Below is opinionated, but hopefully worth airing:

My view is that the field is over-populated.

Probelm is often definition of what's wanted. You end up with overlap between issue tracking and CRM, and if you add in a few outlier requirements you've described half the commercial software i see, from email installs to business automation, ERP and even EDI.

That's quite an exaggerated generalization of mine there, but the list of comercial and non-commercial software which can be put to use as you describe is enormous.

What are you really missing from FogBugz? I'm not clear why you're having to look elsewhere.

Mobile apps integration is simply not mature, or rather elegant, for any product i've seen. Zimbra, Lotus Sametime, come to mind as rather half hearted efforts requiring expensive additional licenses. Developer business sales groups really should wise up to the idea that a good mobile app is the thing small companies (mode 100 employees) i know want to have better systems, it's not a mere extra for new installs, it's the driver.

I forget when i first heard about "unified communications" but it wasn't even in the last decade. That promise seems to have been eternal. I feel we are inching closer, though, yet there's nothing breakout good in any category which i've encountered.

What i want is products with common rules engines, or something which can overlay that via apis. Smetimes i'd just like a regex to flag a string in an email as signifying a task is done and update a conversation thread. Sometimes i'd like a proper transaction written back to a sals DB. Sometimes i'd like to know my updates are delivered, with a message broker or transaction manager.It's applying consistency to that which makes me want a common interface to software as varied as voive, shceduling, management accounting (e.g. for that last one where there's a showstopper ticket, i want the revenue forecast to be dropped right away for that customer) Right now even trying for that flexibility requires some big bloat installs and a lot of work, some of it pretty low level.

As to scope for a new product, i don't think you can design a product out of the box for a large proportion of users in your situation. I believe ther attempt with XML and XSLT to find a common interface for data munging was a good try, but it turned out the only thing more verbose than the XML was the acronym dictionary. And a lot of XML i see is serializing ASN or whatever talks to the outside world of suppliers, basically a patch, not a consistent code base, so you are doing mapping schema for more than just your primary DB.

Sure, i'm being very opinionated / hand - waving. But maybe the best anser is to say you should think hard how important your support process is. Is it something which can really make you stand - out? If so, maybe you should invest in time and coding effort to get what you want. There really is no shortage of systems, apps and tools. Just nothing i see which can hook diverse office systems together. Example of this is getting desk phones to be useful. The best i've seen so far is the XMPP calls which SipExec and Aastra kit supports, but still you need some glue, and a lot of thought what you want delivered and why.

I'm emphasising voice in my post because no atter how i type, there are so many times a quick call really sorts out a problem in a fraction of the time. In my integration nirvana, i'd have the phone logs transcribed and appended automatically to the ticket. I'd have my desk phone call up the subject last discussed when i dial a number, preferably on the desk phone itself, so my concurrent work windows can be left alone.

If there's an opportunity to introduce a new product, i think the hurdle is the mind boggling variety of things any successful product would be wished to work with, and you'll bloat at the end of the day.

I doubt that what you want couldn't be done fairly simply on the data front. But UI on mobile devices is a good challenge to put it mildly.

Two favourite related moans of mine is the state of Nokia support, when they remain 50% of the smartphone game and are if anything still popular in the EU, for fresh sales, let alone installed base . . and the limits of active sync, which is often as not the best way to get email up for Nokia and Apple. I probably need to delve deeper into active sync to discover what really can be done with it, but i guess i'm looking at a oh so inspiring compatibility matrix if i use a non MS sync server.

If you want cheap during startup, mind, and don't have serious adversion to MS product, BizSpark is the best dev programme and you get a comprehensive license set for three years. Sure, it's no panacea, but i think their archittecture documentation is pretty intelligable and provided you want to hook in big name PBXs that would be a serious boon to my view.

Since a lot of what i do with contacts tickets and customer data is grunt style data monging, at least you can price a .net dev reliably. Check out LINQ, because it makes for handy glue if that's your environment. Some guys are doing or protoyping "stream" and "real time" BI with LINQ, certainly in some banks. It's not complete or fully mature by some views, but the project i'm looking at this year involved funnelling a lot of context data into priorities for contact follow ups, both externally and internally stimulated. I'd have gone hook line and sinker for this route already if MS would only talk straight as to whether their mobile handset voip integration will ever come to non MS handsets, which they keep hinting at but not delivering.

I do keep digressing, but i want pbx integration with screen pops available on a tab. Sybase Anywhere is designed to deal with this. OnRelay, a rare Brit company doing good things with SipExec has a partial solution. But it looks like a lot of work from where i'm standing, and my work lives or dies on customer inquiry handling with a big voice dependancy.To my rather simplified mind, i should not have to manually pass the context of a contact or resolution call all the time. This is specific to cell calls. Why does one have to juggle reading a screen, or finding an email thread, when to concentrate on actually speaking to someone, i need to defocus visually and actually pay full attention to what they're saying?

TL;DR version is there probably is a market for new product, but you've not exactly defined it, and for such a product to be truly useful it'd need to play nice with a big range of site installs, hardware (phones e.g. land and cell) and software, and it would be no use to me if the UI wasn't first rate.

final note: this is a very mature market in terms of contituent parts, but having so many failed products, so far as i see it (never yet seen a install at any price which approached comprehensive and simple interface or sub year install times) so you have some pretty big barriers to entry. Kind of project i'd love to do if i had substantial capital to bootstrap and a really caring dev / human factors team. Not something i'd like to do in a VC funded environment, because i am suspicious that product like these are not suitable for release early release often models, and that there could be a good deal of customer business domain specific knowlege required to be implemented first to make such a thing installable in a reasonable time. I'm still surprised how little use colleagues make of their high end cells, even though they're congnisant and if not geek, but very savvy, because somehow it never hangs together well when using under time pressure. Another hurdle is Nokia. You can cobble together anything Blackberry does with any recent Symbian phone, and you can write much more interesting things to that stack, but Nokia seem to go out of their way to hide the possibility. A chat i had with their PR reps in the UK was fascinating - no-one even knew of the capabilities, or that a big network operator in the UK thinks it's ok to blame the handset equipment for problems caused by their proxy servers, in writing no less . . . i figure if i attempted a well integrated system, i'd sure want it to work on that installed base as well as Apple.

Guess i feel strongly about this, so hope what i've said, if not actually helpful, is thought provoking in one way or another. I'd be interested in anyone whose encountered these problems generally and tried to write solutions, as there's ambition at my company to get serious about our systems in this aspect.

kind regards & good luck with your search!