http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3828671Until recently, few enterprises were using open source software for back office applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). But last month, an IDC survey of Western European companies found that nearly ten percent were using open source enterprise software. That's surprisingly high for a market where the industry leaders themselves have only a ten percent share. IDC also reported that the leading open source enterprise applications are growing – by 20 percent or more per year.
That's good news for the owners of the projects on our list. Unlike other categories of open-source applications, a high percentage of enterprise projects are money-making ventures that offer commercial support, training, and/or add-on features.
The scent of money in the air probably also explains why there are so many open source enterprise applications available. In other categories, like open source browsers, for instance, you'll struggle to find half a dozen good choices. But if you're looking for open source CRM or content management apps, you'll face more of a struggle in narrowing the dozens of choices down to a short list.
To help you get started on the process, here are 101 open source enterprise applications.
Note: Enterprise applications can be very difficult to categorize. The features that one group calls "customer relationship management," another group may call "sales force automation." And terms like "content management" and "groupware" mean very different things to different people.
In addition, many of these apps combine multiple functions in a single package. For the purposes of this list, we tried to categorize applications as they described themselves. Applications that didn't fit neatly into a single category ended up in the "Business Suites" category.
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