CentricCRM Teams Up With Red Hat Exchange (RHX)

The launch of Red Hat Exchange (RHX) today marks a significant milestone in the evolution of the open source software industry. Red Hat, a pioneer in developing this industry, continues its ways with the establishment of a global online marketplace for integrated open source solutions. Such customers can now compare, buy and manage open source business applications at a single online location, provided by a single trusted source. The solutions now offered in RHX comprise technical support, centralized license management, a world-class operating system, middleware and applications. Everything, in short, that a business customer needs to successfully acquire and deploy best-of-breed open source solutions.

Centric CRM is pleased to be one of the 13 or so leading technology providers included in the RHX launch. Our company was founded seven years ago with the vision of using an open source business and development model to create and deliver enterprise-class customer-facing software to a wide range of business users. Our flagship product, Centric CRM, has been in continuous development since that time and now comprises over two-million lines of code. It offers all common Customer Relationship Management modules and adds significant new capabilities such as Project and Document Management, Customer Surveys and sophisticated Help Desk functions. Its Java/J2EE architecture is ideally suited to the Red Hat application stack, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss.

Centric CRM has supported Red Hat Linux since our inception, using it as our reference operating system. In fact, as a curious historical note, it was our founder and CEO, David Richards who, in his previous life as VP of Corporate Development for Landmark Communications, introduced Red Hat founder Bob Young to Frank Batten Jr., now CEO of Landmark. Frank provided the very first round of institutional investment to Red Hat, helping to launch the company back in the late 90s.

Since then, the success of the open source approach to software has continued to “move up the stack,” where it now is helping to disrupt the traditional enterprise application business. The launch of Red Hat Exchange will only help to accelerate this trend. Represented amongst the products now available on RHX are solutions like Centric CRM that deliver true enterprise performance at a price and in a form available to any size business. By putting its imprimatur on these solutions, and providing the proverbial “single throat to choke,” RHX will go a long way toward easing any lingering customer anxieties about using these products in business-critical applications.

To learn more about Centric CRM and RHX, see here.

–Michael Harvey, chief marketing officer and VP corporate development, Centric CRM