SugarCRM CEO Roberts replaced by board member
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.
John Roberts
(Credit: SugarCRM)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 open-source company boards, including Pentaho, Compiere, Appcelerator, and Medsphere. He understands how to run an open-source business and, importantly, what to look for in leadership. Augustin should be able to find a strong CEO to lead SugarCRM.
Augustin's near-term task is clear, as he outlines in his blog announcing the change in leadership:
Yesterday, I stepped into the role of interim CEO at the company. I have an immense amount of respect for the founding CEO, John Roberts...My goals for the next 30 days at SugarCRM are fairly simple: get to know the team, customers, and partners. I am looking forward to helping them to continue to execute and (taking) the company to the next level.
In other words, continue the solid work that Roberts started.
I first met Roberts at an SDForum event in 2004, at which time I thought that he was crazy for believing open source could succeed in applications. He and his SugarCRM team persisted in their Quixotic dream, building SugarCRM into a thriving company that brought in tens of millions of dollars in sales last year and has an eye on an IPO.
I couldn't reach Roberts for comment but hope that he spends a little of his downtime on cycling, one of his passions, before he leaps back into the open-source world. As Augustin notes of Roberts, "Few people have taken a company from concept to major growth the way John did at Sugar."
I agree. Roberts will be missed. Fortunately, his legacy should live on at SugarCRM, one of the pioneers of commercial open source.
Disclosure: I am an adviser to SugarCRM.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 






I dispute your claim that this page is "clearly" labeled as a blog. The website looks like an official cnet page and the title/crumb says "Home/News/The Open Road".
I appreciate your time and 'reporting' - and my criticism is meant to be constructive. Cheers,
-jimmy
I think, Matt, that we need to at least entertain the possibility that their business model isn't working.
It's really hard to make Open Source as the main product of a company, and make money. That's why most Open Source is not made that way. And unfortunately the problem with "Open Core" is that you're back to competing as a proprietary company, rather than an Open Source one, again.
And Sugar suffered the usual problem of profit-center Open Source: it had its own community which wasn't really connected to anything else - and certainly wasn't connected with the non-profit-center Open Source community which produces most of Open Source.
But the bottom line is probably that the company missed sales goals for too long. Even if you're doing everything right, it's going to be hard to make them this year.
John ruled SugarCRM by irrational emotions and not the nuts and bolts of a business.
This approach worked fine when orders were coming in without any work ... not the case today.
Good Luck Larry. It will be interesting to see who else moves on to "pursue other interests".
- by SugarInsider May 9, 2009 10:11 AM PDT
- As far as I know sales goals have been reached or are close. Orders are coming in. Business is brisk in this bad economy. The business model of giving away the razor handle and selling the blade (giving away the Open Source version and selling Pro) is working.
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(12 Comments)I suspect they wanted a more seasoned CEO to take the company public. That's been the direction.