Open-Source Vendor Sweetens CRM Pot ...

Computerworld - with Sugar Cubes -- two, to be precise. SugarCRM Inc. in Cupertino, Calif., began shipping the alpha version of its open-source Sugar Sales Professional software in the spring, released the product commercially in September and made Version 2.0 available last month. This week the speedy vendor delivers a pair of preconfigured, Linux-based appliances called Sugar Cubes. The 1005 costs $4,495 and can handle up to 100 users, and the 3005 starts at $7,995 and can support up to 400 people. SugarCRM's software runs on the "LAMP stack" of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. The entire application was written in PHP, which gives it exceptional performance, says Jacob Taylor, SugarCRM's vice president of engineering and co-founder. In fact, the company is so proud of the software's performance that with each page refresh, it displays the response time. If you get tired of paying the annual support fee of $239 per user for Sugar Sales Professional, you can simply stop -- and keep your data, the application and, of course, the source code, which can be customized by your own PHP gurus to your heart's content. Tara Smith, SugarCRM's director of marketing, claims that gives her company a big edge over Salesforce.com Inc. "If you leave Salesforce, you get your data but not the app to run it," she says.
Security tool's link to Remedy ...
can help IT staffers manage and fix network vulnerabilities. By year's end, Solutionary Inc. in Omaha plans to complete pilot tests of integration hooks to BMC Software Inc.'s Remedy IT help desk tools. The hooks are being built into an upgrade of its ActiveGuard Security Management service, which monitors systems for security vulnerabilities. Remedy users will be able to get a prioritized list of security problems that ActiveGuard finds and then use the information to issue trouble tickets to the appropriate IT workers. IT security personnel don't always know who's the best choice to fix a problem, says Mike Hrabik, Solutionary's chief technology officer. So, he argues, it's essential to correct known security problems through an established IT management process, such as Remedy-generated trouble tickets. That can be particularly important after a company does a large-scale vulnerability assessment, which often reveals thousands of security holes. "How do you bubble up the things you need to do first?" Hrabik asks. "And how do get the right people to fix them?" ActiveGuard will answer the first question, he says, and the second can be resolved through the integration with Remedy. Shipments are expected to begin in the first