Continue reading »]]> Many of us are just old enough to remember the UPS commercial about the company that launched their new online store.  The handful of entrepreneurs cheered as they saw the first orders come in.  When the orders picked up and number more than 100, they screamed. Then 1000 orders…unbelievable. Then, as the numbers continued to grow, the mood became somber? Now what do they do?

That same scenario applies equally today. You’ve built your new Magento eCommerce site. It’s branded to reflect your company image, SEO is effectively in place and you’re getting great visibility and traffic. Orders are coming in, you’re getting paid. But what happens when the calls start coming for support? How will you manage customer requests that can’t be managed in 5 minutes or less and require follow up? What about return requests? What if the caller is a reseller who has special terms and price lists that the call center agent needs to know about when they answer?

These are all key needs that products like SugarCRM address. For growing and successful merchants, you’re online store front is just one piece. Continuing to build the requisite infrastructure needed to handle the call center, latest shipping and billing information from your ERP system, and provide customer interaction history is an important step to ensure your company can scale effectively as online order volume grows.

To solve this issue Magento and SugarCRM are uniquely well paired. As Enterprise class open source applications, each provides the architectural framework to allow these two systems to be tightly integrated so whether you’re taking orders online, on the phone, in the store, or all 3, your customer service team can have one common view and representation of all that is occurring for that customer and your business.

Levementum, as the world’s largest SugarCRM partner, and Magento’s 2011 Emerging Partner of the year, has experience in bringing these two heavy weight champions together in an integrated solution set.

Levementum helped Valtim Marketing Solutions achieve this success by integrating SugarCRM and Magento Enterprise Edition to accommodate all customer touch points.  You can read the brief Valtim Marketing Solutions Success Story for additional information on how this integration helped Valtim achieve the customer and sales success they were looking for with a completely integrated end-to-end solution.

Continue reading »]]> A few questions to consider:

• Is your company one of many that sells not only direct to consumers, but also through partners, affiliates, and/or distribution channels?
• Have you discussed expanding your web presence to capture more online sales but held off because you view your direct to consumer (B2C) business too small to invest in?
• Are you looking to find ways to lower the operational costs (or cost of sales) with supporting your channel sales model to allow investment in other growth areas?
• What about giving your existing sales force the ability to service a larger number of clients, particularly new and smaller ones, without having to invest the same amount of sales time and effort?

One of the recent trends we see is companies that typically sell their goods and services through channel partners (resellers, distributors, affiliates) are looking to augment their traditional field or inside sales model with a more robust ecommerce solution.  For B2B companies, it is common to multiple price lists per customer or customer tier, separate or even bonded inventory, and alternate payment terms and purchasing rules for their different sets of channel partners.

As these companies continue to grow, the cost of expanding their customer base through traditional means not only becomes cost ineffective, but it often results in declining customer value because the typical sales person can only support a certain number of target customers through manual processes.

Enter eCommerce solutions and Magento Enterprise. The Magento solution stack provides the framework for taking all levels of complexities per account or account type, and simplifying them into set or repeatable and high automated workflows that are integrated directly to your ERP system.

This system integration allows for consistent, up to date pricing, inventory levels and lead times, as well as greater customer self-sufficiency.

Levementum was able to create this efficiency for Troxell.  To read more about how this solution helped Troxell and their customers by utilizing eCommerce technology to enable the next level of scale and growth for their sales force, read Troxell’s brief Solution Summary or the complete White Paper.

Continue reading »]]>

As most of you know, eBay bought out Magento last week, picking up the 51% of the company it didn’t own.  While I have no idea what they paid for it, we do know that its initial purchase of Magento (the 49%) valued the company at 45 million.  I would bet the farm that the remaining 51% cost them at least 2-3 times as much, netting them out at a valuation of between 100-200m, and fetching at least 50-100m in this transaction.  That is, of course, pure speculation.

More importantly, the question is, what does this mean for Customers and Partners? I feel Brian Walker’s take on this at the Forrester Blog is right on the money:

For Magento users, this is a very good thing. It is time for Magento to mature as a solution and as a business. The same development approach and business practices which can support a small insurgent open source commerce platform do not scale to supporting multiple products with very diverse needs and across many maturing clients. Users of Magento’s enterprise solution have been struggling with support and product traction as Magento invested in the MagentoGo SaaS solution and tried to manage a rodeo of new and existing partners, customer acquisition, and diverse product initiatives. In retrospect this was too much to take on at once, and Magento may have outgrown their ability to deliver on the expectations. With the completion of this acquisition eBay has the ability to clarify the product initiatives, add needed investment to product development, and mature the support given to developers, partners and customers. A failure to do so will erode the Magento value proposition and see a raft of clients evaluating their long term commerce capability solution providers and platforms.  It will take time for the core challenges to resolve, so for Magento users struggling now this announcement will mean little in the short-term. For Magento users in the longer-term this should be a positive.

