August 16, 2006, 12:29 PM — Listen to the column "Open Source Escape Hatch", or visit our Podcast Center to hear more by James Gaskin.
Every Fortune 2000 company uses CRM tools from either PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, Vantive, Avaya, or some combination of two or more of these application. Every Fortune 2000 company hates being locked in to these systems and getting jerked through unwanted upgrades or mergers that requires extensive reprogramming.
Would you love to port the business rules you've built into Siebel to an application you control? Would you love to recreate your GUI in PeopleSoft on an application not held hostage by Oracle? Then you want to talk with Paul Tenberg of Queplix (.com), and learn how Open Source can save you barrels of money.
Queplix has a simple business plan: recreate enterprise CRM systems in Open Source software built on a J2EE framework. Once ported, you choose your own application server that supports J2EE and control your own application running QueWeb from Queplix. There are fees involved, including license fees per processor, but they pale compared to the pirate's bounty demanded by the big CRM players.
Tenberg explained how Queplix developed an application called QueCrawler to search through your current CRM system to automatically capture up to 70 percent of your existing business logic and interface design. Queplix builds their QueWeb application in three layers: the core with database connections, the business layer with workflows and business rules, and the presentation layer. As object-oriented programming planned, each layer remains separate and can be modified without demanding rewrites in the other layers. Try that with your orphaned JD Edwards systems.
Queplix is a small company with about 50 employees, headquartered in Princeton NJ with sales offices in Chicago and London. The development team is in Moscow, since Tenberg believes the Moscow developer community handles J2EE better than India or other Eastern European countries.
While Queplix has only about a dozen customers now, their largest project handled 10,000 global customers. Other Open Source development companies will probably jump on this bandwagon, but Queplix drives that wagon today.
What about SugarCRM, the well regarded Open Source application? Queplix feels the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) framework doesn't scale to enterprise level well enough to replace Oracle etc. I believe many companies over-bought their enterprise CRM and can run on SugarCRM, but that's another story.
This story is simple: you can capture the custom modifications to your enterprise CRM package and control your own destiny, thanks to Queplix and Open Source software.
