SugarCRM - Up and To the Right in 2009
A recent article on TheStreet.com, “Salesforce Has Something to Be Thankful For” by Ivy Lessner highlights the risks and rewards available to the traditional CRM vendors given current economic conditions. While I agree with much of what the author points out, I did notice a glaring omission in her analysis. There was no mention of open source CRM, namely SugarCRM - an award-winning open source software platform.
Open source software and especially SugarCRM has the potential to come out of the current economic downturn as big winners. Currently, SugarCRM is the leading commercial open source vendor and in a down economy is in a great position to grow at rates even greater than those predicted by Lessner for salesforce.com. Like salesforce.com’s greatest strengths, SugarCRM is subscription-based and can be hosted, however it provides far greater flexibility and lower implementation costs than salesforce.com. In addition, it has more flexibility in its deployment options than salesforce.com which many medium to large-sized companies value for reasons of security, control and integration.
The down-side dynamics in today’s economic climate drive many companies to figure out how to grow sales, increase demand, and sell more effectively and most sales management teams know that CRM can be a tool to help a sales force to break out as the economy improves. This fact coupled with the cost-effectiveness of SugarCRM subscriptions and implementations make it a a very low risk approach to CRM. We will see many companies that have not previously considered open source in the past, inclined to consider it now. Commercial open source CRM software has evolved over the last several years and is now ready for the enterprise. This coupled with the current economic conditions can be the impetus that propels open source CRM into the forefront. Like Linux before it, commercial open source CRM, namely SugarCRM, is primed for the enterprise and explosive growth. Already, over 3,500 commercial customers use SugarCRM to grow their business.
At the end of this current economic downturn, we may look back and say this was a defining event for open source.
