Open Source CRM Reaches Tipping Point

At the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, open source continues to march up the software stack–from operating systems to databases to applications. The CRM sector, in particular, seems ripe for open source.

AMD, IBM and Novell announced support for Centric CRM, an open source specialist in Norfolk, Va. Eager Centric CRM adopters include The Weather Channel. SugarCRM, a rival open source organization, has been surprisingly quiet at LinuxWorld. The company introduced version 4.5 of its CRM platform in July. I’m not predicting the death of Oracle/Siebel or Salesforce.com. But there’s no doubt open source CRM has achieved critical mass.