Concursive, until October 2007 named Centric CRM, is a software company located in Norfolk, Virginia that offers the open source ConcourseSuite product, a Customer Relationship Management application, and ConcourseConnect, a social software application, both based on Java/J2EE. Concursive supplies products under a Software as a Service (SaaS) model or a license model.
The company was founded in 2000. It competes with other open source vendors such as SugarCRM and Vtiger,[1] and with major CRM vendors such as Salesforce.com, RightNow Technologies and Oracle’s Siebel.[2]
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Concursive is privately held. It is part of the Open Solutions Alliance.[3] Intel Capital, the venture capital branch of Intel Corporation, is an investor.[4] IBM is a partner.[5][6] In August 2007, the company announced a partnership with Loopfuse, a company that provides software to track and rate the activity of customers online, useful in scoring sales leads and rating / segmenting prospects.[7]
In June 2007, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) president, Michael Tiemann announced plans to crack down on software vendors that claim to be open source without using an OSI-approved license. Although Concursive described their CRM product as "open source", as of July 2007 it was not certified as such by the OSI.[8] However, Concursive quickly announced that they were releasing their Team Elements software components under Larry Rosen's Open Software License.[9]
In October 2007 the company released a new version of their CRM product with improved support for third party developers including a JSR 168 plug-in architecture.[10] The company changed its name to "Concursive" and its product name to "ConcourseSuite" on 12 December 2007 to better reflect the scope, which goes beyond traditional CRM in supporting collaborative web-based applications.[11]
Starting in November 2007, the company started offering one-year free CRM trials of their software to small enterprises, extending the free trial offer in August 2008 to enterprises with up to 100 users in an attempt to expand market share.[12][13]
On March 27, 2009, the company released the ConcourseConnect product and made an open invitation for community members to help refine the software, through a blog post from Concursive's Chief Architect, Matt Rajkowski.[14]