Saving Business Cost with Open Source CRM

Gartner published one of their Hype Cycle reports for CRM Sales a few days back. There's a useful summary on the Forbes site.

The title of the article ("Sales Turns to the Cloud for Quick Relief") gives a good pointer to the main conclusion. Apparently, around 35% of the CRM market is now SaaS/Cloud based, and it's the fastest way to go if you want a CRM.

There are two statements in the report that caught the eye, namely "SaaS-based CRM sales within enterprises are expected to reach $4.48B in 2012" and "There are 3.8M Sales Force Automation SaaS users globally today".

It's not abundantly clear what constitutes SaaS based CRM but a quick bit of math would suggest that $4,480,000.000/3,800,000 means the average revenue per user is $1,179 per annum (or $98.25 per month). That looks plausible based on what I've seen of SaaS pricing. Based on the data in the Gartner study, that revenue is mostly going to SAP, Salesforce.com, Oracle and Microsoft.

We use SugarCRM Community Edition 6.5.2 as our in-house CRM although we also provide Plug-ins for some of the others. It lacks nothing (or, at least nothing we need) compared to the feature-set described in the Gartner study. It's true we run it on-premise and that requires server admin skills but at a per-user saving of £750 per annum that's not a problem.

Every day now someone in the business community is talking about austerity and recession. Open source enterprise software, People: it’s part of the solution and provides the maximum relief.