Open Source for Enterprise Management?

acooks asks: "After a recent talk on Open Source software to a class of MBA students, someone came to me with a huge opportunity to use Open Source to manage business processes. What they want is SAP, but for small to medium sized businesses and at a price that a small business can actually afford. Furthermore, they realised that Open Source isn't going to go away anytime soon and that they might as well try to use it to save costs (If IBM is embracing Linux and SAP & IBM plays nicely, then maybe it's worth finding out more about Linux). The questions that were raised basically boils down to this: Is there Open Source software available to manage a business or some of the business processes? Where do you start looking for something like this? I realised that this isn't something that you can quickly download from SourceForge or Freshmeat, so now I'm asking Slashdot."

Good news and bad.

[FreeLinux]

If you are asking what Customer Relationship Management/Enterprise Resource Planning(CRM/ERP) apps can run on Linux then there is good news. First off there is SAP. There is also Oracle and probably a few others as well, I'm not sure about Seibel.

The bad news is that these applications are prohibitively expensive for Small to Medium Enterprises(SMEs). This becomes a greater problem with the fact that your desire for the application to be Open Source implies that you would prefer free software(wouldn't we all?).

There are a few Open Source projects that have been started to address this need but, they are very small and unlikely to be really helpful or useful in the near future. CRM/ERP apps are huge cantancerous beasts that require a tremendous amount of development effort. In fact, I'm not sure that development will ever end for this type of software.

Now, the really bad news is that our good friends at Microsoft have also seen an opportunity for CRM/ERP in the SME area and are making an effort to fill that void. Recent acquisitions including Great Plains, Solomon and Axapta show that they are aggressively moving into this market and the already have a product [microsoft.com] available.

This new M$ offering will certainly not be free, nor will it be cheap. But, it will be feature rich, powerful and just barely affordable to the SME market. Which all means, further lock-in to the borg.