Hi there.. it's really interesting because that's a core feature that we are focusing on at Saleswhale (http://saleswhale.io/product-tour). When you click into a contact's dossier (sadly, I'm not able to upload screenshots here), it will show you all related contacts, interactions and other smart insights that we managed to surface.

We are currently still in beta though, but we would love to work closely with you and get your ideas and feedback how to make Saleswhale more useful for you.

I'm the technical co-founder at Saleswhale and you can drop me a line at [email protected] if you want to chat more.

Hey,

We are also building something in this area and I'd be very interested to hear more about what you are looking for when you say "if we input a new contact, the system will cross-reference that contact against all other data, showing connections and similarities."?

What "other" data do you have in mind and what are the important questions you are trying to answer using this system?

I use to work at a large firm where everyone had large lists of contacts, old clients, leads, etc. It was always a dream to have a system where all of this data could be entered, and then the system tells us where commonalities are. For example:

You're at a conference and you meet someone, getting their business card. Come back to the office and enter that information into the CRM. If you've added that person on LinkedIn, the software will scrape this data, and compare it against all other data sets in the system. In this example let's say this particular contact once worked at a company that is also a former client. The system should alert and say hey, so-and-so has x connections with other records.

This is probably more data that you wanted, but the larger problem was silos. We were constantly pushing employees to "compare notes" because we never knew when two or more employees might uncover information/contacts/etc. that if linked, could help us leverage that data.

Thank you so much! So it's primarily contact and profile information you are looking for and being able to correlate based on things such as company name, contact name, email, phone for their current or past employment etc?

I use Zurmo community edition for myself. It's php based, pretty easy to install. Zurmo people were snatched up by a company but the community edition is open source and it seems will have a future there.

Right now, SugarCRM because it's Open Source and works reasonably well. I want more out of a CRM though, and I'm constantly tempted to start writing my own, and add a CRM product to our portfolio. There just isn't enough time to do it right now though. :-(

How do you use SugarCRM and which functionality is missing from it? If you are going to build your own CRM based on your experience using it in real world use case (not just with eyes of developer who tests different features) which features are you going to remove from SugarCRM and add your own?

That would take a while to write up. I'd have to really sit down and spend some time thinking about it to remember all the things I've thought about doing. Unfortunately I haven't really kept notes on this.

That said, probably the biggest things I remember wanting were:

1. support for representing entities using RDF/OWL, for integration with other systems. We're big on Semantic Web tech here (it's a core part of what we do) and my vision for enterprise IT involves having, for lack of a better term, an "internal semantic web".

2. Workflow integration / rules / triggers. I want to be able to easily define actions that happen in response to specific events, or on a schedule, or whatever, and create workflows based off of that. For example: a new customer record being created - I should be able to define a batch of actions that happen in response to this. To be fair, this kind of stuff can be done through some combination of using the API, and/or twiddling the db records directly, and bolting on an external BPM system or something. But I'd like it to be more "native".

I'm sure there's some other stuff as well, but like I said, I haven't really kept notes per-se. If you're interested in continuing this conversation though, feel free to shoot me an email and we can talk. I probably have at least some doodles and sketches in one of my notepads somewhere, where I've played around with some ideas I wanted to incorporate. I might be able to dig some stuff up.