sugarcrm

Eating dinner with Larry Augustin in London this weekend, we fell to talking about open source's relevance to the SMB (small- and medium-sized business) market. Augustin is currently CEO of SugarCRM, a company with over 5,000 customers, many of them SMBs.

But SugarCRM is the exception to the rule. Open source has long been billed as a savior for the SMB market, but the reality is that open-source adoption has largely been an enterprise IT phenomenon, despite other exceptions like KnowledgeTree, which recently updated its product suite to further appeal to this market.

Why aren't more SMBs … Read more

Over the last several months I've changed my opinions on open source any number of times. I like to think I'm not just being fickle and instead it's market dynamics that are shifting focus and opinion.

I was recently quoted in an article about open-source "leeches", and in many situations I stand behind the comments. As it turns out, one of the companies I mentioned is now paying, though many others are still not. Freeloaders will always be part of the open-source game, and I think we all accept that, even if it gets under your skin occasionally. At this point, I don't really care--I'd rather see more unpaid open source than expensive proprietary software in use.

In the past I've had bewildering conversations with CIOs and VPs where they told me that they wouldn't contribute code back because they had "created IP--why would we give it to you for free?" while generating hundreds of millions of dollars on top of open-source software that someone, somewhere had given to them for free. I guess that's the sticking point. Not the freeloading, but the assumption that what they created is somehow more valuable than the product that they built on top of.

This brings up a whole world of issues for those trying to build open source companies. Lately, I'm becoming less convinced that you can build a pure-play open source company if you don't fall into two broad categories: direct replacements or inventions. … Read more

John Roberts on Wednesday resigned from his post as CEO of open-source CRM vendor SugarCRM, leaving board member Larry Augustin to assume the role of interim CEO while the company conducts a formal search for his replacement.

Roberts, whose grounds for leaving the company and future plans remain undisclosed, has made a huge impact on the open-source world, innovating the "Open Core" business model and helping drive open-source applications into the enterprise.

SugarCRM, despite losing Roberts, will be in good hands with Larry Augustin, who, as founder and former CEO of VA Linux, sits on a number of … Read more

SugarCRM has long driven roughly 30 percent of its revenue through Sugar-on-Demand, its hosted offering. But in a recent TechTarget interview, SugarCRM CEO John Roberts pushes the envelope a bit on what it means to be open source and cloud-based:

Today, SugarCRM is deployed on more than 55,000 servers worldwide and growing. Where are the servers? Those servers are in the cloud, they're not in local data centers. They're in all the cloud infrastructure providers from Amazon to Rackspace to British Telecom to IBM. They need applications, and SugarCRM is an application that runs basically on every … Read more

Larry Dignan at ZDNet calls out a significant customer concern with SaaS: data lock-in, particularly if a SaaS vendor goes out of business. How can a SaaS customer get its data out of a failed SaaS system without undergoing the burden of escrow agreements?

The answer is simple, but perhaps not palatable to SaaS vendors: open source a version of their software.

SugarCRM does this, letting its customers run SugarCRM "in the cloud" but giving them the code via an open-source license so that they can support their own deployment if necessary. Why couldn't a Salesforce.com … Read more

CFO Magazine is running a great story about the cost savings available from open-source software. This is a topic that you'll hear open-source vendors crow about, but it's somewhat rare to actually get a CFO on the record about her benefits from open source, so it's notable.

Recent Gartner research suggests that over 27 percent of enterprises will deploy open-source software in 2009. (Note: the remaining 63 percent will, too, but Gartner must have asked the CIO, and the CIO is the last to know.) That's up from 25 percent in 2008, while the share of … Read more

Installing an open-source enterprise application has never been easier. No hardware? No sophisticated IT department? No problem. At least, not if you use one of 38 JumpBox-enabled open-source applications, as it announced recently.

A rising number of companies offer virtualized instances of popular open-source applications, but JumpBox takes it a step further, deploying to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, almost completely obviating hardware and setup quandaries.

JumpBox offers small to midsize organizations a library of open-source applications packaged as pre-built, pre-configured virtual appliances through JumpBox Open, its annual subscription service. Public Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for 12 JumpBox … Read more

InternetNews.com's Andy Patrizio pens an excellent analysis of why EMC, the storage giant, just might gobble up Sun, the former Unix king. While there are potential conflicts to such a match, the synergies might well outweigh them.

Patrizio walks through a range of benefits EMC could derive from Sun's hardware prowess (tape storage to complement EMC's expertise in NAS and SAN, enhanced server throughput performance. ZFS, etc.), as well as its software line-up (Java, RSA security, database replication, etc.). The list is long and the potential benefits would be huge.

But it's actually in the … Read more

SugarCRM announced a new Cloud Connectors program on Monday that opens the leading open-source CRM solution to cloud services like LinkedIn.

SugarCRM also got a bit more social, with a new Social Feeds feature that provides alerts and status updates found in Web services like Facebook.

It's a great way of opening up the SugarCRM system beyond mere source code, as PC World reports:

If you're logging into third-party sites "while you're on the phone with someone, you're going to be hemming and hawing and you're not going to have it at your fingertips,&… Read more