Traditional CRM software like Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and SAP have successfully played on this sentiment. They provide functionality rich, preintegrated, comprehensive solutions attempting to meet as many requirements as possible.

What sounds like a clear advantage, has often turned into a burden though. You pay for more than abundant functionality that is however insufficiently understood by your users and only close to what you are looking for. Functions are disabled or ignored because they don't fit, while you are investing in complementary custom functions that the package misses. All of this costs money, compromises the quality of the software, impacts the efficiency of your processes and can develop into an application that becomes increasingly cumbersome to use and manage over time.

The origin of this phenomenon is often found in a lack of thorough understanding of the requirements. Money cannot supersede deep understanding: if you are not firmly confident with exactly what you need, what your priorities are and how much they may cost, you run the risk of making an uninformed decision. Exploring the essence of your CRM requirements and the dynamics of your business might in fact lead you to conclude that you cannot afford to lock yourself into a proprietary product. Rather, you need to retain the flexibility of adapting your software to the processes as these evolve. Secondly, you will soon recognize that sometimes "good is good enough" and instead spend money wisely in enabling your IT rganization, not trying to buy the remaining 20% of the functionality for 80% of the license costs.

Open source software - also in the CRM domain - has some unquestionable characteristics. It adheres to open standards and the code is open, thus allowing you more flexibility to modify the software to meet your changing requirements. In addition, it comes at a low cost while still bringing in the base functionality you need - it's in many cases a "more than good enough" starting point for your implementation.