iRadeon Debuts Open-Source, On-Demand CRM

Small businesses looking for a more cost-effective on-demand CRM solution have more options this week. iRadeon, a provider of on-demand services for open-source business software, today announced Sugar Open Source CRM version 3.5 as an on-demand service.

"With products like Sugar CRM, there are cheaper alternatives to proprietary software in the open-source world," said Jeff Minich, vice president of strategy for iRadeon. "All the functionality that a small business needs is right here in an open-source product."

Priced extremely aggressively starting at $75 per month for 10 users, Sugar Open Source is making an obvious play for the salesforce.com marketplace, which is increasingly viewed as a costly solution for small businesses.

One company that has already made the switch from salesforce.com to Sugar Open Source is Efficient Frontier, which helps companies with search engine marketing (SEM). The main issue was cost. "We'd been using salesforce.com for about a year, and wanted to expand the number of users from four of us in sales to people in marketing and client services, but the cost was just ridiculous--$1,400 a month," said Tim Krozek, director of sales for Efficient Frontier. The transition over to Sugar Open Source was extremely smooth, he said; the team at iRadeon did the data transformation, and "we've had practically no training, everything is great." The goal now is to get the whole of the 45-employee company online with the service in the next 60-90 days in order to better share customer information throughout the business.

A recent cost-of-ownership analysis by Nucleus Research showed that a small business with 25 users migrating from salesforce.com to iRadeon will have an immediate 90 percent reduction in monthly CRM costs.

Other research shows that the small business CRM market is greatly underserved. According to AMI Research, there are 40 million small businesses worldwide, and 7.5 million in the United States, yet just a small fraction of this potential market are utilizing on-demand CRM solutions. Many of iRadeon's customers are first-time CRM users.

In coming months, iRadeon plans to build on its CRM on-demand service with releases of the latest versions of open-source project management and learning management software.

The Sugar CRM on-demand service is available now, and through October 31, iRadeon is offering salesforce.com customers a 90-day free trial.