When our work involves software development, we favor the following tools.
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Ruby, and Ruby on Rails - excellent for web, data manipulation, and scripting work.
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mysql / PostgreSQL - We have found both mysql and PostgreSQL to be incredible for database work.
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Rails provides ActiveRecord, a very elegant way to get data into and out of databases.
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Customer Relationship Management / Support Management - Salesforce.com is an excellent tool (and platform).
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For external access to Salesforce.com data, we've had good success with ActiveSalesforce and Relational Junction.
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Drupal - a very powerful Content Management System. In particular, we like the CCK and Views modules.