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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
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- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
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Sugar CRM
Deal Radar 2009: SugarCRM
Deal Radar returns to open source with SugarCRM. Founded in 2004 by John Roberts, Clint Oram, and Jacob Taylor, SugarCRM began as an open-source project on Sourceforge, something that the company still maintains. The company, which is headquartered in Cupertino, California, develops CRM software in four editions: Sugar Community Edition, Sugar Express, Sugar Professional, and
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
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
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,
From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 2)
SM: During that timeframe, what did you think were the bright flashing lights of OpenSource? JR: It was all about hope and belief. That is why in the fall of 2003 I decided to go for it. I asked my wife for six months to chase this idea.
From Dyslexia to SugarCRM: John Roberts (Part 1)
John Roberts is CEO and co-founder of SugarCRM. He established SugarCRM’s commercial open source business model. Today the Sugar community is one of the largest open source communities on the Web.
