We asked one of our larger clients (800 users) for a short testimonial that could be used on our new website. I loved one bit of his response in particular:

“I think everyone who gives this product a thorough check will understand that SuiteCRM is a game changer in this market”

I don’t think he’s wrong. When you stack this with Gartner starting to wake up to open source (at last), albeit they still have their heads in the infrastructure stack. Add to it the number of enquiries the SuiteCRM project is starting to get from the large consultancies and from large and medium enterprises (all core Salesforce territory), then something profound is starting to happen.

Look at the following two extracts from a recent Gartner report on Relational Databases (they’re endorsing something most of us have known for at least 10 years). When you’re looking, replace RDBMS with CRM. We are not suggesting that Gartner is endorsing our view, but we are firmly saying that the extracts can validate CRM in equal ways.

 

Gartner is clearly stating that the fastest way to reduce cost is to replace commodity databases with open source databases. The same applies to CRM.

 

It’s the top one that’s very interesting – 80% cost reduction. The same is true of open source CRM.

Align that with a recent Forrester survey where 52% of the respondents picked “high cost of ownership over time” as the one thing they most dislike about Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, followed by “rigid and inflexible pricing model” at 42% of the total. You get a picture of high sensitivity to Salesforce’s pricing strategy.

The open source SuiteCRM is the perfect storm for Salesforce. It’s free. Implementation costs are a fraction of Salesforce’s. TCO is a fraction of Salesforce’s. Functionality is very broadly similar. Migration from Salesforce has a typical ROI of 5 months. The cost model is what you want to make it. You can put it in a vendor cloud, a private cloud, a public cloud or behind your own firewalls. Enterprise class support packages are available.

So, for the first time in public, I’ll make the prediction I have been making for years in private: In the next 5 years, Salesforce will issue a profits warning. In the next six years, Salesforce will have a first round of lay-offs. Their model of excessively over-priced licences for commodity business logic cannot endure and there is no plan B.