Business Applicability Of Open Source Customer Relationship Management Systems

Due to low initial license costs and the high transparency of the software, the impact of open source software on the economy is constantly increasing. Over the last decades the customer relationship management (CRM) has become more and more important. Markets have become highly competitive and the effort involved in retaining or winning back an existent customer is much less than the effort needed to acquire a new customer. Many software based CRM-systems have been developed to support marketing managers managing their customers. This paper will focus on all the CRM-systems published on SourceForge and thereby analyzed the business applicability of open source CRM-systems.