If your company does fit the profile, there's quite a bit to be gained. Open source CRM packages (including support and charges for premium editions) cost approximately 20 percent as much as corresponding commercial solutions, says Wurster.

Since most of the code is open, the applications tend to be very customizable, run on any platform, and have a good, if not all-encompassing, feature set. Indeed, SugarCRM, the largest player in the category (Concursive is No. 2), has added more mobile features than many of its commercial rivals.

A Big Trust Question

No CIO minds saving money, but some worry that open source software is, well, too cheap. That was part of the problem faced by IMA Financial's Hallam when she tried to get the O.K. to deploy Concursive. "We view our software vendors as long-term partners. There was concern that they might disappear at some point," Hallam says. Ultimately, though, management was won over by the understanding that even if Concursive should fail, the open source code would still be IMA's and the open source community would continue to offer a measure of support.

Despite its roots, open source has moved well beyond the stage where it represented a cultural revolt against the software establishment. Today, many open source companies keep a sharp eye on the bottom line by selling services as well as enhanced versions of their free-for-the-downloading community editions.

Still, there's no getting around it. The economics of open source are different. "Any CIO who considers open source to solve a critical business need will look at its commercial viability," says Ron Bongo, CEO of Corra Technology, a systems integrator specializing in open source. That's not always easy since the providers of open source CRM are privately held.

But even the larger open source CRM companies are hungry for paying business, which means that a CIO considering a major deployment has a good deal of leverage.

"SugarCRM had a passion to land us as a customer," says Evans Wroten, CIO of InterAct Public Safety Systems in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wroten had led deployment of Salesforce.com and Siebel CRM on other jobs, but having seen the success of open source infrastructure projects, Wroten was ready to listen to Sugar's pitch when the new management took the helm at InterAct following the acquisition in 2005.

From an IT perspective, the company had been flying by the seat of its pants. InterAct lacked a central repository for customer information. Each sales rep had a separate stash of contact files and a spreadsheet of likely sales. "All of that information was stuck in silos," says Wroten.