As Microsoft releases its latest version of a primarily midmarket CRM product, I am thinking only about our enterprise customers. (Maybe it is because I have been working with so many of our larger customers I hadn’t met before planning for SugarCon next month.)

To be sure, selling CRM into the enterprise is hard work. SugarCRM lands new deals in the midmarket, in the double digits per day…which is great, but mainly because so much of that is inbound. But the enterprise is a very different beast. Large companies are slow to change, even if they want to.

Want proof? The fact that SAP and IBM are working together to create SAP workflows for Lotus proves that even the most antiquated and unintuitive products still permeate the enterprise arena. (I personally think they chose the codename “Atlantic” because Lotus is an expansive and unwieldy entity with a lot of sinking ships.)  Of course, this is a “me too” move for Lotus since SAP has Duet for MS Office, but that’s hardly the point.

The point, really, is that changing the IT buying and deployment culture in the enterprise is hard. But SugarCRM and other companies are doing a decent job. One of the takeaways I’m finding from our enterprise wins is that customers LOVE the flexibility an open source product offers, and in the enterprise, the kind of flexibility you find with a product like SugarCRM is pretty much unheard of at the packaged app level. It’s been a one-by-one process, and we’re winning the war battle by battle, and as more companies demand this kind of openness and flexibility, the battles will only get easier…

A sneak peek inside the IBM/SAP co-development facility for project “Atlantic”