June 20, 2008 10:14 AM PDT
SugarCRM moves 30 percent of its customers to the cloud
I mentioned earlier this week that SaaS may well offer open-source vendors a way to write lots of free software, and still get paid. John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM, underscores this possibility by noting that 30 percent of SugarCRM deployments are hosted, rather than on premise, as The VAR Guy notes. I talked with John a year or so ago and that number was closer to 10 percent back then.
Clearly, the "cloud" is growing for SugarCRM as more customers swap "bits" for service.
Intriguingly, the web is going in the reverse direction, increasingly opening up its underlying code. It's near certain that we're going to end up meeting in the middle: A massive repository of open code and closed services...
...and happy, cash-rich customers.
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. 
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