Moving from working for a Enterprise Software vendor to working with Small Businesses using Open Source software then to a Software as a Service startup has been an interesting mindshift.
One thing I was interested in is the differences for a small business in using Open Source solutions compared to SaaS solutions.
In my experience one of the major reasons small businesses (as compared to IT practitioners) use Open Soucre is trhe perception that it is free (as compared to IT practitioners who use casue they can hack the code to do what they want).
However small businesses often hit the limit of their expertise in installing and using Open Source solutions fairly quickly and then have to invest in people like me to help them through.
In a post on Trumba about Five Benefits of Software as a Service they compare them from a cost point of view:
“Open Source - Potentially costly. In addition to any license fees you might have to pay, factor in the infrastructure costs of servers, security, and IT personnel.”
“SaaS - Comparably low. You pay a subscription fee but the vendor bears all the security and infrastructure costs, leaving your IT personnel free to focus on missioncritical tasks.”
They also list the five major benefits of SaaS as:
- Save money.
- Save time.
- Focus your technology budgets on competitive advantage rather than infrastructure.
- Gain immediate access to the latest innovations.
- Join a community of interest.
the key they say is:
“Regardless of what specific application you might be evaluating, you stand to benefit from SaaS in five major ways. When you subscribe to a software service instead of purchasing a software license.”
This is the same expectation small business get when using Open Source solutions. So if I compare Open Source vs SaaS on these:
Save Money
Open Source - You won’t spend money on license but you will probably spend money on services
SaaS - You may spend less money on subscription (than a perpetual license) but you will definitly spend less money on servcies.
Save Time
Open Source - You won’t spend time on building software but you will still spend time installing and maintaining it
SaaS - You won’t spend anytime installing and maintaining software
Focus on competitive advantage
Open Soucre - You can modify the software to your hearts desire so definitely get competitive advantage
Saas - It all proprietary code on a server so no competitive advantage (although Salesforce.com with its APEX framewqork is probably getting there)
Gain Immediate Access to Innovations
Open Source - You have access to Alpha and Beta versions if you want to take the risk but on average you are still waiting 6-12 mioths for major releases.
SaaS - Typically a new release is 2-4 weeks, which you get automatically next time you longin
So overall SaaS seems to have it on these points.
However if somebody came up with a true hybrid solution, i.e. SaaS but where you could modify it to get competitive advantage, then that would change thr rules.
SugarCRM seem to offer that, but under the covers it is just a way of piutting lipstick on SaaS.
I originally started using Open Source SugarCrm software (version 3) as the CRM system to manage all the customer details for Portali.
A number of years ago a couple of Indian based developers forked the SugarCRM open source code and created a new version called vTiger. (there was some controversy between SugarCRM and vTiger as the latter claims the former sees them as a competitive threat and even threatened legal action)
SugarCRM provides a professional (licensed) version as well as the open source version and charges for addin-ons such as outlook integration. So when I was due to upgrade to SugarCRM 4 I moved to vTiger 4 instead as they provided free outlook integration.
I have been using vTiger for a couple of years and needed to move to vTiger 5, but instead I have ended up going back to use SugarCRM (version 4.5).
Here is why:
vTiger Pros
As I mentioend vTiger always had more free functionality, including:
- Outlook Integration
- Thunderbird Integration
- Invoicing
vTiger Cons
Unfortunatley one module that vTiger never included was a projects module. SugarCRM has a simple projects which always met my needs. I got around the lack of projects functionality in vTiger by using DotProject which was pretty good and met my needs, but it was alays a pain to use two systems, maintainig two sets of customer records etc.
The outlook and thunderbird modules didn’t work very well in vTiger 4. So I ended up not using it anyway which negated the man reason I moved to vTiger.
SugarCRM Cons
The latest 4.5 version of Sugar CRM requires PHP 5 and infact the installer won’t let you continue with the install on a lower version. My hosting company Webfarm provide PHP 4 as a default and all the other products I use such as Zencart are only certified on PHP 4, so SugarCRM was still really out of the picture.
So an upgrade to vTiger 5 it was.
Upgrade woes
After reading the vTiger forums it seemed that upgrading by installing over the top of version 4 was fraught with problems, so I thought I would do a fresh install of vTiger 5 and migrate my content.
All went well until I tried to add a new user record in the new verision which didn’t seem to do much, i.e. didn;t create a new record. Editing the admin user also seemed to delete a lot of the admin users details which resulted in not being able to login and a reinstall.
Trolling the vTiger forums it seemed to be either a problem with Firefox or a problem with PHP 4 and the recomended fix was, you guessed it, upgrade to PHP 5!
The return to Sugar
Well if I was going to have the hassle of moving to PHP 5 (by the way Webfarm can upgrade individual domains/.sites to PHP 5, so none of my other sites were affected, way cool!) I might as well go back to SugarCRm.
Which I did.
Migratng content wasn’t too bad as I just used the standard export to csv in vToger and the import wizard in SugarCrm and Graeme’s your uncle (or mine anyway).
