E.piphany, SugarCRM Take CRM to Linux

CRM will be a hot topic at the LinuxWorld show in San Francisco as a new open-source CRM software company launches and an existing player announces that its porting its CRM software to Linux.

SugarCRM Inc. will officially launch at the show, while E.piphany Inc., which SugarCRMs founders have ties to, makes its Linux move.

Funded by legendary venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and headed by former E.piphany executives, the San Jose-based companys open-source product, SugarSales, became available July 4 and has had more than 4,200 downloads via the SourceForge open source community.

SugarSales is offered in both on-premise and hosted versions with typical sales force automation applications like account, contact, opportunity and lead management plus tracking of customer contact.

It can support up to 5,000 con-current users and runs on Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL (LAMP) and Windows, IIS or Apache, PHP and MySQL (WAMP) Web development platforms. Customers get access to the products sourcecode as well.

The company was co-founded by three former E.piphany execs, including CEO John Roberts, who was most recently director of product management at E.piphany; vice president of products and services Clint Oram, who was senior product manager for the E.piphany Service product line; and vice president, engineering Jacob Taylor, who was a senior development manager in charge of platform infrastructure and services at E.piphany. All three left E.piphany to form SugarCRM earlier this year.

Not to be outdone, E.piphany itself will announce the availability of its E.6 suite on Linux at the conference. E.piphanys Java-based sales, customer service and marketing applications will all run on Linux.

In addition the San Mateo, Calif.-based company is announcing a marketing partnership with Red Hat Inc., which will resell E.6 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. E.piphany is targeting the mid-to-large enterprise market with the new Linux offering, company officials said.

Editors Note: This story was updated to include further information on SugarCRM management.

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