Crust is Spreading its Wings

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Since we launched in March 2019, Crust CRM Suite has established itself as the de facto open-source alternative to Salesforce. Self-funded, profitable in our first year of trading and equipped with an order book delivering over a year’s worth of cash runway, Crust Technology is already on target to grow between 200% and 300% in its second year. Corteza, the community project founded when Crust contributed its entire code base to the Commons Conservancy in June 2019, has gone from strength to strength, garnering many thousands of users in its first year. Its goal to become “The Digital Work Platform for Humanity” is gaining momentum.

These are big statements and we count ourselves lucky, given the economic mayhem and misfortune that has afflicted so many to date in 2020. Keeping our commercial focus and development on track and on budget has been a tough but welcome challenge to date and our next steps will set the bar higher again. Read more

Golang CRM

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We mention it regularly in our blogs, but why is it important that Corteza use Golang? Well, first of all, if you’re to get a CRM for free, it may as well be written in a modern coding language. Google uses Golang to build and manage much of its application infrastructure. As the leading open source Salesforce alternative, Corteza also shares the use of Golang in common with its primary competitor.

What is Golang?

Golang, also written as Go, is an open-source programming language. According to the website of the project Golang “makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software”. It is developed by a team at Google and many contributors from the open-source community. The first release was in 2009 and it has become a very popular programming language. Read more

When to use Rapid Application Development?

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Corteza is widely known for the excellence of its CRM Suite, the leading open-source alternative to Salesforce. Much of its strength comes from the fact that its build process was inspired by the “Lightning” low-code platform. However, Corteza did add some extra features and user friendliness not present in Salesforce.

The Corteza Rapid Application Development platform is the ideal companion for enabling your digital transformation strategy. Or, for simply building once-off business applications. This is because Corteza delivers a Rapid Application Development environment with the best of “no-code low-code” practices. Read more

What is BPMS?

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According to Wikipedia, “Business Process Management is a discipline in operations management in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize and automate business processes.”

BPMS (Business Process Management Software or System) is a software platform for enabling BPM activities. Managing business processes is at the heart of your work, building a:

  • CRM Suite
  • applicative software
  • applications of IoT
  • tools for a digital transformation strategy

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How to set up an automated business

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As the economic squeeze continues, many businesses will be asking how automation can help them and their staff become more productive, focus their efforts on relationship building and service existing customers more effectively. Read more

Is an Open-Source Low-Code Platform Really Right for You?

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Some users and even software vendors seem to think that open-source and low-code platforms compete with one another. I’ll be honest, the title of this article even came from one such vendor. And, it is a crazy line of thought, in the same way as the Mattermost vs Slack argument in the field of open-source chat. It’s futile without putting the respective feature sets front and center. Whether an open-source low-code platform is the best choice for your organisation or not is dependent on the feature set and quality of the product – not that the software code is available in the public domain or not.

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What is an Open-Source Low-Code Platform?

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It’s a cliché to say by now, but the world has entered stormy economic waters. Spending on information technology is due to decrease for the foreseeable future. Being less expensive than traditional development and often delivering better results, the growth of Low-Code Platforms is about to accelerate even further. Planet Crust offers the premium free and open-source Low-Code Platform Corteza for building records-based management web applications.

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It’s time to turn the page on open source forks of SugarCRM

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It is a testament to SugarCRM that it spawned so many open source forks, before deciding to take itself down an exclusively closed-source, proprietary route. There seem to be dozens of them out there, each claiming to be unique while all working from the same core community edition engine, abandoned by Sugar CRM all those years ago. Read more

Why Crust is Ideal for Not-for-Profit Organisations

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For many, either being part of something bigger than ourselves or standing up for closely held principles are important. In June 2019, Crust Technology contributed all of its software intellectual property to the Commons Conservancy, an independent open-source foundation. In doing so, we created Corteza, “The Digital Work Platform for Humanity”.

Corteza

The objective of Corteza is clear – to deliver a 100% free, open-source, self-hosted cloud platform for growing your organisation’s productivity. It enables relationships and protects the work and the privacy of all those concerned.

This effort began by producing a fully-featured alternative to Salesforce – the cloud leader in CRM – and an alternative to Slack Enterprise Messaging. All of this is presented via a unified interface on the frontend, joined up with automation on the backend. Very recently, we also released Service Solution, a self-hosted enterprise-grade alternative to Salesforce and Oracle Service Clouds.

