The battle of the suites comes to open source

Niches are established and before you can say presto, they're being connected into suites.

Next will come bundling.

I'm not against the trend. It's highly useful. It delivers enormous value to customers, and turns nice little companies into great big ones.

It's a complex dance, however, and you can see the first steps from JasperSoft, the open source business intelligence outfit, which has announced Jasper4SugarCRM, a set of standard reports and dashboards aimed at integrating the two projects.

Suites have a long history in the proprietary world. (That's a logo for SageCRM in the corner.) Is it wrong to think suites could be just as successful in the open source world?

Today's enterprise suites, of course, are tools for manipulating and gaining value from databases, using Web interfaces. They are highly complex. You may need subscriptions to several projects to replicate what a proprietary system can deliver, but you'll still pay less, and your staff will have access to the underlying code.

Linking these tools together increases their value, and increases the likelihood someone will choose your tool over others. This is as close to customer control as an open source project is likely to get.

But what if you have already built with another BI tool, or another CRM tool, and your vendor says, no, I'm offering special support to this other one over here.

That's what I want to know. Any customers want to talk about it?