So, we will see….and Levementum, as a Magento partner is excited about the change, and optimistic about the future!

Continue reading »]]>

So  – I just got a preview of Aaron Fukerson’s presentation at SugarCON.   I will not steal his thunder before his session – but holy toledo, was I impressed by it!

So….without any spoilers, here is the 30,000 ft summary:   …We all know how hard it is to take the tweets, blogs, forums, threads, likes, shares, and rich dynamic content….and turn them into a recognizable element or artifact for use in a business context.

Aaron and his team at Mindtouch have it figured out.

Go listen…5:05 pm at SugarCON 2011.  Track 4.

UPDATE 4/6/2011 4:11 PST >>>>>>>>>Spoiler alert!!!

He uploaded his presentation on slideshare before the event…heh heh heh

Continue reading »]]>

Day 1 at SugarCON 2011….and at any software conference or exposition, its easy to get carried away with the hyperbole and “vapor” of new product releases, new alliances, the latest “foo”-CRM idea.

There is one solution offering though, that appears to be the real deal, and I am betting is going to get traction…fast….and its the SugarCRM – Lotus Live Collaboration integration being touted by IBM and SugarCRM.

The short story is that LotusLive Meetings and LotusLive Documents are now integrated into SugarCRM…the details though spell out the power behind these integrations. LotusLive Meetings cleanly integrates into the framework of CRM activity that is cataloged and managed in SugarCRM’s world of tasks, meetings, calls, etc. Perhaps more impressively, LotusLive Documents provides a context sensitive (i.e. related to Opps, Accts, Contacts, explicitly) document management cloud, that fits cleanly into SugarCRM, and is accessible throughout the application.

I suppose its probably easiest to put it this way. Levementum sells a lot of SugarCRM….and from my perspective, its going to be fairly easy to position and sell the LotusLive offering on a large percentage of the deals we see. Perhaps the key thing here is that I don’t see this as a “risky add-on” that potentially is a headache in the long run. It works – and its got Big Blue behind it.

In any case – I’ll keep you posted on our LotusLive journey. In the meantime, take a look at the LotusLive demo on SugarCRM’s website: https://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/webcast/LotusLive

Continue reading »]]> Over the weekend, two of Levementum’s engineers spent 50 hours with 50 programmers for SugarCON Code Sprint.   These fantastic super-nerds spent 2 days working on innovations for the upcoming release of SugarCRM 6.2. The best news…they ran on Beta all weekend and in spite of all the cutting and chopping the 50 programmers did, they did not run into a single bug.  A shout out to Clint Oram, Lila Tretiak and the Engineering Squad at SugarCRM for a high quality beta….way to go Sugar!

All games aside, and there were plenty (beer pong anyone??), these programmers worked on the latest and greatest Sugar 6.2 and successfully created new modules and performance enhancers that will work into later versions of Sugar.

Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, and Clint Oram, Co-Founder and CTO of SugarCRM, have talked repeatedly to the partners over the last couple of days about how impressed they were with the results and the improvements that came out of that session.

Here at Levementum, we are constantly looking at the SugarCRM product, new improvements, and how we can collaborate with Sugar to make a smarter product for our customers.  We are excited to see the developments our guys helped create during the SugarCON Code Sprint.

Continue reading »]]> Over the next 3 weeks, we will count down the top 10 reasons why current Salesforce.com users and those considering Salesforce.com should examine the possibilities that a SugarCRM implementation can offer.

Learn about why SugarCRM is a better choice then Salesforce.com

…and come see it in action at SugarCON 2011 in San Francisco, at the Palace Hotel on April 5 and 6.

Stay tuned over the next 2 weeks and learn why so many companies are turning to SugarCRM!

Continue reading »]]> This past October 2009, I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the Free Libre Open Source Summit and Think Tank in Paris, France. It was an opportunity for me to learn from the best and brightest that the world of open source has to offer – but more importantly, it was an opportunity to understand why, given the global relevance and reach of open source, Europe has so clearly established itself as the most dominating “consumer” of open source enterprise applications.

If you take one look at the global deployment footprint of say, a SugarCRM, or say an OpenBravo, clearly something is going on across the pond, that makes them more receptive, more successful, more bold and more committed, to the adoption of open source enterprise applications.  Given the spirit of innovation, and the burgeoning commercial open source business emerging in the US, I was curious…why there? why not here in the States?  why not in Asia?  Whats different?

At the conference, I came across folks from a number of VARs and integrators.  I was introduced to Smile consulting (www.smile.fr), a 300 person firm focused on Open Source implementation in France.  The team from RedPill-Linpro, the open source stalwarts from the Nordic region.  There were countless mid sized open source firms, all successful, all bullish about the future.

