Shapes and Pages – Extraordinarily Effective Web Strategies

Open source software companies continue to strengthen their channel partner programs. The latest example involves SugarCRM’s new Open+ Partner Program. But SugarCRM isn’t alone. The VAR Guy has a hunch that several open source partner program announcements will surface this week. Here are the details. The VAR Guy’s 2009 Open Source 50 survey revealed most open source application providers were just getting started with Partner Programs.

SugarCRM announced the new program at Everything Channel’s annual XChange Solution Provider in Los Angeles. The Open+ announcement comes on the heels of major channel accolades for SugarCRM. The company was recently named one of CRN Magazine’s Top 100 Cloud Computing Companies. Vice President of Worldwide Sales Jeff Campbell was also named a 2010 Channel Chief by CRN for his leadership in building one of the most channel-friendly CRM applications companies in the market.

MindTouch, the open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, will present at this year’s SugarCon event in San Francisco, being held April 12-14. SugarCon 2010 unites CRM customers and developers with companies and projects committed to building open business applications for the Cloud. Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of MindTouch will lead the discussion, aimed at highlighting how companies can gain from adding next-generation, open collaboration tools to their existing CRM initiatives.

DataSync, a leading provider of consolidated business software solutions, will present at this year’s SugarCon event in San Francisco, being held April 12-14. SugarCon 2010 unites CRM customers and developers with companies and projects committed to building open business applications for the Cloud. Mike Vetter, CEO of DataSync, will lead the discussion, aimed at highlighting how companies can gain from running their business applications in a cloud environment.

This year SugarCon has expanded to eight breakout tracks that tackle the industry’s most important trends – cloud computing, social networking, and open source – and offer practical advice for improving sales, marketing and support operations. The tracks are: CRM Strategy, Open Source and Open Cloud(s), Business Apps in the Cloud, Extending Sugar, Beyond CRM, Getting Social, Partner Innovation and SugarU.

The first, a large manufacturer of industrial equipment with about $650 million in annual revenue, is using SugarCRM to push critical customer information to its far flung salesforce. They’ll also use Sugar for traditional sales opportunity management functions like keeping up with their sales pipeline, but the real value of the system will be a tight integration with their ERP system, which is closed and difficult to use. By linking it to SugarCRM, sales reps will be able to view and act on customer order histories, order status information, inventory levels, and customer payment data.

BrainSell and SugarCRM will take attendees through a whirlwind session of social media marketing. Speakers will evaluate the usefulness of “hot social media sites” and discuss how exactly these tools can increase business visibility, lead generation and sales. Dharmesh Shah, Chief Technology Officer & Founder of HubSpot and co-author of Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs, will present the keynote and offer a book signing in the afternoon.

Clint Oram, Co-Founder, SugarCRM in an interaction with Biztech2.0 gives a comparative view of different CRM models and their adoption trends. Many of SugarCRM’s larger customers with strict data management needs, run their CRM solution in the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment. Where the infrastructure is delivered as a service, our local implementation partners manage the software application as a service and the customer ‘owns’ the data storage environment, thereby ensuring compliance to data management policies.