customer relationship management

eCRM Guide: "Open source customer relationship management vendor SugarCRM today took the wraps off its first mobile CRM app for Apple's iPhone and also unveiled new social CRM features."

Tech Source: "If you happen to own a business and are looking for CRM applications, I have here a list of some of the most well-known free and open-source customer relationship management (CRM) software available today."

LinuxLinks: "In simple terms, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) represents the way an organisation keeps track with its existing and potential future customers.

CRM software offers the means to support these processes."

The VAR Guy: "Two prominent open source applications providers — Open-Xchange and SugarCRM — are partnering to integrate their collaboration and customer relationship management software.

The move comes as Open-Xchange recruits SaaS partners and on-premise channel partners to battle Microsoft Exchange."

The business social network LinkedIn is not just a way to connect with your business contacts.

According to eMarketer’s latest research, US social network ad spending will fall 3% in 2009.

If it happens, it’ll be a big change from previous couple of years; in 2007., social network ad spending grew 129% in 2007, and in 2008, it grew 33%.

The is a clear pattern to open source's continuing rise. The first free software that was deployed was at the bottom of the enterprise software stack: GNU/Linux, Apache, Sendmail, BIND.

Later, databases and middleware layers were added in the form of popular programs like MySQL and Jboss.

Malcolm Yates, the global independent software vendor (ISV) alliance manager at Canonical Ltd. traveled halfway around the world, flying from London to San Francisco with a message for LinuxWorld: Ubuntu is growing up.

No longer just an operating system for geeks, Ubuntu has begun to evolve into a mature ecosystem with a small but growing cache of applications to run on top of an OS and more partners to expand its reach, he said.