Pass the Sugar(CRM), Please

Some interesting figures on the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) sector in this item, which seems to predict rocky times ahead for Oracle. Well, I certainly concur with that, but there's a name that is conspicuous by absence in this analysis: SugarCRM.

Why is it important, given that it is currently way behind the leaders? SugarCRM is different from the others, because it's open source. This means that all those good dynamics of the open source world are starting to kick in, in terms of cost, in terms of customer loyalty and in terms of development. And as I've said before, you just can't buy open source companies as you might something like Siebel or PeopleSoft, and this poses a big problem not just to Oracle, but SAP and Microsoft too.

And if you don't believe me, you might care to look at BusinessWeek's thoughts on the matter: its analysis is not as bullish, but is strikingly upbeat.