Open source professional services app goes hosted

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 08 April 2008 05:39

Business IT - Technology

An open source professional services automation program is being offered as a hosted application by the project's technical lead in conjunction with a pioneering Linux provider.

allocPSA is designed to help organisations manage projects, employees, clients, time sheets and invoicing, and includes an email interface for fault and task tracking.

The open source program is now being offered on a software as a service (SaaS) basis by allocPSA Pty Ltd, a company formed by Alex Lance, the long-time technical lead on the allocPSA development team, and Melbourne-based Linux and open source provider Cybersource.

Subscriptions to allocPSA.com start at $US50 per month. A one-month free trial is available.

"There are excellent business benefits in using a hosted solution like allocPSA.com for your services supply-chain management," said allocPSA Pty Ltd spokesperson Con Zymaris, "You gain immediate access to a mature professional services software suite, you incur zero roll-out and implementation costs, and you get a complete support solution for no added charge."

Zymaris added "We take care of all the provisioning, development, upgrades, backups, support, performance tuning and hardware maintenance for our users, and they are free at any time to take control, download their data and walk away."

The difference between allocPSA.com and some other SaaS offerings such as Salesforce.com and Google Docs is that not only can a user organisation download its data from the host provider, the software itself is also available to run on the company's own computers.

"We think our model captures the best of both worlds," said Zymaris.