Cheap Computing and Open Source Movement Reduce Software Costs By 90% For Small Business.

Proof that Open Source is making the computing side of business cheaper everyday is all around us. Take this press release for instance. It talks about how the power of Open Source is taking small, medium and even big businesses in a whole new direction.

Serving Small Business’ need for dynamic data-driven applications hasn’t been an attractive financial proposition for traditional enterprise software firms who rely on larger customers to drive sales and profitability. Where medium and enterprise software companies may have budgets in the hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, the typical small business software budget may be as little as a few thousand dollars per year. With small budgets yet big expectations, it’s no wonder this segment of the business population has felt ignored. This is likely to soon change, however, as the evolution of Open Source business software combines with ever cheaper and more abundant computing power to enable even the smallest businesses to digitize key parts of their operations.

In the early days of the PC, increases in computing power, along with concurrent decreases in computing costs, enabled ever wider adoption of desktop applications. The widespread availability of the desktop PC created a vast market for applications such as word-processors and spreadsheets which were dependent on Microsoft DOS and eventually Windows. A similar tipping point occurred in the mid-1990’s when decreasing internet connectivity costs and relatively inexpensive servers combined with a burgeoning volume of offerings on the Web to create the Internet boom.

Today, another wave is taking hold as thousands of small businesses adopt Open Source applications to run their business. Companies like Sparco Technologies, which uses Open Source CRM to manage its sales program, can get nearly the same functionality of commercial software without expensive licensing and consulting costs. Sparco, a San Antonio, Tx based wholesaler of Wireless Technologies to over 30,000 distributors around the world, uses the popular open source application SugarSales to monitor its sales pipeline and measure the effectiveness of its telemarketing efforts. “We needed a solution that would allow us to quickly manage and track information throughout our entire sales and marketing process” said Dave Dullnig, President of Sparco. “We looked at eCRM from Salesforce.com and NetSuite. At the end of the day it boiled down to cost. With SugarSales it takes a little more effort to generate the custom reports we need than it might with a commercial solution, but our annual costs are more than ten times lower than the typical eCRM provider. We use a Managed Application Service Provider, bNitro.com, and pay a flat fee of $39.95 per month whether we have one or 20 users. bNitro implemented the application for us, manages upgrades, and backs up and protects our data. We access our CRM system via the web. It’s simple, cheap, and reliable.”