The 7th Annual eWEEK Excellence Awards: The Winners - ' Business Relationship Management ' (
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CATEGORY: BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
WINNER
SugarCRM
Sugar Professional 4.5
Over the last few years, eWEEK has watched with interest as small open-source applications have attempted to enter into an enterprise application market typically dominated by expensive and extremely complex products.
During that time, SugarCRMs product has shown much progress, but it was in the last year with the release of Sugar Professional 4.5 that SugarCRM finally provided a customer relationship management product thats fully competitive with major commercial players in terms of functionality and capability.
Among the key new features judges noted in this release were much improved user interfaces boosted by drag-and-drop capabilities that are now much easier for sales workers to use. Also key in this release is Sugar Professionals move toward becoming a very Microsoft-friendly product, with good integration with Microsofts Internet Information Services, Active Directory, and SQL Server database. The product also still maintains its classic support for the Linux and Mac OS X platforms, and, similar to many other products in this space, SugarCRMs solution is also available in an on-demand model.
FINALISTS
Numara Software
Numara FootPrints Hosting Service 7.5
When it comes to relating to their customers, many businesses focus exclusively on sales issues, gaining new customers and getting existing customers to spend more money. But one area that is often left underserved is customer support, which doesnt make much sense as one bad support call can lose a customer forever. Numara FootPrints Hosting Service 7.5 makes it easy for companies to quickly get up and running with a platform to manage help desk and customer support calls.
OpenMFG
OpenMFG ERP Suite 2.0
OpenMFGs ERP Suite 2.0 is a well-designed, shared-source solution for the complex problem of ERP (enterprise resource management). This product has traditionally covered manufacturing, supply chain and accounting, but with the release of 2.0, OpenMFG took the big step of bringing CRM (customer relationship management) functionality to the table.
Our judges think this addition goes a long way towards making this uniquely licensed application an excellent option to traditional commercial ERP solutions.
Analytics & Reporting
Application Development
Business Integration Systems
Business Relationship Management
Desktop & Mobile Hardware
E-Business Foundations
E-Mail Management & Security
Enterprise Collaboration
Enterprise Storage Hardware
Enterprise Storage Software
IT Quality Assurance Tools
Productivity Applications
Server Hardware
Networking & Management Tools
Networking Infrastructure
System & Application Management
Authentication & User Management
Network Data-Stream Protection
Vulnerability Assessment & Remediation
IT Infrastructure 
