During the recession times, most companies are facing two challenges:

1) How to better retain and develop customer relationships?
2) How to cut the costs?

Two answer the first question; most business decision makers have probably considered CRM system as part of the solution. It is likely that many also have considered to invest in one of the famous CRM brands like Oracle Siebel, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce.com, SAP and so on, but have been scared away by the high license and implementation cost. At this point the second question remains unanswered. read on.......

To answer this, it is worth to spend a little more time for research and see what the open source community has to offer. In this way, you can cut 100% on CRM license costs as well as infrastructure license costs, because open source software and related systems like database management system, application server is available at no cost. This is not the case with commercial vendors who will make sure that you not only buy CRM license but also related prerequisite systems like Microsoft SQL Server, IIS, Oracle Database system etc.

Going the open source way you might be able to get more from consulting vendor since it is also observed that the consulting rates are lower from open source vendors (SME market) than proprietary software vendor partners, who are used to serve rich high-end market.

Secondly, it is needed to distinguish between so called “Commercial Open Source” and really 100% open source software.

Commercial open source might turn out to be just one proprietary licensed software with 3 editions (as example) from which the starting or free open source edition will not include sufficient functionality and you will see promotional ads to “upgrade” to a full version. This will turn out to be commercial license software meaning that you have to pay for license after you are stuck with the free open source version. Example of such open source software is Sugar CRM.

On the other hand, one of the best well known 100% free open source CRM software is Vtiger CRM (www.vtiger.com). There are no license cost and the application functionality covers all generally required CRM functions for SMEs.

To implement any enterprise software business users will often need an experienced implementation consultant and support service. One of such providers is Positive Global LLP at www.positiveglobal.com engaged in installing, implementing, customizing and supporting Vtiger CRM deployments in the SME market worldwide.

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