looks good - thanks - they say:
The history of openCRX
After careful analysis of the market for Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) software we came to the conclusion that the world
needs a professional enterprise-class Open Source CRM solution for
several reasons:
Spending millions on a commercial CRM solution to get an "intelligent
data warehouse" with a few business rules simply does not seem
justified - with a professional Open Source CRM solution you can spend
your money on company-specific features and integrating CRM with the
rest of your business (systems and processes) instead of financing the
marketing machinery of the typical CRM vendor. It is just a fact that
the true value of any CRM solution can only be unlocked with proper
customization and integration, regardless of what you read in glossy
brochures.
The cost-advantages of rented/hosted CRM applications over commercial
solutions may materialize - or not (and yes, the marketing machines of
many CRM providers are really outstanding...); far more important,
however, is the fact that neither rented/hosted CRM solutions nor
commercial CRM solutions can beat the total cost of ownership (TCO) of
a well-designed Open Source CRM solution like openCRX.
While it is very smart to let somebody else do the work for you (e.g.
running your CRM application) it is definitely not so smart to trust
your most valuable data (information about your customers) to just
anybody. In particular, handing over all your valuable customer data
to a company under foreign jurisdiction is a substanial business risk.
So, when you looked at those hosted/rented CRM applications, did you
ever ask yourself where exactly they would store your data and how
much better you would feel about staying in control?
We are strong believers in platform-independence. And honestly, is it
not great to know that you can decide for openCRX without committing
to a particular platform? openCRX is deployable on any J2EE-compliant
application server and you can use a wide range of major database
management systems (Open Source and commercial).
Hence, back in 2003 we started modeling the core of a reference
CRM-application. The tool of choice for developing an open source CRM
solution was openMDX, the leading open source MDA platform (MDA =
Model Driven Architecture). In February 2004 we already released an
initial version of the core models. The first public version of
openCRX was released on 1-August-2004 and we admit that we have been
totally overwhelmed by the interest in openCRX ever since. |
