Open Source CRM Startup X2Engine adds Email Campaigns

X2Engine CRM, a new Open Source Customer Relationship Management startup, releases email campaigns for sales professionals

X2Engine today announced the general availability of X2EngineCRM, a next generation, open source CRM system. Founded in 2011 by CRM software entrepreneur and SugarCRM co-founder John Roberts, X2Engine CRM has been installed on over 2,500 public and private cloud servers across 110 countries within the last six months.  
“Today’s CRM systems have become so bloated with features they are almost impossible to use effectively,” said John Roberts. “With this latest release of X2EngineCRM, sales professionals can easily add unique tags to customer and account records, allowing them to quickly send out emails to targeted groups. It puts the power of a full marketing campaign management system into the hands of sales representatives, and frees marketing to work on more strategic campaigns.”

Customer Relationship Management(CRM) software has evolved over the years, and today there is an almost dizzying selection of capabilities, technologies, and pricing. CRM complexity and poor usability limit the value provided to companies, while restricting their return on investment. Too often, CRM systems become bogged down with features and capabilities, making them complex, costly to run, and difficult to use. We started X2Engine to reinvent CRM and provide an open, modern, more effective alternative.

X2Engine CRM Key Features:
Web and Facebook Lead Capture Forms
Lead Nurturing, Scoring and Intelligent Routing
Contact Activity Management
Sales Process Workflow Engine
Email Correspondence
Product and Sales Quotes
User Profile Pages and Activity Streams
Field Security, Roles and Sales Teams
Visual Form Editor for Admins
Reporting Dashboard
iPad and Mobile Device Apps
New Santa Cruz, Headquarters
X2Engine Inc. is headquartered in beautiful Santa Cruz, California, a short 40 minute drive from San Francisco International Airport. We really enjoy meeting users whenever possible and encourage you to visit our offices when you find yourself in the San Francisco bay area.
Supporting Resources:
X2Engine.com
Live Demonstration
Download Sites
Feature List
X2Engine on Twitter
X2Community

Gamification is used by New Open-Source CRM app

The backers of a new open-source CRM (customer relationship management) application called Zurmo are hoping to stand out in a crowded field via the use of gamification, the notion of applying game-like design principles in an effort to make users engage more closely with a product.

Now in beta, Zurmo is written in PHP and made available under the GPLv3 open-source license. A release candidate is slated for availability in July, with a "general audience" release scheduled for September.

Its core CRM features cover contact management, deal tracking and activity management, while the gamification elements include the use of points and badges that users receive based on the actions they take, both in terms of sheer use as well as "business-related milestones," such as garnering a certain number of sales leads.

As users build up these points, they can achieve higher levels. The best performers jockey for space on a "leaderboard" inside the application, with the idea being to spur competition.

"We made the decision to go with gamification about six months ago,"said Zurmo's community manager, Stafford McKay. "We could either continue on and do the normal enterprise functionality like everybody else, or do something different."
The problem is that the CRM industry "has failed in terms of user adoption," McKay added. "Truly, end users do not use the [systems]. We've got to fix this. What is the point of creating an application nobody's going to use?"

Gamification is still a nascent field, "but we see it as really interesting and very possible in terms of motivating users," McKay said.

The company is seeking contributors to the open-source project. Right now, five internal developers and about eight committed external contributors are involved.
Zurmo is using test-driven development practices to create the software, which makes the process slower but avoids buggy code.

It would probably be possible to reach general availability earlier than September but Zurmo wants to make sure the initial release has "a nice baseline of functionality," said co-founder Ray Stoeckicht.

Gamification is a key philosophical focus of the product but not the only one, he said. In addition, Zurmo intends to deliver a "pure" open-source product, with all features available for download at no charge, rather than offering more basic editions at no cost and charging more for additional functionality, as is often done, he said.

Zurmo's backers have previous experience in running an open-source CRM business. Stoeckicht and McKay both work for Intelestream, a firm that offers consulting and services for SugarCRM and its own Intelecrm application, which is a fork of the SugarCRM community edition code. Zurmo's lead architect and co-founder, Jason Green, was an early SugarCRM employee and founded Intelestream, where he serves as CEO.

Intelestream and Zurmo are completely separate companies, and Zurmo has its own codebase, according to McKay.
Zurmo hasn't made final decisions on how it will make money off the software, but will probably look toward support and customization services, as well as building out a channel model, Stoeckicht said.

Hosting is available for the software from Zurmo and a few partners, but right now most deployments are on-premises, he said. In terms of customers, Zurmo is targeting small and medium-sized businesses.

Zurmo's success or failure may rest on how it executes the gamification components.
"Gamification is most effective when it employs rewards in exchange for actions," said analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. "Sometimes the reward isn't pay, it's personal pride," he added. "Really good gamification mechanisms take advantage of non-monetary rewards."

For example, reaching a certain point threshold might earn a user a dinner with the boss or a preferred parking space, Wang said. "It's something that's valuable to them. That's what motivates people."