Dealing with the CRM bear trap

If so, you may feel you're in a bear trap. (Modern bear traps look like the one at right.) Your supplier has been bought, for your contract. You fear rising costs. You want to get out from under.

Queplix says it has an answer, one with the words "open source" all over it. But how open source is it? I asked Paul Tenberg, a director of business development at the company, and the answer is still unclear.

"There is a commercial open source for enterprises where there are additional modules, compatible with enterprise level servers like Oracle. It will be a proprietary license."

Essentially, Queplix has some simple CRM software, free, available for download. There is also a "professional" version, with tools that let you pull your business objects out of your present installation, and from that re-create your old interfaces and business rules under J2EE. These tools are proprietary.

But what Queplix is really selling is a methodology, one in which their people help take you off a platform you feel may be dieing and give you back control of it.

Even after you go through this process, of course, you may still be in a trap if your database is proprietary, as it often is. Queplix solutions speak only to getting your CRM application out of the bear trap, not the underlying database.

And if you're thinking about this just from reading ZDNet, you may not be in Tenberg's target market anyway.  "For legacy converson we're looking at high end and Fortune 500 enterprises. These things we're converting are bought by big players. We can technically convert any legacy system, but it makes more sense for bigger players."

Little bears are still on their own. If you're a little bear, let me know and we'll see what we can do.