Open Source Software to Drive New Productivity Wave: Team Productivity
An expanding selection of feature-rich open source business applications promises to drive a new wave of productivity growth by automating and tightly coordinating team-based activities.
Roseville, CA (PRWEB) July 16, 2006 -- An expanding selection of feature-rich open source business applications promises to drive a new wave of productivity growth by automating and tightly coordinating team-based activities. According to Mckinsey & Co’s Software 2006 Industry Report, more than 40 percent of worker activity in the U.S. is currently comprised of “tacit interactions”, or dynamic collaboration between individuals in the workplace. (1) In spite of this, most businesses have yet to make significant software investments to support these team-oriented work environments. While shared activities such as sales management, project tracking, and document creation have become central in today’s workplace, they are usually managed by a disorganized crossfire of email interaction between workers.
“Microsoft Outlook is great for email, but it is not an optimal solution for managing team activities. When information that should be accessible to all team members is lost in individual workers’ inboxes it creates productivity bottlenecks that hinder competitiveness,” says Jeff Minich, vice president of strategy at iRadeon, an on demand provider of open source business applications. “Companies, large and small, need to have centralized systems in place for structuring team-oriented business processes like managing projects, servicing customers, and publishing documents.” Minich says the reason most businesses haven’t addressed the team productivity issue with existing proprietary technologies is because “the total cost of ownership for solutions from providers like Salesforce.com and Oracle make return on investment highly elusive, particularly for small businesses.” Rather than spend thousands of dollars per user on proprietary solutions, many small businesses are now turning to open source to circumvent license fees altogether.
iRadeon is leveraging open source to deliver a web-based team productivity solution to the SMB market. Scott Ryan, president of SR Associates, Inc., a manufacturers representative firm in Langhorne Pennsylvania, recently turned to iRadeon to help coordinate employee activities across his company’s remote offices. After looking at several CRM packages and contact managers, Ryan decided “Salesforce.com was too expensive and none of the pc-based solutions allowed us to keep everyone up to date because they lacked the ability to tie in to our network remotely.” Ryan ultimately chose iRadeon’s on demand solution AppPortal, which integrates four different open source applications (CRM, Project Management, eLearning, and Document Management) into a single team productivity portal. Ryan expects SR Associates to save over 80% by using open source versus a proprietary solution like Saleforce.com. “With AppPortal we immediately got the ability to manage our teams across all our offices at far lower cost than the other solutions we evaluated.”
SR Associates is not alone. Leading industry analyst firm Gartner predicts open source will take away 22% of the traditional software market over the next five years. (1) With Software as a Service sales expected to grow 20% annually during the same period, iRadeon is betting that the combination of open source along with low cost on demand software delivery will present a significant challenge to proprietary team productivity solutions such as Microsoft’s Office Live and Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. “The avalanche of information confronting today’s workers makes widespread adoption of team productivity solutions inevitable” says iRadeon’s Minich “with open source, businesses can get the same productivity benefits they’ll find with proprietary solutions, but without the high licensing fees.”
iRadeon is aggressively promoting open source adoption by offering new customers a free three month test drive of its AppPortal on demand solution. New customers will get three months of free access to the web-based AppPortal platform, which includes open source applications for Customer Relationship Management, Online Project Management, eLearning, and Document Management. The offer is available from July 17th 2006 through July 31st 2006 with additional information available at www.iradeon.com.
About iRadeon (www.iradeon.com)
Founded in 1999, iRadeon provides on-demand services for open source business software. With iRadeon’s on-demand services, companies can deploy open source business software via the Web without costly hardware investments, consulting or license fees. iRadeon is a privately-held company headquartered in Roseville, California.
Press Contacts
Liz Brentnall
iRadeon
916.787.1931
Jeff Minich
iRadeon
916-787-1931
(1) Mckinsey & Company, “Software 2006 Industry Report”, Ken Berryman, Joel Jones and James Manyika, April 2006
(2) Gartner Research, “Market Focus: Open-Source Software, Worldwide, 2005-2010”, Laurie F. Wurster, Fabrizio Biscotti, Bob Igou and David Gootzit, June 7, 2006
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