CRM Welcomes Open Source World

Move over, Sugar! In light of this week's Linux World Conference & Expo, the CRM world is abuzz with the marriage of open source applications development to help companies better respond, up-sell and cross-sell to their customers.

Siebel Systems reported on Monday that Novell agreed to support its suite of business applications on Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. At the same time, CRM software solutions provider Epiphany announced plans Monday to make the Epiphany Sales & Service, Marketing, Advisor and Customer Relationship Backbone solutions certified for use with the open source JBoss Application Server.

Meanwhile, well-known open source CRM vendor SugarCRM reportedly plans to announce on Aug. 15 a new version of its enterprise edition and RightNow Technologies will try to build momentume when it announces two new product launches during its annual analysts' day on Wednesday, Aug. 10.

The news come as developers are set to converge once again in San Francisco for the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. The developments underscore the impact that open source technologies is having on enterprise applications. Whereas open source relegated itself previously as an operating system for hobbyists or at most running a corporate firewall, developers are now embracing open source software code in mission-critical functions like sales automation in order to help lower total cost of ownership.

For example, SSA Global, which announced last week that it was acquiring Epiphany, on Monday said it will also acquire Boniva, which developed HR solutions built using the same Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology as its recently released SSA Technology Architecture.

In fact, open source was also a key point of interest last week in San Francisco when VoIP developers converged at the second annual VoIP Developer Conference, hosted by TMC, the parent of this Web site. Among the speakers drawing standing-room-only crowds were Mark Spencer, President of Digium and creator of Asterisk, an open source PBX.

Of its new relationship, Siebel said it really represents an extended development partnership where its product development team will work to support the standards-based computing solutions of Novell's Linux platform. "This new product initiative enables Siebel to offer our customers the additional choice of using Novell's fully supported Linux platform for their Siebel deployments," said Skip Bacon, Vice President, Technology, Siebel Systems.

"Specifically, this effort will allow customers of all sizes the opportunity to leverage standards-based computing technologies and exploit SUSE Linux's integrated management capabilities to enable system administrators to more rapidly deploy, configure, and operate their production systems. We look forward to continuing to work with Novell and deliver world-class enterprise solutions to our customers."

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.

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