Last Updated on April 21, 2022
Oracle is a computer technology corporation best known for its software products and services like Java.
In 2020, Oracle was the second-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. They employ over 130,000 people, and sell cloud-engineering services and systems and database management systems.
Oracle has a fairly prominent position with open source. They are a supporting member of the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and the Java Community Process.
Through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle also became the steward of many other important and long-running open source projects such as the Java programming language and the MySQL relational database, introduced in 1995. The acquisition of Sleepycat Software, brought the open source Berkeley DB key/value store.
The company co-develops the OpenJDK, an open source implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition, and Btrfs, a B-tree file system. They also open source the Oracle Coherence Community Edition, NetBeans, and produce Oracle Linux which is a Linux distro compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code.
While Oracle develops and distributes open source software, they have many different business models. The majority of their products are published under a proprietary license. This series looks at free and open source alternatives to Oracle’s products.
Oracle Siebel CRM delivers a combination of transactional, analytical, and engagement features to manage all customer-facing operations.
Siebel CRM is proprietary software and not available for Linux. What are the best free and open source alternatives?
1. Odoo
Odoo is a complete Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. It is mainly developed to meet the changing needs of an organisation.
Odoo Apps can be used as stand-alone applications, but they also integrate seamlessly so you get a full-featured Open Source ERP when you install several Apps.
Odoo enables users to efficiently manage leads, opportunities, tasks, issues, requests, bugs, campaign, and claims. It manages key tasks such as communication, identification, prioritization, assignment, resolution and notification.
2. vTiger
vTiger is an easy to install Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution.
The software provides CRM functionality including contact management, campaigns, sales pipeline, calendar, project Manager, customer portal and documents. There are also ERP modules available such as inventory.
3. SuiteCRM
SuiteCRM is a software fork of the popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system SugarCRM, developed and maintained by SalesAgility.
With SuiteCRM, users can build business process models and create flexible, automated actions that can be activated to operate at any time. Users can also create sales pipeline models and design template customer quotes, regulate and control pricing strategies, maintain contract renewals and monitor the progress of leads.
All articles in this series:
| Alternatives to Oracle's Products | |
|---|---|
 | Business Intelligence is business analytics software that offers an integrated, end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System. |
 | Business Process Management is a complete set of tools for creating, executing, and optimizing business processes. |
 | Database is a multi-model database management system often used for running online transaction processing, data warehousing and mixed database workloads. |
 | JDeveloper covers the full development lifecycle from design through coding, debugging, optimization and profiling to deploying. |
 | OC4J (Oracle Containers for J2EE) is a slimmed down version of Oracle Application Server. |
 | MySQL is a relational database management system. It runs as a server and allows multiple users to manage and create numerous databases. |
| Siebel CRM delivers a combination of transactional, analytical, and engagement features to manage all customer-facing operations. |
 | TopLink is a mapping and persistence framework for Java developers. It is an object-persistence and object-transformation framework. |
| Web Cache is a secure reverse proxy cache and a compression engine deployed between a browser and web server/content management server. |