Everything is delivered with modern, hyper-efficient code. Organisations can benefit from the impressive low-code development facilities to build their own custom apps, reducing costs and lowering time to delivery.

The publicly stated values of the Corteza project are as follows:

Public Good:

Corteza’s software and other offerings are designed and provided as a public good for the public benefit.

Open and Transparent:

Corteza’s governance and operations are open and transparent. It uses the best practices from across the not-for-profit, private and public sectors.

Diverse and Inclusive:

Corteza’s members, policies and programmes are designed to actively foster diverse, inclusive and non-discriminatory participation.

Built for Humanity:

Corteza’s software and other offerings have a real impact on people’s lives. As such, they are designed, built and provided with a strong emphasis on quality, privacy, security and usability.

Crust for the Not-for-profit sector

All Crust software is built 100% on the Corteza code-base. Professional versions of Crust software are made freely available to the not-for-profit sector, including all professional software maintenance.

On top of this, Crust is beginning to push development of Corteza’s outreach Programmes, which range from Humanitarian through Ecological to Privacy Programmes.

Delivering a standards-based public good, then constantly striving to push those standards higher is a lot of work. Being part of something bigger than us is key to the Crust team’s identity and to our brand. Since the launch of Corteza, we discovered that the more we give and the better we give, the stronger our business gets.

The Not-for-Profit sector deserves an approach to building software that is inclusive of its requirements and which ensures organisations in the sector do not fall out-of-step with developments in the private and public sectors. Crust and Corteza successfully deliver this approach, feature-rich and with ever-reducing economic barriers to entry and participation. Our low-code philosophy is central to this ethos and we go out of our way to ensure that, where coding is required, it’s limited to well-supported and inexpensive JavaScript skills.

The cherry on the cake? Crust Essential Support subscriptions are completely free-of-charge for Not-for-Profit organisations and their customer bases – subject to the condition that the organisation is fulfilling its purpose by using our software. Digitally transforming and managing your relationships with your donors, advocates and volunteers have never been easier.

Try out Crust

Are you working in a Not-for-Profit organisation? Get your free online Crust demo here.

 

 

 

Is Salesforce Copying the Crust’s Product Strategy?

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Last week brought us the news that two of the most significant players in the CRM market, Salesforce and Microsoft had struck a deal. Salesforce Marketing Cloud will soon be hosted by Microsoft Azure. At the same time Microsoft Teams, a Slack Messaging alternative, will be integrated with Salesforce Sales CRM and Service Cloud.

When we were first designing Crust’s product strategy, our research showed that Salesforce Chatter, the internal messaging system on the cloud-only platform, was the most disappointing element of its portfolio. In its place, we decided to implement a core Messaging system inspired by Slack’s architecture and feature set. This feature set is already included in our Sales CRM and Service Solution.

Why was Slack-like Messaging of such interest? At Crust, we believe that openness, consistency and standardisation of data architecture are critical to the healthy long-term functioning of a business. Cobbled-together data architectures are expensive to maintain, and it’s always the customer that pays. Crust and our community project, Corteza, avoid such complexity by default. Our Messaging can suck in data from thousands of different sources if we wish and standardise that data for use across our various applications. Try to do that with email…

At Crust, we believe that openness, consistency and standardisation of data architecture are critical to the healthy long-term functioning of a business.

It remains to be seen what Salesforce’s decision to hold hands with Microsoft means in terms of businesses’ data sovereignty. Recently, Google’s been accused of health data stockpiling, and one of the concerns is that data from one service will be used to promote others. Is it possible someday that Microsoft buys Salesforce outrightly, giving it unfettered access to all activity on the powerful trio of Salesforce, LinkedIn and Skype? That’s a lot of sensitive trading data and intellectual property, and it highlights the big question of a data grab where Microsoft may find itself wandering into antitrust territory once again.

However, let’s face it; this is all about money. The real costs of Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics365 already border on extortionate. How much more customers can be “locked-in” by dependence on the vendors’ closed business logic implementations and hoisted with new charges remains to be seen. If history is any measure, then they usually find a way.

Crust will always aim to include market-leading features, will always provide familiar UI’s and UX and will always be 100% free and open. Our strategy to offer a robust, self-hosted alternative to Salesforce looks more aligned than ever.

So is Salesforce copying Crust’s strategies? Maybe just a little wink in our direction with their Microsoft Teams integration, but for the rest, we’re a whole lot safer and less expensive a bet 😉

Online demo

Want to check it out for yourself? Get your free online demo here.