Oregon Dept of Human Services turns to open source (SugarCRM)

Folks, the end is near. The Proprietary Bloc may not feel it quite yet, but the nails are already hitting the coffin. Here’s just one nail: the Oregon Department of Human Services (9,500 employees and a $10B budget) just scrapped its proprietary system for SugarCRM. The interesting thing with Oregon’s story, and with so many others who adopt open source, is that open source is highly addictive:

The unsettling prospect of failing to meet a federal deadline to redesign electronic Medicaid transactions led Bill Crowell, former CIO of the Oregon Department of Human Services (DHS), down the path from curiosity about open source software to experiencing success with an application to becoming something of an open source evangelist.

“My view is that open source software is to the applications arena what the Internet was to networks and communications 10 years ago,” said Crowell, who served as DHS CIO for three years. “In other words, it will become dominant in the next 10 years and overtake proprietary business models.”

It’s very hard to just sit by and say “It’s just business” once you get a taste for open source. It’s certainly not “just business” for Bill.

What’s equally fascinating in this, and I see the same thing play out every day in my own business, is just how easy it is to get into open source. This may well be the greatest benefit open source offers (to its vendors, as well as to its customers):

Crowell knew of several good CRM products on the market from companies like Siebel and Salesforce.com, but they are expensive and he estimated it would take a year to go through the procurement process, including publishing an RFP. “Delivering something to them in more than a year,” he said, “with this deadline looming six months away, wouldn’t have been very helpful.”

The same day Crowell and other IT staffers met with OMAP staff, senior systems architect Kurtis Danka searched Google for the terms “open source” and “CRM.” He came across software from open source software company SugarCRM and downloaded it.

A large US federal organization just found and bought Alfresco in exactly the same way: by typing these words into Google:

Open Source Documentum

How can a proprietary vendor deal with this kind of threat? One company that I worked with told me that it would take his legal department six months (6!!!!) just to get approval to evaluate our software, if it weren’t freely available as an open source download.

Open source, of course, is about much more than ease of access. That part, actually, could be easily replicated by proprietary vendors. (Microsoft does this fairly well, IMHO.) But most proprietary vendors just can’t fathom giving away something for nothing, even for a limited time under limited circumstances.

And so they’ll lose. At least, until they learn to open up. If not the code, at least the process by which one evaluates the code.

Good work on this one, SugarCRM. Yet another excellent customer well earned.