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?
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.
Some of the openCRX milestones:
Date
Milestone
01-Aug-2004
initial launch of openCRX v1.0.0
09-Aug-2004
made the Top100 on Sourceforge for the first time ("most active" ranking)
04-Sep-2004
openCRX v1.1.1 (support for additional DBs and language localization)
06-Sep-2004
reached 1,000 downloads
20-Sep-2004
reached 3,000 downloads
25-Sep-2004
made the Top20 on Sourceforge for the first time ("most active" ranking)
29-Sep-2004
made the Top10 on Sourceforge for the first time ("most active" ranking)
openCRX was released into the public domain on 1-August-2004 and has been under active development ever since. With every new release a whole range of new features and enhancements are added (see also this comprehensive feature
list for an overview):
Werner Froidevaux and Chris
Mueller have been the main drivers behind the development
of openCRX; in total there are 4 people working on the project
(each spending about 20% of their time on this project). Most of
the resources have been donated by CRIXP
Corp. and OMEX
AG.
Localization is done by a dedicated team of translators who contribute their valuable business and language know how to the project - a list of available locales is available here.
The
task of building a CRM suite with such limited resources is doable thanks to MDA (MDA = Model
Driven Architecture), which makes our team roughly
10 times more efficient than typical development teams. Our
development platform - openMDX -
is also playing a major role. We spend virtually no time programming
as all the main patterns (persistency, security, etc.) are readily
available. Our focus is on analyzing business processes and
modeling.
It is the hope of the openCRX team that lots
of bright people join the effort to make openCRX the tool of choice
for limitless relationship management.
If you can contribute or want to co-operate
. Any kind of support is appreciated.
