Most of the market share for CRM software is taken by the big name brands: SAP, Siebel, Oracle and SalesForce.com. Currently open source solutions such as SUGARCRM are a small part of the market, but my prediction is that we are going to be seeing a lot more of open source products like SUGARCRM.

Years ago in the B-to-B world it used to be said, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” That was true, but it seems to me that as the world is becoming more networked and users are becoming more sophisticated, that soon functionality and price performance will become more important than branding.

Open source software is much less expensive and tends to be less buggy than branded software. One of the reasons open source is cheaper is because the industry does not spend as much on marketing and sales. But word of mouth is the best advertising and the word is getting out.

If you ask enterprise IT managers why they would choose a branded CRM solution over SUGARCRM, most would not say that the reason was quality. In fact, most will tell you that vendor professional support and services was important to them and that open source solutions don’t match up in term of product support.

Both of this reason is becoming less important. Today, the biggest system integrators are supporting open source and besides, there is also the argument that the better the product, the less support it needs.