John Roberts on Wednesday resigned from his post as CEO of open-source [tag]CRM[/tag] vendor SugarCRM, leaving board member Larry Augustin to assume the role of interim CEO while the company conducts a formal search for his replacement.

John Roberts

(Credit: SugarCRM)

Roberts, whose grounds for leaving the company and future …

Originally posted at The Open Road

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SugarCRM burst onto the CRM scene with its own disruptive business model: open source. The build-it-yourself model was not for everybody, of course – or so many thought at the time. As SugarCRM continues to refine its code and product lineup, it is attracting more and more customers. Now SugarCRM is waiting for the financial system to right itself so that it can enter the next stage of its corporate development: going public.

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CRM vendors pitch their software with great enthusiasm, rightfully claiming that CRM is a must-have in a troubled economy. But beyond all the hype, are CRM providers themselves using CRM to tend to their customers’ needs? SugarCRM uses its product in sales exactly the same way its customers do, but expands usage beyond some of its clients? self-imposed boundaries. ‘We leverage the entire SugarCRM suite to our support team, our IT team (in project management), our PR team, our HR team. Everyone from our receptionist to our CEO uses Sugar everyday.’

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SugarCRM today announced that John Roberts, co-founder and CEO, will participate in the North Bridge Venture Partners Keynote Panel, at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) on Tuesday, March 24 at 9:30 a.m. at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Joined by executives from Sun/MySQL, Novell, Mozilla-Firefox and North Bridge Venture Partners, the discussion will focus on the current state of economic and global affairs and the future of open source technology.

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SugarCRM today announced that John Roberts, co-founder and CEO, will participate in the North Bridge Venture Partners Keynote Panel, at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) on Tuesday, March 24 at 9:30 a.m. at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Joined by executives from Sun/MySQL, Novell, Mozilla-Firefox and North Bridge Venture Partners, the discussion will focus on the current state of economic and global affairs and the future of open source technology.

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Four years after it was launched, SugarCRM now counts 4,000 customers of its commercial open source software. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company recently held its annual SugarCon conference for customers and developers. We caught up with CEO John Roberts, who discussed how SugarCRM is approaching cloud computing and open source applications in the cloud, mobile CRM, and the use of open source software in a recession.

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Sugar CRM has announced a new partnership with Tata Communications. The India-based company will now offer Sugar’s on-demand CRM services to small, medium and large enterprises. ‘This is a mutual partnership,’ SugarCRM CEO John Roberts told IT Examiner. ‘Tata Communications is our first major partner in India. The company is the premier information provider in the country and further proof that open source products are successfully covering the planet.’

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With the economic meltdown in full swing, Roberts sees an opportunity for what he calls the Open Cloud, where a combination of unique value services and squeezing cost out will ride the cloud computing wave. As he pointed out in a conversation embedded below, open source has always been about the cloud, a vast army of disconnected programmers iteratively building a platform of free services with the kind of commercial open source strategy popularized by JBoss and MySQL.We’re a Sugar Partner

In his keynote, Jim Fowler will discuss how SugarCRM and Jigsaw are working with a shared vision to break down the restrictions of closed and proprietary software. Highlighting the companies partnership in 2008 to leverage Jigsaw’s Open Data Initiative, which made company contact data freely available, easily accessible and quickly transferable into any professional contact system and CRM system, Fowler will showcase how open source data will completely change the game of content management. Drawing on the results of the initiative, Fowler will demonstrate how open source and open data have disrupted the realm of centralized software and are blazing a new trail for business information and data management.We’re a Sugar Partner

Commercial open source CRM vendor SugarCRM has announced keynotes and sponsors for SugarCon 2009 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The kick-off keynote, The Open Cloud: Open Source and Cloud Computing Converge, by SugarCRM co-founder and CEO John Roberts, will look at how open source and cloud computing are blending to provide customers with greater control and lower risk for their CRM deployments. Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and Liar?s Poker, will deliver a talk titled Panic: Modern Financial Insanity, providing his perspective on the ongoing financial crisis – how we got here and where we are headed. The ever-sprightly Greenberg will speak on the topic Retaining Customers in an Economic Downturn.We’re a Sugar Partner