Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 6)

Larry Augustin: What we find is that the open platform makes that very easy for anyone coming in. And that community buids very early integrations. Twitter is a great example. We had a Twitter integration available for our product long before most of us here even knew what Twitter was. It’s now part of the product, but it started out in that open developer ecosystem. That’s been a great success for us and that’s one of the reasons that we’re in business.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a good segue into my next question. You are in a very interesting vantage point to call out and introduce our audience to stuff that is happening now that are especially innovative. You talked about Twitter, D&B, Data.com type of integrations, which are kind of established partners at this point. What is the most interesting, exciting, and cool innovations that you’ve seen on that platform that’s from a startup?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s a ridiculous amount of spam that comes through as well and that’s why that tool needs to be able to distinguish between spam and real customer opportunities where a client wants to talk to you.

Larry Augustin: Yes, I agree, all of those are opportunities for innovation in the industry. I think, as an industry, we’re just at the beginning of those pieces. Here, our goal has been to build a platform which can pull those pieces together, integrate them well, and create a great dashboard – whether it’s mobile or desktop – for the individual to view all of those pieces and pull them together. Some of it is internal data. A lot of data are external. How do you correlate those difference sources? We have architected a platform that enables all of those pieces.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Switching gears a little bit, I’m going to give you a scenario which I am experiencing based on our own process of sales and marketing, which uses LinkedIn centrally. We use LinkedIn community’s ability to market and sell subtly. I’m a LinkedIn influencer. Content marketing happens to be one of our primary strategies of how we are building our brand. This is probably why you knew about us before today’s call. We have a very active blog. We have very active social media channels where every hour, we put a good piece of content out there in social media. That flows through using technologies like Hootsuite.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jacob Cooke, CEO of Web Presence in China (Part 1)

The dynamics of e-commerce in China are very different from the US. Let’s dig in!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to your company and yourself. Tell us what you do and your background. We’ll take it from there.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 3)

Larry Augustin: Today, we have a virtual office for that. That virtual office is social media that sits around the person. Today, you may not be selling by physically sitting in that person’s office, but you may be sitting in their virtual office – what they are saying on Facebook or their resume on LinkedIn. Do their kids play soccer or softball? What is it that they care about?

Sramana Mitra: There’s a lot more information accessible today given the virtual nature of information flow than you would gather by visiting someone for an hour.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me comment a little bit on what I’ve heard so far, and then we’ll double-click on a few things. Firstly, this notion of your competitors in the industry not focusing on the sales people and how the customers are facing people—this is the whole notion of social CRM that has come about. Everybody is paying attention to that. Today, people know and believe that you want to dig and ask somebody to introduce you if you want to get into an account as opposed to cold calling somebody.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 1)

We covered John Roberts’ Entrepreneur Journeys story in December of 2008. In this story, we explore the cloud CRM industry’s evolution with Larry Augustin, who replaced John as CEO on May 6, 2009.

Sramana Mitra: As you know, we have covered SugarCRM quite a bit before. So our audience does start off with some knowledge of the company. I’d like to start us out by asking you, now that we are in a mature phase of the cloud computing industry – and CRM on the cloud especially is in a very mature stage – what does your ecosystem look like? Who goes for what solution and why? Who chooses SugarCRM and why?

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Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the revenue would you say is BPO services?

Atul Jain: We are mostly a software company. When you say professional services, do you mean to say installation and implementation kind of stuff?

Sramana Mitra: No, anything that is custom where you’re not selling software.

Atul Jain: We don’t do any real contract-based software development. Sometimes, we do services that are not selling software. For example, we do have a portion of our business, which is not very large, where somebody will hire us to do optimization of their network. They’re not buying our optimization software. They want us to come in and optimize their network. Sometimes they will hire us to do managed services on an ongoing basis. There are services like that, but there are no services where we are building custom modules of our software. >>>