Best Free and Open Source CRM Software: Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy for managing and understanding clients and sales prospects to help enhance customer satisfaction and thus increase profit and reduce operational costs.

Proprietary code powers the world banks, networks, voting machines and other critical applications that we regularly interact with. But the real question is where mission critical applications like this can be done with open source code, as many open source advocates would like to see happen.

BeyondTrust Software Inc. today announced a formal partnership with Red Hat. BeyondTrust will join Red Hat’s ISV Partner Program and create joint solutions aimed at offering Red Hat users a tightly aligned package of the Privileged Identity Management (PIM) tools needed for mission-critical servers.

He’s the man who brought open source to Silicon Graphics and NEC and advisor to Warburg Pincus on how to make money investing in open source. "At one point I got the title of open source's undercover agent," recalls Dave McAllister.

According to an old saying, when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. That, however, does not seem to apply in the proprietary software business, because as we have seen over the years, whenever a proprietary software vendor falls on tough financial times, it closes shop and releases its products under an open source license.

The first way that you can use your business cards is as a calling a card. To use your business card as a calling card all you have to do is hand it out to people when you first meet them. This is a great way to establish a relationship with a new vendor, a colleague or a new customer.

A good CRM package does you no good if employees aren't willing to use it. Case in point: IMA Financial Group, a medium-sized financial services company based in Wichita, Kansas. IMA had installed a commercial customer relationship management system that "was flexible and configurable and attractive on the front end," says business processes manager Jennifer Hallam.

If you’re a small business owner, you probably don’t need all the bells and whistles of a full-fledged customer relationship management (CRM) application, but you still do need a solid platform from which to automate common business tasks such as managing materials and generating invoices, ideally at little cost. Then Kraft is a great choice.

I've been writing about the use of open source software in business for nearly a decade and during that time I discovered the level of interest in free software to be somewhere between non-existent to various point solutions for routine or mission-critical tasks.