugarCRM's components can be downloaded for free, although the company sells an enhanced version of the Linux components as Sugar Professional, as do a number of software resellers and systems integrators.
In Sugar Professional 3.0, part of the vendor's Sugar Suite offering, the Cupertino, Calif., company is adding a new module called Sugar Collaborate that will bring a number of project-driven capabilities to SugarCRM's existing applications, which include Sugar Marketing and Sugar Support.
Document management capabilities will be added throughout the suite, including the ability to manage sales documentation, marketing collateral and customer service incident reports.
Olliance Group an independent, open source, strategy-consulting firm, offering technology users, suppliers, and the investment community, a set of business strategy, technology planning, risk management and investment consulting services. Olliance has more than 20 years of combined open source consulting experience helping firms like Nokia, The United States Navy, Sun Microsystems, and many more, with their open source plans.
SugarCRM is the creator of Sugar Suite, an open source CRM application built on a pure LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) platform. By using the combined – and open – intelligence of CRM developers across the globe, Sugar Suite is a self-described “more revolutionary” CRM application than what is offered by most proprietary software or hosting companies’ today. Sugar Suite, so it says, “addresses today's business demands, has a low total cost of ownership and is highly customizable.”
Andrew Aitken, Managing Partner of Olliance Group stated openly that Olliance is “extremely impressed” with the quality of Sugar Suite. In less than a year, Aitken said, “they are a better solution than many of the available commercial CRM products.”
David Sims is contributing editor and CRM Alert columnist for TMCnet.
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