For our September 2019 “Staff Pick” Project of the Month, we selected vtenext, a unique open source CRM with an iBPM heart. We reached out to the team behind vtenext and they shared some thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.
SourceForge (SF): Tell me about the vtenext project please. What made you start this?
vtenext team (VT): Too often we find too many obstacles in the exchange of information and collaboration among the different company departments. This represents a big problem for the correct execution of CRM processes– processes that very often embrace the whole organization in a horizontal sense. Right for this reason, together with one of our very important industrial partners, in 2015 we implemented a “Process Driven” CRM. This solution allows, in a lean way, to orchestrate the CRM processes, to shoot the company “silos” and to prepare the organization for the continuous changes of the markets caused by the digital transformation.
SF: Has the original vision been achieved?
VT: Sure! The introduction of the BPMN engine, in our open source CRM vtenext, has made it possible to break down many business obstacles, by eliminating organizational waste at the root. Now the data of each company “silo” can be imported, synchronized and managed by the vtenext processes engine. The main advantage is that now the CRM processes can be easily designed, implemented and automated, for the benefit of the whole organization and their customers.
For example an e-commerce generated order can easily activate actions on the ERP, and vice versa, thanks to the process orchestration between the two services done by vtenext.
By using vtenext, even in the presence of other CRMs, it’s possible to manage the business processes from beginning to end. Also, if you are already using different services or software this approach significantly improves response time and collaboration among departments and final customers.
SF: Who can benefit the most from your project?
VT: Every company that acknowledges that often “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing”: we can transform it into a “handshake”. So, if a company wants to destroy the silo mentality, we can help them in this evolutionary process.
Even companies that want a good return on their investment (ROI) can count on us.
SF: What core need does vtenext fulfill?
VT: First: it helps you to track and share all of the company’s and customers’ information with the people that need to use that data, in a secure and policy-optimized environment.
Second: it lets you design and automate the CRM business processes just by drawing them in the tool and then, with a few clicks in the administration interface, you can bring that process to life: users will see the information they need whenever they need them and interact with them step by step. Of course all the features are also available in the mobile version.
SF: What’s the best way to get the most out of using vtenext?
VT: Install it on your premises or subscribe to our cloud offer. Connect it to your company “silos” database and use it as your daily companion to manage customer issues and sales; send and track mails with the integrated imap webmail; schedule events with the integrated calendar, and so on. If you need help let us, or one of our hundreds of partners, help you define and design your processes: we guarantee that you will work faster and better.
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SF: What has your project team done to help build and nurture your community?
VT: We are happy to offer different kinds of setups for the different server platforms available. We also offer free tech and business support, tutorial and other content with our open forum and learning platforms. We think that feedback from the community and from our customers or partners are fundamental in order to achieve every year a more mature and appealing solution.
SF: Have you found that more frequent releases helps build up your community of users?
VT: Many companies use our solution in production, even if they don’t subscribe to our support offer. So we think that two releases per year are enough to avoid the pain of stopping the service, upgrading and testing if all is okay before restarting it. Since version 19 of vtenext we have automated the update process: in this way we hope that it will be smooth and painless, reducing the downtime of the process itself.
SF: What was the first big thing that happened for your project?
VT: The introduction of the BPMN Engine. This has encouraged big sized companies to use it; now we, and our partners, can deploy customized projects (processes) in a very short time and if necessary revise them, if the customer requires so, without rewriting the software code but simply by modifying the processes adopted using the GUI.
Just to be clear on how important that was: we worked with Gartner for many years but now that we have created a hybrid CRM+BPMN solution we are mentioned in their reports and researches.
SF: What helped make that happen?
VT: An Italian company called Bosch Rexroth, one of our first adopters (in particular for departmental information tracking and IT helpdesk). A couple of years ago they made clear to us that they wanted to integrate our solution with another BPMN software available on the market.
They are a very “digital process oriented” company that already used an “old-fashion” BPMN software, so it was clear why they wanted a new solution. But instead of integrating vtenext with a third party BPMN solution, and so adding another silo, we proposed to add a brand new BPMN Engine to vtenext and transform it into a tailored process oriented solution for them. After the successful use of the resulting software in their production environment, we decided to add this feature to the core of vtenext and then release it open source, as usual.
SF: How has SourceForge and its tools helped your project reach that success?
VT: Sourceforge helped us to achieve a broader audience and visibility, reduce operational distribution costs and is a sort of “certification” of our open source soul.
SF: What is the next big thing for vtenext?
VT: The introduction of Artificial Intelligence. We are working closely with the University of Verona to develop machine categorization and process mining agents.
Imagine if one day the machines will be able to tell you which are the hidden but consolidated processes you have inside your company and, imagine, if you could then refine those processes or have a sort of decision making support system, based on the previous steps taken by your employees and customers. This is what we are building right now: The first iBPM open source solution.
SF: How long do you think that will take?
VT: The AI related functionalities will be released to a set of customers (that will be beta testers) in the last quarter of 2019. For the Sourceforge Community it will be available, approximately, in the second quarter of 2020.
SF: Do you have the resources you need to make that happen?
VT: Yes we have our developers already engaged to achieve that goal, but of course we don’t have the marketing or the resources of the big guys in Silicon Valley.
We need the help of the community in order to spread our solution. The best way is for the users of the community to keep using vtenext if they are happy with it.
SF: If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently for vtenext?
VT: We never think about it, because we don’t have a time travel machine. To be more serious though, we think we should have a better engaged community of developers to help us make a better solution faster.
SF: Is there anything else we should know?
VT: That our mission is to democratize the access to iBPM solutions. The combination of a hybrid CRM+BPMN solution and the Artificial Intelligence is going to give to the users the power to focus on the real value added tasks, not the routine ones.
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