Carson notes that his experience with SAP was several years ago, and it may have evolved the platform to the point that his earlier concerns no longer apply. However, he remains a SplendidCRM customer and expresses satisfaction with the deployment.

Control, in a slightly different sense, was a key issue for Axel Products, a testing lab in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As the business added customers, it was clearly outgrowing packages like Outlook and ACT, and was looking for a CRM application that would fit a six-person business. As he experimented with different software, company president Kurt Miller made an unsettling discovery. "I couldn't get our data, and that's hundreds of customers, out of ACT."

Eventually, he did, but the lesson stuck. Miller settled on SugarCRM largely because it's built on top of MySQL, an open source database. "No matter what happens, I control my own data. Sugar could disappear and my data remains in MySQL for to do what I want," he says.

No one would call either Sugar or Concursive a giant, but both have sizable user bases and are known to the IT analyst community. Concursive has extended its functionality into team collaboration; in fact the shift from its former name of Centric CRM was made to reflect the company's broader scope. Splendid has its partisans, but is admittedly quite small, and appeals to smaller businesses. There are scores more small open source CRM providers listed on sourceforge.net.

Is open source CRM right for you? There's no one answer. Those apps save money, are flexible, and give you lots of control over your data and infrastructure. If your company has had good experiences with Linux, or an open source database like MySQL, you'll be in a stronger position to recommend open source CRM to your management team. If you're not ready to take the plunge, a pilot deployment might well answer your questions, without much strain on the budget. Or, give it another few years. Linux grew up; so will open source enterprise applications.