CRM and ERP News

-- By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer

Open source CRM provider SugarCRM has tasted moderate success with its on-demand model, with 1,000 commercial customers to boast of. The company diversified into the SaaS model in September 2004 with SugarCRM Professional. It pulled off a coup of sorts when it signed up Starbucks, Honeywell and First Federal Bank. Another achievement was stealing away special equipment provider for the automotive and appliance industries, Sterling PCU, from Salesforce.com. Apparently, the company ran into some extra costs with Salesforce, and was more than happy to switch over to SugarCRM, which apparently provided them with a sweeter deal. The future prospects for the company are not rated too highly though by Paul Greenberg, president of the CRM consultancy, 56 Group LLC:

SugarCRM's pricing model -- which operates in a more traditional way and is less "open source-like," -- will make it difficult to keep up with SaaS companies like Salesforce.com and San Mateo, Calif.-based NetSuite Inc., as it scales up.

Small and home-based businesses usually don’t have the resources to purchase high-end CRM solutions. But that doesn’t diminish the value of CRM in any business. So what does one do? Here's a list of free customer relationship management (CRM) products that I found on Line56.com. Check them out; one of them might be appropriate for your small business. Click on the product name to get more information:

OpenCRX: Its promoters call OpenCRX a professional CRM solution deployable to all major platforms. OpenCRX is multi-entity enabled, scalable, a real enterprise-class CRM-solution. You can try out their demo service to see if OpenCRX is compatible with your system and supports your functioning.

XRMS CRM: XRMS offers an advanced open source CRM, SFA suite. It also features business intelligence tools, Computer Telephony Integration, and advanced plugin architecture.

Cream CRM: Cream is for businesses like media organizations, which deal in a lot of multilingual work. It features powerful modules for sales automation, customer service, incoming and outgoing email, template-based HTML newsletters, and a WYSIWYG editor.

Daffodil CRM: Daffodil CRM enables seamless coordination between sales, marketing, customer service, field support and other functions that handle customer contact for an enterprise. You can try their live demo before downloading the solution.

Tustena CRM: "Tustena CRM is an Enterprise-Class Customer Relationship Management server written in C# for the .NET platform. It has many advanced features like companies/leads/contacts manager, calendaring, groupware, email marketing, reporting, orders, and catalogs.

Hipergate CRM: Includes sales automation, customer service, intranet, email marketing, content management, bug tracker, project manager, groupware, webmail, calendar, forums, file sharing and directory.

SourceTap CRM: Includes Sales Force Automation (SFA), marketing, campaign management, and customer service. SourceTap claims that its features are similar to Salesforce.com, Netsuite, or Siebel OnDemand.

Leopard CRM: "Leopard CRM’s system is designed to track customer contact within an organization including sales contacts, product trials, and technical support history."

Match.com has recently selected an email marketing firm to device a CRM program for its global roll out. CheetahMail, which is Experian’s email marketing company is all set to device a program that would reach out to almost 15 million global user community. The campaign is expected to reach out to individuals in at least 32 countries in 6 continents. CheetahMail brings to the table advanced targeting and segmentation tools to help Match.com to achieve its end objective. The tools will enable the dating firm to refine its email communications by the use of demographic information and preferences. This in effect will help to personalize each outgoing message.

Match.com’s product marketing manager, Robert Waeschenfelder stated that it is very important to be highly targeted in their campaign broadcast. And speed definitely matters when one is talking about a global presence. CheetahMail was able to fit the bill completely and hence their selection. Data Bulletin reports:

“Roy Jugessur, senior business consultant for CheetahMail UK, said: "Match.com's selection of CheetahMail demonstrates its strategic approach to using email to communicate effectively with millions of customers across multiple territories. This deal also reinforces CheetahMail's truly global capabilities and we look forward to helping Match.com deliver against its email marketing objectives."