Open Source CRM - How it fits into the overall CRM solution market

Many people are still unclear on the role of open source business applications in relation to the proprietary offerings available. In a recent article in destinationCRM.com, I’ve provided Optaros’ point of view of open source CRM in an overall CRM solution context. Over the last couple of years, several strong open source products and projects have emerged in the CRM business application space, beginning to challenge parts of the traditional CRM market by providing functionality and suitability for enterprise integration and, most importantly, an ecosystem of integration services & support offerings. The traditional CRM solution market consists of three partly overlapping segments, each with its own advantages and drawbacks: - Products focusing on large enterprise-wide CRM deployments (e.g. Siebel & SAP) provide a large set of industry and/or domain specific functional features, yet have high per-user license costs; a feature overkill where only parts are used; and a heavy “project infrastructure” in terms of system and business process implementation. - Products focusing on SME or business unit deployments tout a focused set of domain-oriented features and limited industry focus, but they don’t scale well across domains, and functional extensions are costly due to vendor and technology lock-in. - The Software as a Service (SaaS) service offerings, also focusing on the SME/BU segment, have good functional offerings and a pay per use model. However, SaaS solutions tend to become relatively expensive from a TCO point of view as user population grows and additional features are required. In addition, many companies are uncomfortable with data ownership and the high costs for integrating additional systems. Open source CRM projects and products are becoming an attractive fourth alternative in the CRM solution space. While premier open source products like SugarCRM and CentricCRM cannot compete head to head with the enterprise CRM products like Siebel, they provide a broad functional offering across the core CRM domains. This offering is compelling and increasingly competitive for the SME and business unit implementations, while being free from license costs or priced along a subscription model similar to the SaaS products. The real upside with open source CRM products is the high level of flexibility provided through open source code, modular components and standards adherence. This flexibility enables companies to easily adapt the technology to achieve true usability, which is something that can only be conceived with commercial packages at high levels of effort and cost. Additionally, open source CRM products can be leveraged as assembled building blocks for solving specific business problems. These building blocks come with a core set of functionalities and each individual building block can be enhanced to meet specific business requirements. The different building blocks are easily integrated through the use of open standard technologies and additional features can be custom developed in a modular way. The full article can be found here: http://www.destinationcrm.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7526