ERP software leader Aplicor is the latest contestant to merit a review from CRM Idol.

Paul Greenberg and Denis Pombriant and their fellow CRM Idol judges, Esteban Kolsky, Jesus Hoyos and Brent Leary, “are viewing and reviewing contestants for the quality of their product, the vision of their company, the presentation that they are making and a variety of other factors.” They’ll have you know that these reviews are reviewed “and modified if need be” by all the primary judges.

First up: Aplicor. The stage is yours.

According to the judges, Aplicor offers a cloud-based Business Management product pitched to small and medium businesses, which the Idol judges consider to be businesses with 500 or fewer employees. On stage today is the Aplicor CloudSuite7, containing both CRM and ERP tools.

The judges see the tool’s ability to be cloud independent as one of its unique selling points today -- “Aplicor’s customers can select where the application can run based on their cloud strategies,” whether they want Aplicor to host it on their own cloud, or they want to host in a traditional IT situation, or on external clouds like Windows Azure and Amazon.

The choice is yours, customer. You’re not locked into any one option.

“Aplicor is built on the Microsoft (News - Alert) technology stack and all functionality is included under one single price - $89/user/month,” the panel of judges note favorably, adding that the price is the same for any cloud model or software delivery alternative, “such as private hosting, multi-tenant hosting or on-premise.”

Noting that Aplicor also differentiates in the CRM marketplace on the user experience and tool sets, the judges were impressed with how Aplicor “did a rethink of the traditional GUI and came up with two -- a traditional user interface and a panel and tiled view that helps users to set up the system to mirror their work styles.” You want panels to have views, graphs or objects? Whatever you like.

The CRM functionality and user interface include drag and drop fields to group and sub-group list of customers in order to drill down on specific customers, a Google (News - Alert)-like search to jump to customer records and objects, bookmarking for customer records and views, the ability to perform LinkedIn, Google and Twitter searches from within account record and other ease of use tweaks.

Overall, the panel thinks, “Aplicor CloudSuite7 is a good CRM system with a clean and easy to use interface... attractive to small and medium business.” As they conclude, this positions Aplicor as a viable alternative to such CRM tools as Salesforce.com and SugarCRM (News - Alert).

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.