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 7/1/2009 2:39 AM
 
We are currently evaluating Splendid CRM and so far are quite thrilled with what we've seen. This would be our first foray into "open-source" as a primary tool, so we have a couple of questions:

1) Roughly how big is the current customer / installation base of SplendidCRM or SplendidCRM-Based customizations?

2) What are the support options available from SplendidCRM - either free or paid? (great job in looking after the forums, btw, I've been thoroughly impressed with the response times in the forum)

3) Is there ongoing development of the product happening at SplendidCRM, and is there any kind of roadmap for future minor and/or major releases? How often is the core product updated?
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 7/1/2009 10:19 AM
 

1. We have close to 100 Professional or Enterprise customers, ranging from the small 10 user license all the way up to the large 350 user license.

2. We provide support via forum, email or telephone.  In general, we try for a 24 business hour response time, but we also offer Premium support for our larger customers that has a 4 business hour response time.

3. We continue to enhance SplendidCRM by researching the latest technologies out of Microsoft.  For example, we are currently experimenting with both Silverlight 2.0 charts and with the new .NET charting package.  We are also working on QuickBooks integration and an offline client.  We don't publish a roadmap because we like to be flexible and we don't like to be rushed.  Rushing always leads to poor quality code.

 

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 7/1/2009 11:24 AM
 
 Modified By Shaun Peet  on 7/1/2009 10:29:31 AM
I can't find a price for premium support anywhere on the website. Can you provide pricing for premium support?

I very much inderstand your point of view when it comes to a published roadmap and agree that rushing things doesn't help. From our point of view, however, we're trying to evaluate ROI over a 3-5 year period. With no upgrade protection or upgrade discounts available, it would be helpful to know in general, or on average, how often minor / major updates are released since we'll need to shell out 15-25 user licensees for each major release and wiill have to maintain our customizations for each minor release (which costs us time and money too). I would be able to estimate this from your "What's New" page on the site except that no dates are provided next to each of those releases. I appreciate your understanding.


Also, how "open source" is the product at this point? Do the companies who purchase your product have an opportunity to make improvements to it and submit them to the core product? We'd certainly have no problem passing along our customizations. I suppose for that to happen effectively there would need to be some way of communicating which features / bugs are being worked on, and by whom.
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 7/1/2009 11:49 PM
 

We usually only recommend the premium support option when you have 100 or more user licenses.

We usually run about 18 months between major version upgrades.  Some companies like to do upgrades every year so that they can have a steady stream of upgrade revenue.  We prefer to drive our upgrades using compelling features. 

We have a slightly different approach to open-source in that we don't require our customers to give back to the community.  A fair number of our customers are actually partners that are trying to build a business in a specific vertical, so we encourage them to keep their customizations to themselves to create a competitive advantage.

If you have any code that you would like to contribute, just send it to our support staff for evaluation.  As a general rule, our goal is to follow SugarCRM as closely as possible to ensure compatibility with their documentation.  While there are a number of areas where we deviate, this rule has served us well for several years.

 

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 7/3/2009 1:50 PM
 
Thanks for the added information. One more quick follow-up.

I noticed that the SugarCRM is into version 5 and that the SplendidCRM is "using" version 4.5. Please forgive me if that's not the case but I thought I read that somewhere. If that is the case, a couple of questions come up:

1) Do major version updates from Sugar usually correspond with major version updates in Splendid?
2) About how long after a new release comes out from Sugar does it become implemented in Splendid?
3) Are there any plans to begin using Sugar 5 in Splendid 3?

Thanks again. Have a happy 4th.
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