I immediately started to wonder, where the hell are the open source firms in the US?  Sure, we’ve got an abundance of innovators at the individual contributor level.  But large going concerns, exclusively focused on open source?  You’ve got us – Levementum,  and maybe Optaros, and maybe 2-3 others that are out there…but thats it.  And none of us are close to the big European players in size or reach.  So…Why?  After 6 glasses of Beaujolais in a bar on the Champs – I started to get some answers.  I’d name the individual references, but I suppose they were casualties of the investigative process(!).

I’ve come up with a few reasons.  Its not comprehensive, but its a start.

1. The reach of Government and the power of associations in Europe: No one doubts that the reach of government in Europe is far deeper than we’re accustomed to in the US.  Invariably, as is the case with most agencies of the state – there is a need to do more with less.  The notion of ROI tends to be “cost reference” versus the traditional “value reference” as it relates to implementation of technology.  Of course, value is paramount with respect to implementation, but the purchase profiles and criterion are different.  Additionally there is a clear distrust that the EU has for the big “IT gorillas” of the US…the Oracles, the Microsofts, et al.  The combination of cost sensitivity, government policy,  and mistrust has led European government agencies to supremely value “control of their destinies”…perhaps more so than their US counterparts.  Clearly open source gives them this control: on cost, on features, on scale, on customization.  This explanation, provided by my dear friends in Paris, made a lot of sense to me.

2. The need for regionally customized solutions in Europe. As a native of Boston, Mass, I can tell you there’s a lot of difference between Beantown and say, the Big Apple.  It starts with the Sox and the evil empire…but thats another story.  Back to point…even with the great diversity of the US, we still have a fairly homogeneous culture of business. Try and contrast French business practices with say Italian business practices.  Try and take your Spanish salesforce, and send them to close a deal in Copenhagen.  Doable yes…easy no.  Europeans are fiercely proud of their language, culture and history, and it permeates the business sphere in every way imaginable.  The walls start with language differences, and follow through to customs and legal practice.  Invariably, a business solution that works in Kiev, is likely not going to seamlessly work in London.  Open source applications, buttressed by their optimal flexibility, clean architectures, and open development environments, offer the European regions to shape a core of business features to their regional needs.  The US regions have much less of a need in this dimension.  These characteristics, that are inherent to open source, are vital in Europe.

3. The fall of the wall and the influx of skilled Eastern European engineers into the European market. With the fall of communism in Europe, millions of eastern European engineers and scientists were emancipated, armed tremendous skill, unparalleled resourcefulness, and a hunger for tools.  With a dearth of capital available to them…many of these great scientists and engineers jumped head long into open-source.  This created not only a skilled mass of open source experts and professionals, but also created new innovations that served to accelerate open source application adoption throughout Europe and the World.  If you want proof of this…take a look at odesk.com or guru.com.  Eastern European software developers outnumber just about any other global region (with respect to open source technologies).

In summary, its the perfect storm of demand, culture, and supply.  This European tempest will rage for quite some time…and frankly, I’m happy about it.  There are some lessons learned that I’m sure we can apply here in the new country!

NOTE: Ok…so, so what…what have I learned that we can apply here in the US?   I’m going to crack this code somehow – the elements related to government don’t seem to be that different than today’s US.  There’s an opportunity there I’m sure.

Continue reading »]]> You have likely heard the names before, especially if you are an advocate or user of open source software.  Beginning about, 3 or 4 years ago open source software began to get noticed in the world of enterprise applications.  The clear leader and fore-runner in the enterprise was SugarCRM, now several other common or soon to be common names join SugarCRM as credible enterprise applications and ‘Bossie’ award winners.  SugarCRM, Compiere, Magento and Pentaho are all 2009 Bossie Award Winners.  The Bossie’s are awards bestowed upon the Best of Open Source Software.  These applications though different in their capabilities and purpose share three distinct similarities:

1) They are all Bossie award winners – best in class in their respective categories.

2) They all can be integrated and complement each other in a typical enterprise.

3) They all are partners with Levementum, an emerging leader in the open source community as a system integrator and implementer.

Levementum’s customers span small business requiring CRM (SugarCRM) and a web store (Magento) to the multi-billion dollar enterprise requiring ERP (Compiere), CRM (SugarCRM), e-Commerce (Magento) and Business Intelligence (Pentaho) all complementing each other.  Creating synergy between these applications is both the dream and nightmare of most CIO’s.  Levementum has made this their bread-and-butter and understand the importance of applications that are integrated and support a single verison of the truth in an enterprise of any size.

Congratulations to the 2009 Bossie Award Winners.