Well, after four years of toiling, the StarPound project is finally seeing the light of day.  In the wee hours this morning, Wei Wang (CTO) and I published v1.1.0 RC1 of the open-source StarPound CORE platform to Sourceforge, and then published the new StarPound.net web site.  The team has been working nonstop over the past few months to make this launch date – we’re tired, but we made it.

You can read a lot more about the platform over on the site, but I’ll serve up a quick description of it here, and share a little bit about where we’re going.

StarPound CORE is a beautiful fusion of business process management (BPM), telephony (VoIP/SIP, PSTN/TDM, cellular, etc.), and web services (SOA).  What a mouthful.   In other words, the platform gives you an easy way to turn your organization’s business processes into web (or voice) services.  You can also use it to create any web service, not just those that are explicitly tied to some business process or telephony.

StarPound CORE is comprised of two key components: StarPound Studio and the StarPound Application Server.  StarPound Studio is a visual process modeling tool that is BPMN compliant (very cool), and built on top of the Eclipse IDE.  You create a visual model of what you want the voice/web service to do.  You can drag/drop really cool things like calls to external web services (e.g. Salesforce.com, Google, etc.), call control tasks, IVR tasks, etc.  Test it, then deploy it into the cloud on a StarPound App Server where it is ready to use.  The service can be initiated by a person, a phone call, an email, FAX, SMS, or web application request via SOAP or REST.

The platform is 100% Java/J2EE, but obviously you can invoke deployed StarPound services using whatever language you are using (via SOAP or REST calls).

There is a lot more to our vision than what I’ve described, but at its core (no pun intended), that’s what the platform does. You can read more about our vision here.

What’s even cooler than finally releasing the first release candidate of the platform is that we’ve also released two sample open-source applications that were built on top of the platform (StarPound PBX and StarPound Call Center).

StarPound PBX is a full-featured, free, open-source PBX that gives you pretty much all of the features you’d need out of a PBX for your office:

• Auto-attendant
• Voicemail (and web-based voicemail)
• Call menus
• Call hold
• Call forwarding
• Call routing
• Conference calling
• Hunt groups
• Unified messaging
• User directory
• Integrated voice response
• Call center support
• Web-based administration
• Open-source and free!

And, it is scalable because it is built on top of the StarPound platform.  Legally, I can’t mention any names, but one of the largest video game publishers in the world is now using StarPound PBX.  And why not? It kicks ass.

StarPound for Call Centers is also mega-cool. It provides mission critical functionality for call centers, like skills-based routing, automated call distribution (ACD), inbound/outbound, predictive dialing, workflow management, queue management, CTI integration, call recording/monitoring, screen pops, agent dashboard, supervisor dashboard, remote agent support, etc.  Again, free and open-source, and another really cool example of the types of apps you can build on top of StarPound CORE.

Right now we’ve got a ton of really exciting business and partnerships in the pipeline on the commercial side of things, and I’ll be writing some more about those things down the road as we work through them. But I can tell you that we are enjoying a tremendous push into the enterprise call center space, online marketplaces/exchanges, and scalable cloud services.

On a semi-related note, we’re also exploring opportunities to invest capital and resources in new startups that are in a position to take advantage of this new platform for creating disruptive applications within specific vertical markets.  More on this soon … but you can read the official particulars here.  We have a couple of deals that we’re already considering.

Now with all the cute cuddly launch comments out of the way, I’ll add this:  We have a long list of incumbent industry players that we’re going after, in multiple markets and sectors. And we’re coming fast and going for your jugular. Let the games begin.

Hats off to the whole StarPound dev team for this launch (Wei, Andrew, and the guys in St. Pete) – it has been a long time in the making, and I know that everyone is ecstatic right now about where we’re going with the company.  Good stuff …

Cheers.

SugarCRM was founded in 2004 by CEO John Roberts, GM Clint Oram, and CTO Jacob Taylor. Since their founding, they’ve grown to a respectable 55 employees. In 2004, the same year of their founding, the company scooped up Communications Solutions 2004 Product of the Year Award. Not shabby.

The core product (SugarCRM Open Source) is freely available, so if you are running a business, you are able to download and implement the system without any software license costs whatsoever. This core offering serves up a lot in the way of functionality, including integrated contact managment, marketing campaigns, opportunity management, project management, lead tracking, account relationship management, web portals, integrated shared calendar, and RSS syndication. A nice “dashboard” metaphor brings all of the elements (and others) together nicely.

SugarCRM is also offered in 2 different commercial editions. The SugarCRM Professional edition adds additional features such as team management, MS Outlook integration, wireless access, sales forecasting, catalog management, and quoting. Among other things, the more robust SugarCRM Enterprise edition adds support for Oracle 9i and 10g on the database side, as well as some access to professional services and dedicated support services. If you want an easier path to going live, they also offer hosted solutions on a per-user basis.

SugarCRM (the company) gets open source. They realize that in order to be successful as an open source company, you basically have a very limited playbook. You offer a freely available core product, that is distributed via the open source license, and you grow your revenue streams around licensing for more advanced versions of the product, as well as professional services. If I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again: open source businesses are essentially services companies. (See: Software, Services, and Revenue, Oh My!).

From an architecture standpoint, SugarCRM is built around the wildly popular LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). The LAMP stack represents a fast growing open source enterprise software stack that more and more companies are using as an alternative to expensive proprietary software stacks (because of its lower cost and freedom from lock-in). While it is nice that the Enterprise edition will function with an Oracle database, it certainly isn’t required to achieve very respectable performance results. MySQL has come a long way from its early days – far enough, in fact, that Oracle acquired Innobase, a key technology provider to MySQL AB, the Swedish firm that produces and distributed the MySQL database engine.

While all of this sounds great, what really sets apart SugarCRM, in the opinion of this veteran technologist, is the fact that the leadership team has completely immersed aspects of online community building within their portal site located at SugarForge. Through the service at SugarForge, users are free to download and share themes (look and feel modifications), language packs, custom plugins, and other information. Also supported are support forums, a project lead database (mined by custom CRM implementors and service providers), and even a live chat (there were 8 or 9 folks in there a second ago chatting about customizing various aspects of the SugarCRM product).

From a cost perspective, there is simply no contest when you start laying out the numbers. According to Corra Technology, an open source software integration services firm, SugarCRM is over 6.5 times less expensive from a total cost of ownership (TCO) standpoint, when compared to rival salesforce.com:

Should Oracle, Seibel, et al, be scared? Not yet. The open source CRM movement is still creeping up from smaller companies to mid-size firms. Eventually, though, it is entirely conceivable that SugarCRM could exert some upward pressure on the aforementioned bellwether players, in much the same manner that MySQL put upward pressure on rival database maker Oracle within the enterprise database market.

Should salesforce.com be scared? You’d better believe it.

The future looks bright for SugarCRM, especially given their unique positioning at the nexus of the CRM wave and the open source movement, as well as their marquis capitalization via Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Walden International, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). These are storied, lynchpin investment firms, and they made the decision to jump into the enterprise open source market for a reason.

Cheers.