Open Source Google: Queplix CRM
Steven Yaskin, Queplix Chief Technology Officer, asked me to review his recent creation, an Open Source Customer Care web application named QueWeb Customer Care, made available also for download (requires registration) under an MPL + attribution license (QPL license).
To boldly go by Cadigan
Queplex was announced on the 23th of April, and apparently is the first commercial software built on Google Web Toolkit – an open source Java framework designed to deploy AJAX applications – chosen for the following reasons:
Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile. GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.
I went through the live demo available on line – just in case I suggest you to read the brief guide for the demo, it might help – and it looks fancy, but I didn’t go much further than having a look at it.
Queplix adopted the product specialists model, selling value added services for data conversions and it looks like if it is going to start a partnership program based on a new upcoming product:
QueWeb Professional (scheduled for Q3 2007), for IT consulting companies and Value Added Resellers (VARs) serving customers with verticalized or specialized solutions. Features a QueWeb OS download along with a set of proprietary development tools, including: QueDesigner to more easily customize, configure, integrate and build additional functionality; and QueCrawler to “crawl” through company legacy metadata and extract business objects for the replication of existing business processes and GUIs.
Queplix involving VARs might start its own marketplace, and opening to a Split OSS/Commercial products business model, who knows.
About Commercial Open Source, I disagree with this pretty bold statement:
Queplix is the only enterprise-level commercial open-source vendor
As far as I can see they still have to work on creating and leveraging their own community – as others like MySql and at some extent Alfresco are trying to do now – but… is Queplix willing to abandon the corporate production model?
Roberto Galoppini, 
Steven 11:49 pm on May 7, 2007 Permalink
Roberto, thanks. As always, this was a very insightful and informative post with good comments. Let me try to explain the comment “Queplix is the only enterprise-level commercial open-source vendor” if I may. We were not trying to offend anybody, just merely describing that we are coming from the other side of Open Source vendors’ spectrum: Queplix started as an open source solution for enterprise in 2003. As such, we did not have the community and huge following as other open source companies have (as you rightfully sited Alfresco and Sugar); but instead we focused on adoption of our product within enterprise. It was not until we had a dozen of Fortune 500 companies with global deployments and stable revenues that we decided to create a community around our product. As you noted, this community is just starting up, while our product development is being actively fueled by our enterprise customers. That is what prompted our marketing people to say that we are very proud of being first widely adopted enterprise solution in customer care. Let me know what you think.
Roberto Galoppini 10:23 am on May 8, 2007 Permalink
Steven, thanks to join the conversation.
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:
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.
Steven 4:45 pm on May 9, 2007 Permalink
We believe we came up with the actually different approach to the open source model. This approach was more of a natural progression for Queplix, since we did not create it, but rather our customers demanded it. Queplix solves a specific problem – we eliminate specific pain points that exist today in our industry niche, which is Customer Care. Queplix founders (including myself) spent many years working as consultants for the major companies working in CRM and Service, implementing proprietary software such as the siebels and vantives of this world. Being consultants, we were always between the hammer and the hard place, since vendors produced bulky and rigid products while customers demanded more custom things. We were walking the thin line between losing the vendor’s support and failing the implementation. Without disclosing any names, I can tell you that I worked for 3 out of 5 BIG consulting companies for over 12 years, with the same result – while we had more than half of the projects go live, corners were cut, support was limited and future upgrades required millions in additional consulting fees. That was all too familiar CRM world dominated by big and proprietary technology vendors.
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 ïŠ. 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.
Roberto Galoppini 8:57 pm on May 11, 2007 Permalink
Hi Steven, thank you very much for your long comment, here some few spare questions. Quoting you:
What about making available a product comparison chart?
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.
Joe Austin 12:24 am on February 11, 2011 Permalink
Queplix Virtual Migration Manager Reduces Data Migration Time from Months to Days – Cuts Costs by up to 75 Percent – http://bit.ly/goaN2Y
Roberto Galoppini 9:51 am on February 11, 2011 Permalink
Readers would better check out a later blog post about Queplix, explaining why they didn’t go open source eventually.