Disorganized sales contacts are bad enough. But the new managers found that making an accurate financial forecast was very tough. "They (the salespeople) would walk into meetings with estimates on a yellow legal pad," he says.

A few items on Wroten's check list stood out as InterAct picked a new CRM vendor. First, of course, the application had to have the requisite features and had to fit into the existing infrastructure. "Since we had systems in place, we liked Sugar's open platform and its ability to write to other systems," says Wroten.

In particular, the CIO needed to integrate the new CRM system with an existing customer support intranet written in ColdFusion. Wroten could do it with SugarCRM, without resorting to expensive systems consultants often needed for commercial CRM deployments.

InterAct's execs decided they liked the flexibility and openness of open source applications; other companies might not. "Think about the cost of building and maintaining your own features," suggests Sheryl Kingstone, director of enterprise research with the Yankee Group. "You have to understand what you are getting into."

Control Over Code a Plus

Unlike commercial software, open source code, is just that—open. Users are free to modify and distribute most of it under any of the several commonly used open source licenses. In fact, openness and the right to modify the source code is a key advantage for tech-savvy companies willing to take on development tasks. But it could be a burden for small businesses with meager IT resources.

Development languages, for example, become a key issue, says Bongo, the systems integrator. "Sugar is written in PHP, and for a lot of Java shops, that would be a non-starter," he says. Concursive, on the other hand, is Java-based, so for some organizations it would be the better choice, Bongo adds.

If you can handle it, though, the flexibility of open source CRM is very powerful. At NetroMedia, a provider of streaming media services based in Victoria, British Columbia, the in-house IT staff transformed SplendidCRM's package into "a control panel for our entire business," says Matthew Carson, the Canadian company's founder and CTO.

NetroMedia, with nearly 500 customers in 77 countries, had been using Salesforce.com for several years, but had problems integrating new features the company needed. Carson looked at SAP, Microsoft, Accpac and others as well, and found them too closed for his taste. "Control is a big issue. You want to be able to write the (CRM) system around your business model, not the other way around," he says.