Deal Radar 2009: Service-now.com

San Diego-based Service-now.com was founded in 2003 out of the ashes of Peregrine Systems, which was purchased by Hewlett-Packard (and is now that company’s competitor) in a fire sale. Fred Luddy, who was the CTO of Peregrine Systems, believed that legacy enterprise IT software is akin to “customer abuse” and set out to build a

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Deal Radar 2009: OrecX

In this installment of Deal Radar, we follow a company that is working in line with a theme I addressed in a recent Forbes Column, commercializing open source. Chicago-based OrecX helps businesses record phone conversations using open source software. Founded by Bruce Kaskey and Bruno Haas in 2005, the company is focused on making call

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Deal Radar 2009: Talend

Talend provides open source data integration software with data quality solutions that complement the data integration. Through the open source model, the company aims to make data integration available to all types of organizations regardless their size, level of expertise or budget, using the company’s flagship product, Talend Open Studio.

From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 7)

SM: On a personal level, how has dyslexia impacted your growth and success? JR: When we got our first patent at Sugar my name was typed wrong. It was Johri. I was a bit upset about that, although they corrected it. Then I thought about it longer. If you look at it, the ri looks

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From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 6)

SM: What else has come out in your genre the last four years? JR: If you look at commercial open source, which is the category we put ourselves into, there are about 20 companies . Zembra had the same model as ours and was founded at the same time. It was sold to Yahoo for

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From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 5)

SM: Can you take us through the process of building your sales team? JR: People started calling from all over the world, so we built four different sales channels: an ecommerce engine, an inside sales team, a channel sales team and enterprise sales team.

From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 4)

SM: Who is your customer base? Do you mainly have small businesses? JR: This is a very interesting area to explore. In open source there is very little control over who your customers are. As a result, we have everything from big banks to the Men’s Warehouse.

From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 3)

SM: The situation you described is not a pretty one. Why did you do it? Did you have any idea how you were going to make money? JR: We just believed. It was pretty early on. We did not know how we would make money. We hoped to be able to create a commercial version,

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