It’s been an astonishing year at the SuiteCRM project.

We continue our mission to build the world’s best CRM application and to make every line of code free and open source. We believe open source is the future of enterprise class software development and we believe we’re being proved correct.

It’s been astonishing and unsurprising in equal measure. We have always held the core belief that if we continued to innovate and continued to release an ever-improving CRM application with increased functionality and stability, that eventually we would prevail.

It’s starting to happen: In the last 12 months, five billion dollar plus corporations have engaged with the project for strategic enterprise-wide deployments of SuiteCRM. There are global brands included in these engagements. The implementations are multi-national, multi-language, multi-year, complex projects.

We have competed and prevailed against Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft and SugarCRM. You’ll understand if we take some ironic pleasure from competing against SugarCRM and winning.

We’ve won all this new business and yet we don’t have any salespeople. When you consider that Salesforce has some of the best sales people on the planet and we have none. When you consider that Microsoft and SAP have embedded account teams inside most large corporations. Teams whose single focus is to keep the customers on-topic when it comes to software procurement. It’s worth saying again – the SuiteCRM project has no sales people, no sales teams. In reality, we’re so focused on producing the world’s best CRM application that we don’t have marketing people either. Our investment is not in well paid sales people, it’s in free and open source CRM.

We don’t sell SuiteCRM. Large corporates buy it. They download it for free from the project site. They deploy it. They run code scanners and penetration tests against it to check for vulnerabilities and code integrity (they can’t do that with Microsoft, SAP or Salesforce). They run load tests. And they reach the conclusion that this is a robust, secure, performant and highly functional CRM application.

Then they start talking to us. They want to know what our plans for the future are, how smart we are, how project capable we are, what our project costs are. Every time we get this far into an engagement, we win. We win because we have a complete commitment to open source and because we have come through the ranks of small and medium sized projects over a number of years. We have robust processes underpinned by ISO9001 and soon by ISO27001. We have smart and knowledgeable people everywhere from Business Analysis, through Engineering and Support. We’re battle hardened CRM warriors with none of the pretensions of our proprietary competitors.

We win because CRM software is commoditised business logic. Large corporations understand that Emperor Salesforce has no clothes. That underneath the slick, glossy sales machine, Salesforce does the same as SuiteCRM. We win because large corporates engaging with the project are delivering the highest quality CRM solutions at greatly reduced cost and at a pace of innovation that both surprises and delights them and their users.

This is a virtuous circle. Many of the corporations we’re engaged with give code back to the project. Most of the revenue from these enterprise projects goes back into the core project. The core project team is growing. We’re planning to hire some of the additional people that we need to make the project amongst the best of it’s kind in the open source world. We’ll be hiring Community Managers, Product Managers, Engineers, Technical Authors.

But no salespeople.

The future feels very bright and we’re happy if you can join us on the journey.