Now, the difference between our enterprise and open source editions is simply in number of pluggable functional modules, enterprise edition more modules that we believe apply to larger companies (archiving, survey, customer portal, dealer portal, change request, HR, etc.) Both solutions are identical in terms of underlying technology – which is J2EE and Google open source engine (GWT). We offer legacy conversion for enterprises with different levels of SLAs and support (we or our partners always offer to support 100% of all QueWeb systems

What about making available a product comparison chart?

Third version, QueWeb Professional, which we are planning to release in Q3 of this year, will be targeted to our VARs and integrators. It will add the above mentioned QCrawler and QDesigner integrated development and conversion tools. These tools will NOT be open sourced however and this is how we plan to continue our growth. Our believe is that software we develop and promote should be open source, but we will charge developers and analysts for the usage of our design and conversion tools, which they can use to convert legacy CRM and, in the future, any proprietary software to our open source model, generate a business application and then resale it.

I totally follow your line of reasoning here, it makes perfect sense to you keeping proprietary tools enabling the delivery of added value services. Doing that you are not upselling your community, and you are (honestly) providing causes for effects. Tools could greatly help your partners to manage customers’ expectations. Your channel can’t be deeply involved with your (upcoming) community, channels love marketing shortcuts.

In the recent years however, the consolidation among the big CRM vendors was predominant and following the IT sector collapse in early 2000, a lot of smaller and successful CRM vendors were disappearing for various reasons (i.e. Quintus, Vantive). This left hundreds of medium and large corporations left with the proprietary, closed solution, which was heavily customized, deeply entrenched within the company, and something on which the company spent millions trying to make it satisfy at least 80% of their requirements and no vendor. What are the customer’s choices? Continue running legacy solution until it crashes and burns, while slowing down entire infrastructure and creating a security threat by not being updated by the vendor anymore and still not satisfying most of the existing and new requirements. Second choice - dump everything they have built, write off millions spent on existing solution and buy a new solution, not unlike the previous one; go through adoption of new rules, data migration, user training, deployment, etc. etc. In other words forgo entire investment in previous system and make a new investment in the same type of a product, only more expensive. Some tough choices.

Most of the companies running legacy CRM solutions are still running them, as they are unaware of the third choice. Queplix was created by CRM consulting veterans with one simple idea: allow companies to maintain their investment into legacy systems, while not requiring them to migrate to yet another closed product; in fact, we almost eliminate the migration all together. The solution is QueWeb on open source platform, coupled with the powerful business transformation engine that identifies all business objects in the legacy system and extracts them to the open source platform. QueWeb is distributed today through two channels: one for small to medium companies that have no CRM in place, as long as they buy into open source paradigm they can use and customize QueWeb any way they want. The out of the box features are abundant for SMB. The second channel is large enterprises with existing legacy systems: we convert these systems into QueWeb using our QCrawler and QDesigner tools. The conversion is almost entirely automated and it eliminates data migration, redoing all customizations and even mimics the screens. We convert all entities, business objects, custom developed VBA scripts, stored procedures, etc. everything that belongs to the customer, without taking a line of code from the legacy system itself (which is impossible anyways since it is closed). At the end, we save the investment made into legacy CRM and eliminate the possibility for the customer to be in the same bad position ever again. We have done over 12 such large migrations for large enterprises, migrating various enterprises from Siebel, Vantive, Avaya, Quintus and others to QueWeb in a matter of weeks. Nobody is safe anymore in the legacy world . We are finalizing the conversion drivers now for Peoplesoft and starting to look at Remedy and other similar proprietary vendors that still exist today.

Now, the difference between our enterprise and open source editions is simply in number of pluggable functional modules, enterprise edition more modules that we believe apply to larger companies (archiving, survey, customer portal, dealer portal, change request, HR, etc.) Both solutions are identical in terms of underlying technology – which is J2EE and Google open source engine (GWT). We offer legacy conversion for enterprises with different levels of SLAs and support (we or our partners always offer to support 100% of all QueWeb systems).

Third version, QueWeb Professional, which we are planning to release in Q3 of this year, will be targeted to our VARs and integrators. It will add the above mentioned QCrawler and QDesigner integrated development and conversion tools. These tools will NOT be open sourced however and this is how we plan to continue our growth. Our believe is that software we develop and promote should be open source, but we will charge developers and analysts for the usage of our design and conversion tools, which they can use to convert legacy CRM and, in the future, any proprietary software to our open source model, generate a business application and then resale it.

Would love to know your opinion on this, as this is something of a totally new approach to open source. To make it easier to analyze, we proved this approach by converting a dozen Fortune 500 companies in Europe and US in the last 2 years from various legacy CRM systems to QueWeb, all with global deployments in thousands of users. One more comment: Queplix had been mostly under the radar of media and current hype around the open source for few reasons: we are still a small company and we never raised VC funds, focusing on the core development. We can successfully sell to large companies since we resolve their paint point; this does not require large marketing expenses on one side, and allowing us to distribute QueWeb under the open source license to smaller companies on the other side.

I believe you at Queplix are totally right being proud of enterprises’ adoption of your product, and I also believe that your VAS proposition basically based on conversions pays.

Reading others’ opinions, today I created an account to access properly the download area, reporting:

Choose between two Windows Installer programs: Full Installer with a complete stack of software required for QueWeb Open Source edition or the Light Installer if you already have installed JBoss and MySQL. Software included in the Full-stack Installer: QueWeb Customer Care OSS edition, MySQL©, JBoss© and Java© binaries.

For other deployment options consider upgrading to the Enterprise edition with support for BEA©, Websphere©, JBoss and Orion© as well as running on the latest Oracle©, MS SQL Server©, DB2© and Sybase© versions.

Could you possibly make clearer the difference between the Open Source Edition and the Enterprise one? It might greatly help users and potential customers, and I could also update my business model considerations.

About building communities I believe it is much easier in the infrastructural arena, but both marketplace and franchising approaches can greatly help.

I hope to hear back from you.