I was reading David Sims First Coffee column where he discusses SugarCRM and vTiger an offshoot of SugarCRM with some modifications and additional support. The article reminded me of a recent discussion last week I had with Mark Spencer of Digium and Asterisk at VoIP Sizzles in Texas.

Spencer was telling me that he thinks that there is a plug-in or one is in the works that will link SugarCRM with Asterisk. To paraphrase Mark, "That is when this stuff gets really interesting." Mark went on to say that the solutions n the contact center market are so expensive, a reseller can make a good deal of money selling customer contact center solutions based on open-source.

This opportunity is not lost on the open-source CRM vendors and according to Sims, there is some controversy between SugarCRM and vTiger as the latter claims the former sees them as a competitive threat and even threatened legal action. I am not a lawyer but it does seem based on the limited knowledge I have of this case that what vTiger is doing is legal based on an adapted version of the Mozilla public license.

In the open source PBX space there are two strong choices, Asterisk and Pingtel. I wonder if vTiger will become the SugarCRM alternative in the CRM space.