System iNetwork

Chris

I don't think the Sugar CRM announcement is really that important other than a "we can do that as well" message. The important thing is people may start to see that the i5 is not the closed system they were always led to believe? The fact that it now supports these kind of products also means similar solutions using similar technology are also supported.

The important thing to get out there is the fact that it's supported — then others will register the message and hopefully decide to try it out!

Generally business application buyers want to buy a product with support available — they tend to steer away from the free applications just because they lack a support structure and they may not have skills in house to do their own.

It's left up to the development community to build applications and provide that support to the users for a cost. If they can port their application which runs in the LAMP environment on another platform such as pSeries, they may consider the opportunity to sell into the i5 market. Or at least that's my thinking. This means more fully supported applications could be ported to the System i and hopefully keep the platform alive.

Chris...

Hi Chris, here's a link from Zend/IBM on downloading MySQL and SugarCRM and running it:

http://www.zend.com/forums/index.php?t=msg&th=3111

Maybe everything doesn't work, but it comes up, we've got the source, and we have i5/OS, so adding to it what's necessary, if anything, to get it running well on i5/OS is the whole point of open source.

Of course paying for the value add from SugarCRM, Zend, and IBM can each be evaluated on its merits. The DB2 MySQL engine will be potent, I assume that will be part of i5/OS, and when available, will add a lot to our arsenal of solutions for companies that run on the System i.

rd

SugarCRM Open Source (FREE source-provided version) does run on the V5R3+ models - YES! Using MySQL, it is not as fast as you would expect database-oriented apps to be, but it DOES run under PASE - NOT Linux - so an LPAR is NOT required. You load PHP, MySQL, and Sugar, and it works. MySQL has announced a link from its front end to use DB2/400 as its back end database. This may improve performance hugely...

Check out the http://mantis400.com project!

Sugar CRM running on System i box sounds like a very important step for the System i community. What needs to be taken into consideration — above the cost of setting up this application, is how can it be connected to your existing environment. Having a stand alone CRM solution doesn't sound like what most enterprises would look for.

I think there are 2 main challenges here:

1. Setting up a functional and modern application taking use of System i servers and DB.
   
2. Connecting this new application into your ordering, ERP, supply chain management and other organizational assets.

If you really want to make sure there is an easy and massive implementation of this new offered solution, you can not avoid the question of how easy you can invoke logic or retrieve data that is already part of your working environment, and how easily can this new piece of application be part of your cross-organizational process.

Once this question is solved, organizations that have implementations of JDE, IBS and any other major System i-based back office application can start to explore this new and exciting option.