When I was working as a Sales Engineer for a large Silicon Valley web content management systems firm in 2002, the holy grail of most organizational IT Managers was open, extensible systems for the various departments they supported. Marketing would need to communicate with Product Development and Human Resources needed a beeline to Accounting, technology-wise.

The challenge was that these departments usually ran their own servers with specialized and proprietary software that didn’t like to play nice with other applications. Typically they required ‘data-bridges’ or ‘plugs, paths and workarounds’ to get the data from one place to another. The business logic was usually lost in the process and had to be ‘restructured’ on the receiving end. This made the deployment of a company-wide intranet, as was the majority of our work back then, time consuming and fraught with sensitive migration issues. A typical project to tie in all the various departments would run into the millions and cost ten times that in time and internal resources.

The amazing thing about technology is how it moves at light speed- so today, a small business running a Customer Relationship Manager like vTiger has a system that is far more feature-rich and open with it’s data than those large expensive systems Fortune 500 was running in 2001. What is vTiger? It is an open source (General Public License or GPL) software package that allows you to run a sophisticated in-house CRM at a fraction of the cost of a commercial application. The software itself is free, so the cost is in time for implementation, configuration and deployment. If you were tech saavy enough, you could get something like vTiger running all by yourself. You can host it on your own servers or in the cloud, either way, it’s accessible 24/7, securely, from anywhere by anyone with an Internet connection.

vTiger is just one example of many. Here at Netcetra, we recently implemented the OpenGoo online office suite for project management, shared calendars, document repository and general workplace organizer. It’s AMAZING and has literally changed overnight how we do business. It allows everyone on the team access to vital client and project information 24/7 without having to reach others, and has dramatically increased my productivity as the general manager. I assign tasks and log milestones and everyone is in sync with all the data they need to complete their part of the project! We used Google Apps for this before, however one day and for no apparent reason the account was disabled and we lost access to our data for THREE WEEKS before Google realized it’s error and re-activated the account. It was a blessing in disguise! We now run a suite far more sophisticated, faster and more secure on our own servers that we already monitor 24/7 for our hosted clients. I sleep much much better at night as a result. If you haven’t already, run, don’t walk to OpenGoo.com if you run a business that could use an organizational power horse!

Software as a subscription (SAAS) is becoming a big business, with luminaries like Salesforce.com at the forefront. I often wonder how long it will be before the exceptionally talented, diverse and effective open source community delivers a self hosted solution to rival it… a quick search of SourceForge.net doesn’t reveal any outstanding contenders, however OpenGoo didn’t exist a year ago either. Now don’t get me wrong, Salesforce.com is an outstanding and mature product that I would not ditch without seriously compelling advantages to. For most small businesses though, it may just be overkill. vTiger already mimics much of what makes Salesforce.com great already: managing customer relationships pre and post sales and enabling management to see what’s ‘in the pipeline’. Most business owners know that to survive you must be effective at creating a solution then delivering it to your customers in a timely manner. Automation helps a great deal, however it’s the human element that is key.

So with a limited number of hours in the day, how do I best use my time to the service of my family, business and customers today?

The answer for me, these days is to log into our OpenGoo deployment on the netcetra.net servers to find out. Netcetra offers OpenSource business software and top tier hosting solutions to small businesses 24/7. Wouldn’t it be great to offer your customers that level of service as well? Contact me directly at (602) 410-4727 or hani@netcetra.net if you would like to find out more about the open source solutions that exist for your business. I can handle the extra workload now, I assure you.