Open Source And CRM
Open source has significantly altered the tech landscape in that the space is now more open to new ideas and collaborative effort. The spread of open source has also made it easier for smaller companies to deploy technology for boosting business. The CRM business application space has also benefited from the competition that open source vendors are providing to the established behemoths. Open source CRM products like those from Daffodil and SugarCRM are capable of matching established proprietary software in terms of functionality and integration. Commercial open source has developed an excellent support system for its customers.
The CRM space is divided into three main spaces, designated by the size of customers. Enterprises are serviced by the larger players that cater to several industry verticals and provide domain-specific features. Their drawback has been the high costs of licensing and the surfeit of features of which only a selected few are used regularly. SMBs are catered to by another set of CRM vendors that promote their focused set of features as their strong point but vendor lock-in is an issue here. The third category is of businesses that prefer the SaaS route to CRM to escape licensing fees. However, factors such as an increase in the TCO with time and external data ownership are issues with SaaS.
In such a scenario, open source CRM is an attractive option as they offer a broad range of core functionalities and cover several verticals. Open source CRM is particularly well-suited for SMBs that wish to test the CRM waters before taking any major policy decisions regarding the deployment of a CRM solution.
An excellent piece here on the open source angle to CRM.
While open source programs certainly apply competitive pressure in the CRM landscape they are still costly to deploy. These systems are very complicated and require hours of training for users.
There are hosted providers such as PipelinDeals that make adopting a CRM system easy. Their customer service is fantastic and their application intuitive, elegant, and powerful. Their application is simple and doesn’t include superfluous features. Give them a look.
Sincerely,
-nic