CRM for Linux?

Posted by Cliff on Thursday January 17, 2002 @10:45PM from the how-much-difference-does-a-year-make dept.

diwolf writes "I've looked high and low, but haven't found a real Customer Relationship Manager for Linux. I used to use ACT! for Windows (bad word, blah, blah, blah), and loved it. But, I can't find anything similar on Linux. Does this mean I have to dust off my progamming skills and write my own? Or, is there an ACT! clone that's GPL'ed and just waiting for my download?" A ZDNet article from over a year ago also makes this point stating that Linux "still falls short when it comes to supporting workloads required by applications like ERP (enterprise resource planning), business intelligence, CRM (customer relationship management) and supply chain planning". Now it's a year later, and SourceForge has racked up an impressive array of CRM related projects. For those with experience with some of these Linux CRM solutions, how well do they stack up to other well known offerings in this arena?

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There isn't, and for a while there won't be. by DavidpFitz · 2002-01-18 04:28 · Score: 3, Insightful

CRM on Linux (or any Free OS) is a long way off. It's not a technical reason, it's just that CRM is a very expensive business (Think $30k for a Siebel licence (per seat) and then the big servers that sit behind it. I've seen Siebel implementations that use 6 E10K's to drive it. Really.

Problem is, big businesses are going to want to use Oracle on Solaris, and since they do, people like Siebel, SAP and Oracle (with their own CRM offerings) are always going to tune (and tie) their systems to Oracle on Sun (almost always.)

So, for the moment, the only way you're going to see enterprise level CRM software on Linux is through a browser front end.

It really sucks, since all that's needed is a fairly thin client to get Siebel working on Linux. Come to think of it, that part of it couldn't be that hard to port... but it still leaves you tied server-wise.