If you’re a user of business software, chances are there is an open-source alternative to the expensive licenses pitched by big vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. We asked Bernard Golden, chief executive officer of Navica, a consulting firm that helps companies implement open-source software, to recommend some of the most popular alternatives to conventional software. Read on to see if there’s an open-source solution that is right for you.

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If you’re a user of business software, chances are there is an open-source alternative to the expensive licenses pitched by big vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. We asked Bernard Golden, chief executive officer of Navica, a consulting firm that helps companies implement open-source software, to recommend some of the most popular alternatives to conventional software. Read on to see if there’s an open-source solution that is right for you.

The SMB applications market is growing more than 10 percent a year and will reach $80.3 billion by 2012, according to market researcher IDC — and open-source applications make up an increasingly more significant slice of that market. Open-source applications have won some acceptance within large corporations, although ERP applications from vendors like Oracle and SAP still predominate. But for midsize companies that need more than Excel and QuickBooks to run their businesses and are looking for alternatives to Microsoft Dynamics applications and SAP BusinessOne software, open-source applications are popular.
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Although SugarCRM has its roots in the small and medium-sized business market, it’s now robust enough to compete with Oracle Corp. and SAP AG in mission-critical roles and increasingly has attracted larger enterprises.
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Hens, president and chief operating officer of White Springs, a San Mateo, Calif.-based ISV, says his company’s application sales growth on SugarCRM far outstrips that on its other supported platforms. White Springs integrates popular sales methodologies with SugarCRM and with PeopleSoft, Salesforce.com and Oracle financial applications. Its numbers are tripling on SugarCRM alone, however.
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Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Journalist Daniel Lyons, Technology Visionaries Paul Greenberg, Larry Augustin, Gerhard Gschwandtner and Mark Leslie to speak. Research In Motion, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, MySQL, Talend and Levementum to Sponsor Commercial Open Source CRM Conference
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