People

In the trenches with...Matt Heitzenroder of SugarCRM

I've really enjoyed this In the Trenches series so far, as I've felt like I've met new people and I've definitely learned some new things. No matter how long you've been in open source, with all the disparate perspectives open source feeds, it's hard to open your mind without having it changed by someone else. If it seems that I think I've got it all figured out, I don't. Not even remotely. The longer I'm in open source, the less I think I know definitively. I just pretend sometimes. :-)

I was therefore really glad to get this submission from Matt Heitzenroder of SugarCRM. He works in Support for SugarCRM, and it sounds like his role is Special Forces-like in its scope and purpose. Given how much time my own company spends on trying to ensure our support offering is perfect, I'm grateful to hear how others manage.

Matt didn't follow the outline I provided, though he does (mostly) answer the questions I had posed. I'm including his post because I think it's indicative of the passion that open source can evoke. Anyone can get excited by a particular technology, but by a licensing model? Curiouser and curiouser!

My name is Matt Heitzenroder. Most people call me "Roder." I join you from beautiful, sunny Miami, FL....For as long as I can remember, I have been sitting in front of computer. In the '80s, my mother made me do a "Science Fair" project on telecommunications. It was the first time I had ever seen a modem or a fax, and I was hooked. When the movie "Hackers" was released, I was just a rebellious teenager that wanted to be a cool "hacker" too.

So I did research on the burgeoning Internet on the definition of a "hacker" and found something called Linux.… Read more

A conversation with Pentaho's Lance Walters: A continued trend toward more open source

I spent a half-hour this morning talking with Lance Walter, VP of Marketing for Pentaho, a leading open source Business Intelligence vendor. I wanted to see if Pentaho's experience in the market matches up with what other open source application companies are seeing.

Indeed. The good news of open source goes well beyond any one particular vendor.

Question: I hear good things about Pentaho all the time. Can you give me a high-level update?… Read more

Marten Mickos on the "un-value" of compromise

I love Marten Mickos, and it is quotations like this in a Computerworld interview that reinforce my respect for him. Asked whether MySQL would ever go partially proprietary in order to get a higher download-to-sale conversion rate, Marten replied:

We've had that debate many times. I think we might win a few new customers, but we would lose 2 million users. We're not ready for that kind of compromise. We also look at other companies who have built closed-source products on top of open-source ones. They don't seem successful.… Read more

In the trenches with...Chris Harrick of SugarCRM

One of the first people I thought of when thinking up this In the Trenches series was Chris Harrick of SugarCRM. I've known Chris for a year or two, and have always been impressed. He's the sort of employee that any company would want, whether proprietary or open source. Fortunately for the open source world, he left Siebel to join SugarCRM.

When you talk with Chris, you don't get the sense that he spends much time mucking around in the ideological side of open source. He cares about customers and figuring out how to make them happy. And, as you'll see below, he thinks a lot about this and other issues that affect an open source business.

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Chris Harrick, director of Product Marketing, SugarCRM. My team is responsible for communicating the benefits of SugarCRM products to open source users, prospects, customers, analysts, partners, and the media. Responsibilities include creating product messaging, competitive positioning, supporting sales, developing demos and webcasts, briefing analysts and the media, and authoring lots of collateral (White Papers, Datasheets, Press Releases, Web Site, Customer Case Studies).… Read more

In the trenches with...Jonny Brown of rSmart Group

Most people aren't aware of how vibrant the open source community is in the Higher Education vertical market. Sakai, uPortal, and other Higher Education-specific open source projects thrive in the academic environment. Oddly enough, two of the premier open source vendors in this space hail from Arizona, not normally known as the center of open source. Something in that heat must generate school-bound open source....

One of the strongest commercial open source vendors in this market is rSmart, which provides commercial support for the Sakai project, among other things. Jonny Brown hadn't taken Open Source 101 before he joined The rSmart Group, but as you'll read below, he has clearly imbibed the Kool-Aid.

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Jonny Brown, Senior Information Architect, rSmart Group. In the very narrowest sense, my job is to find, create, and distribute to our subscribers and the open source community information about using Sakai software. For the most part, this means that I'm a technical writer - a role I played for many years quite some time ago and have never had much desire to revisit. For sure, it wasn't the nature of the meat-and-potatoes work I do (which is very detail-oriented and tends to be boring) that brought me to rSmart. Neither was it the pay check that lured me - I was happily self-employed, reasonably well compensated, very busy, and quite challenged.… Read more