Monday, August 20
SugarCRM Meets the Big Apple
The VAR Guy hit the road early today and headed to a SugarCRM conference in Manhattan. He expected the open source event to attract only local IT managers. Boy was he wrong.
During breakfast, The VAR Guy mingled with business decision makers from Wisconsin, Oregon and other far-off lands. Many of the event attendees are seeking to learn how SugarCRM’s open source platform can integrate with traditional applications and ERP systems. Bland McCartha, VP of business development at Samma Systems, traveled from Oregon to learn whether his company should continue with a managed SugarCRM user or transition to an internal, server-based system. Other attendees are migrating from the old Act contact management system… and striving to remain focused along the way.
The VAR Guy hopes to heckle TechIQ Editor-in-Chief Joe Panettieri during the conference panel later today. Panettieri will describe how he expects SugarCRM and other open source applications to increasingly integrate with unified communication networks from Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and others. Cisco already integrates its unified solutions with traditional and hosted CRM systems, such as Salesforce.com. A relationship with SugarCRM would be a natural next step…
More updates from the event later today.
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It was worth the trip to NY to attend the SugarCRM seminar. The day was packed with useful information, and the ability to talk directly to SugarCRM executives and other Sugar users who are farther along with their implementation was invaluable.
Bland McCartha, August 25th, 2007 at 1:03 pm #One of the most interesting things was the explanation of how the open source model lets Sugar spend a much higher percentage of revenue on development rather than sales and marketing. Brilliant!
Another highlight of the conference was the presentation by David Meerman Scott, author of the new rules of Marketing and PR. His talk was fascinating and thought provoking. I’m half way through his book and intend to put his suggestions into practice right away.
Bland,
That book, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” is fantastic. The VAR Guy read it during a flight from NY to Colorado. It confirmed many of the business concepts we’re using at TechIQ, but also generated some new ideas internally at TechIQ.
The VAR Guy, August 25th, 2007 at 8:04 pm #[…] SugarCRM executives are currently touring the world to promote the company’s open source wares to new customers and partners. The VAR Guy attended one of the events last week. Here’s a recap. […]
TechIQ » Archive » SugarCRM Revenue Doubles, August 27th, 2007 at 9:18 am #