Open Source CRM: An Introduction to Open Source CRM Software

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy that enables organizations to better serve its customers. Its focus is service, information gathering and processing. It integrates and automates the information needs of the entire organization, especially customer service.

Open source software is a revolution in CRM in particular and the software industry in general because of the availability of the program's "source code," the material that programmers write and maintain. Programmers have free access to the source code to eliminate bugs, improving the software free of charge. Hardware engineers can also remove unnecessary components from the operating system to add on differentiating capabilities.

The biggest names in open source are the Linux operating system, MySQL (which runs well on Windows and Unix systems), the Firefox web browser (invented by a Wunderkind now at Stanford), and the Apache web server. According to Dr. Kristof Kloeckner, IBM's vice president for business integration development, open-source Apache "drives 66 percent of the Internet, perhaps even more." This is significant because Apache is the most-used Web server on the Internet and is widely respected for its flexibility, scalability and, for the most part, security. In a short time, Apache has achieved default Web server status for most Linux, Unix and Mac OS X systems.

This is known as FOSS, Free and Open Source Software. FOSS is proprietary software whose source code is made available under a free, or open source, dual-license model, the GNU / GPL (General Public License), permitting users to copy, modify, or distribute it, but charges a fee if customers want a commercial license to run it. Another model is the support model, where companies provide the software free, but charge for support. A third model is to offer a basic version of the software free and then charge for an upgrade.

The Current State of Open Source CRM

Open source software has been making huge inroads of late into the CRM market. That has not gone unnoticed by CRM industry giants, including Oracle, SAP, Entellium, and IBM, who each have at least one foot in the door of the open source world. These giants want to exploit and expropriate the benefits of open source. IBM especially has emerged as the most aggressive proprietary vendor with Linux.

There has also been an explosion of smaller open source CRM vendors. Leading the way is SugarCRM, offering sales force automation applications, new data migration capabilities, a new plug-in for integrating contact and account information from Microsoft's Outlook e-mail application, and Web services support for integration with Microsoft's .Net and J2EE

This gets a wee bit technical, but it shows the extent of open source's growing acceptance throughout the CRM industry. For example, SugarCRM's customers are now offered support and patch management services, access to SugarCRM's knowledge forum as well as custom consulting services. Customers can also get marketing automation and its open-source CRM components can be preconfigured and preinstalled.

Open Source CRM currently offers features for sales, marketing, contact center, and analytics. Also included are multi-language and multi-currency capabilities for the global market. It is scalable to grow as the business grows. Application Service Providers (ASPs) can work with the uninitiated to provide the types of things they need the software to do: development, customization, migration, and implementation.

A Harvard "Cyberposium" saw the relationship between open source and CRM software as a good sign. They said that the emergence of open source in the CRM software space will create new opportunities for companies to enter and, they predicted, succeed.

Post Script

In the broader world of open source, there are also games, tools, and databases.

There are a couple of activist non-profits advocating total open source software, The Free Software Foundation (www.fsf.org) and the Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org). The FSF and the OSI are a great source of information for those wishing to understand more about free / open source software. The former advocate that software customers should absolutely demand open source and refuse to deal with software vendors who close and shroud their code. It's a matter of controlling your own destiny, they say.

See also www.free-soft.org and www.openskills.net. And eWEEK.com's Linux & Open Source Center for the latest open-source news, reviews and analysis.

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