Open source technologies have become one of the major talks of the present conference meetings. Having the discussion about the open source ERP with the small businesses has led to the concern about the businesses to switch from one enterprise environment to a completely different one.

When it comes to adopting open source technologies, the reasons given by most of the corporates for its slow adoption were reluctance to throw away the huge investment, and not to discard already trained individuals. When Odoo started years ago, open source enterprise solutions were largely unavailable at the time. It became quite difficult to make the businesses get switched to open source. But gradually, it became easier to begin using open source business solutions. For example, when an enterprise is implementing a new BI for the business, it gets the BI instance and when the software starts running they open the doors to implement an Odoo BI which doesn’t require co-workers onboard. This is why running open source solutions are seeing a growth in adoption. There are different software solutions in the market like Kolab, BeanBooks, uniCenta, on which mid-sized companies can rely on. And one of these is EspoCRM, which is available both as a cloud option and as locally on-premise. EspoCRM also allows creating and cultivating the customer relations in an open source environment.

It's important to consider whether it even makes sense for your business to switch to open source. At the same time, it's difficult for existing enterprise environments to switch to open source as they consider employee expectations, existing workplace system requirements and much more, which comes from changing anything deeply ingrained into a work culture. Cost and avoiding vendor lock-in are indeed considered major aspects to switch to open source, but if it fails to benefit the business, choosing open source might end up being a wrong decision.