Today I spoke with the IT project manager of a European-based company that deployed Sugar On-Demand and is now considering moving to an on-site deployment of either Sugar Professional or Enterprise. During the conversation, the project manager, whose company will remain anonymous for now, provided an answer to one of my questions that I wasn’t entirely expecting.

Upon asking him why his company selected SugarCRM over other name brand solutions, he simply replied “risk mitigation.” In other interviews I conduct, the answer usually revolves around SugarCRM’s open source model or functionality/usability, but for both this IT project manager and his CEO, the prospect of purchasing or installing another CRM solution after just a 30-day free trial wasn’t worth its weight in gold. Instead, they downloaded Sugar Community Edition, “fooled around with it,” and decided to purchase Sugar On-Demand. With their sales force up and running, this technology manufacturer is now looking to go on-premise.

Besides representing the most common migration path customers of ours take, the interview underscores the big step businesses take when they purchase a CRM solution. While selecting a vendor largely based on risk mitigation might seem as much an insult as a compliment, it reminded me of the fact that ROI is still the driving factor in any CRM deployment, and that vendors like ourselves are still battling the long-lived perception within the marketplace that CRM is an exercise in trial and error. Besides, if SugarCRM can beat the competition on this factor, we’re better off because of it, because in the end, the ultimate goal of every IT endeavor is: