Fonality acquires Aussie CRM developer

LEADING US-based unified communications and contact centre specialist Fonality has acquired Sydney-based SugarCRM development house Insightful Solutions for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition is part of a Fonality initiative to create the industry’s first phone system that unifies both telephony and CRM for small and medium sized businesses.

Insightful Solutions is one of the world’s largest SugarCRM development companies and is a SugarCRM Gold partner for the Australia-New Zealand and Asia Pacific regions.

SugarCRM is a commercial open source customer relationship management software platform.

Over the past two years, Insightful has made substantial enhancements to SugarCRM and hosts more than one thousand seats in 13 countries at the company’s three global data centres. By combining Insightful’s CRM expertise with Fonality’s telephony suite, small businesses will have an affordable solution that unifies employees with presence management, instant messaging, fixed and mobile calling, and provides a single 360 degree view of customers and business partners.

“Fonality has over 1,000 hybrid-hosted call centres deployed in 25 different countries and our hybrid-hosted platform is a powerful framework for delivering integrated applications directly to the SMB with no investment in premise equipment required,” said Fonality chief executive Chris Lyman.

“Telephony and CRM have a naturally concentric relationship, so this is good place to leverage hybrid-hosted and we are thrilled that the great folks at Insightful have joined forces with us to accelerate our unified offering to the global SMB marketplace,” Mr Lyman.

As part of the deal, Fonality will also begin selling Insightful’s SugarCRM managed service offering immediately, branded FonalityCRM.

Insightful co-founder and chief executive Marc Englaro has been appointed general manager of Fonality’s CRM Division. Before founding Insightful, Englaro was Director and Principal Consultant with Si2, leading its open source consulting practice. He will remain in his role as director of Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA), the country’s national industry body for open source adoption.

Insightful’s Australian team of CRM development and marketing experts have all taken positions with Fonality. The Insightful offices in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore will remain open.

“In Fonality we found a like-minded team which values going beyond simple integration, and building fully conjoined products that expand the definition of what’s on the market today,” said Englaro.

“Together we’re going to continue to raise the bar for what people expect from both VoIP and CRM.”

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SugarCRM integrates project management

OPEN source customer relationship management software vendor SugarCRM has launched a project management application integrated into its Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise products.

The company is also reported to be readying its Sugar 5.0 beta software for launch in April. The company’s last major release was its Sugar 4.5 version in August last year.

SugarCRM co-founder and chief technology officer Jacob Taylor is a keynote speaker at the Open Cebit event that is part of the Cebit Australia conference and exhibition held in Sydney from May 3 – 7.

“As companies become more service-based, managing customer and internal projects becomes even more critical,” SugarCRM chief executive John Roberts said.

“Project Management delivers a best-in-class project management application fully integrated with SugarCRM.”

The company quoted a Nucleus Research paper that found while 32 per cent of on-demand customers were currently using on-demand CRM, only 23 per cent were using on-demand project management.

“Managing customers and projects is the next step after acquiring them, making integrated project management a key factor in driving greater value from CRM,” said Nucleus Research vice-president Rebecca Wetteman said.

“Current SugarCRM customers have an opportunity to gain even greater return on investment by using Sugar Projects; others looking for a CRM solution with tight project management integration should investigate the Sugar offering.”

Sugar’s Project Management delivers a full project management solution combined with the sales management, marketing automation and customer support used by employees to manage customer-centric activities.

These new capabilities allow users to deploy projects across all customer-facing tasks, including campaigns, opportunities, accounts, and customer cases.

Because Project Management is integrated with Sugar’s customer information, users no longer need to be concerned with redundant or inaccurate information, lost customer data, poor information sharing, or lack of user adoption.

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