I have been lucky enough to be involved with SugarCRM as a board member since February of 2005, just over four years now. Yesterday, I stepped into the role of interim CEO at the company. I have an immense amount of respect for the founding CEO, John Roberts. Few people have taken a company from concept to major growth the way John did at Sugar.
Like any big idea, Sugar encountered many doubters when John, Clint and Jacob first started the company. Many people were skeptical of open source at the applications level. I knew John, Clint and Jacob were on to something and have argued for years that open source made as much sense for applications as for infrastructure. John, Clint and Jacob also found some great investors in DFJ, NEA and Walden International who recognized something special in the founding team and are incredibly supportive of the company. The company proceeded to break new ground in business model (commercial open source), development (www.sugarforge.org), licensing (one of the first company’s to adopt the GPL v3) and cloud computing (see their announcement from last week on the Sugar Open Cloud).
Today SugarCRM is a thriving commercial open source business with award-winning products, a large customer base, strong financials and a thriving open source project.
My goals for the next 30 days at SugarCRM are fairly simple: get to know the team, customers and partners. I am looking forward to helping them to continue to execute and take the company to the next level.
Congrats on the new gig. I am sure Sugar is happy to have you at the helm.
Will John be staying with the company?
I am sure you will do a tremendous job and Sugar is lucky to have you.
Posted by: Ben Koo | May 07, 2009 at 02:05 PM
This is exciting. I hope that you bring SugarCRM to a new level. This is a company with a HUGE potential as an application platform. Although many companies hope for this, SugarCRM has a real opportunity. Simply look at Salesforce.com and their market cap of $5B+ in this crappy economy.
It's time for an open source company to go out there and getsome!
Posted by: Craig Oda | May 07, 2009 at 02:57 PM
As a guy intimatley involved in the space I can tell you that you have your hands full finding a solid replacement. Sugar's failure is not understanding their customers and the true need of the marketplace. Few people have their thumb on that magic piece.
Best of luck
Richard Keith Latman
CEO
iMagicLab
Posted by: Account Deleted | May 07, 2009 at 03:05 PM
Kudos to John for helping to get Sugar to where it is today. Even the open source Community Edition is very usable.
If there are any product areas to address, let me suggest Case handling. This is an area where both Salesforce and Sugar are fairly deficient (as are most of the alternatives).
Posted by: pwb | May 07, 2009 at 04:59 PM
Wow.
Posted by: Jay Batson | May 07, 2009 at 05:21 PM
I spoke with John Roberts nearly four years ago and he did not seem very open to me. Two years ago, I called and asked if he was interested in working with SplendidCRM and I got a one-word response, "No!", before he abruptly hung-up the phone.
I hope this posting will serve as an open invitation to Larry to talk.
Paul Rony
President
SplendidCRM Software, Inc.
http://www.splendidcrm.com
Posted by: Paul Rony | May 07, 2009 at 09:55 PM
Larry, I am also open for discussion it will be great to see a change of approach at Sugar.
TurboCASH is an open source accounting package. We compete against Sage and Intuit. They also provide CRM solutions of their own. We have 100 000 users in 25 languages and 81 countries. I would like to link up with a CRM company that wants to move forward with the open source model.
Philip Copeman
TurboCASH Accounting
http://www.turbocacash.net
Posted by: Philip Copeman | May 08, 2009 at 06:35 AM
Larry, Congrats on taking the helm, I can't imagine the company in better hands.
Best Regards, Mark
Posted by: Mark Hinkle | May 08, 2009 at 09:30 AM
Sugar tastes good going down, but vile when you throw it up.
The software QA is very bad -- lots of bugs all the time and terrible upgrades...breaking SugarCRM and fixing it is a constant struggle. You need FT PHP gurus and SQL database gurus just to maintain it.
The best strategy is to pick a release and stick with it to the bitter end. Upgrading and patching will cost you thousands of dollars and hours.
The promise of SugarCRM is not the same as the delivery.
Posted by: Stanley Kellmann | May 08, 2009 at 09:37 AM
Congratulations Larry, that's a great challenge, onward,
sacha
(now your wife won't tell you anymore that you don't have a real job ;) )
Posted by: Sacha Labourey | May 08, 2009 at 11:25 PM
I assume that John Roberts didn't leave his post voluntarily. Or in other words: VCs have become cold feet because 48 mio is not exactly pocket money if there is no return.
I believe that (sadly) only one part of Sugar's strategy worked: Creating an excellent, free OS product and getting an enormous response from the media.
The second half didn't work out at all - turning this degree of popularity into money (= paying customers).
The reason is twofold: Firstly the free product is too good. Many even very large organisations can live with the CE version without any problems if they are ready to invest a few dimes in some decent programmer.
Secondly there is no channel management (and subsequently no channel) to speak of. For most of us it is much better and more profitable to sell proprietary SW simply because there is more in it for us. And for the few who still stick with Sugar as their main product it makes much more sense to "sell" the CE version and make money by adding the needed functionality themselves (and thereby deliberately locking in the customer).
My advise:
- Scrap the free version. The Express pricing is just about right provided the quality improves (less frequent upgrades).
- Scrap the partner fees but implement a partner certification program. Today there are too many so called partners who don't have a clue what they are doing but since they pay they are part of the family
- Raise the partner commission to a normal 35 - 45% but make partners responsible for support. Sugar should only provide 2nd level support or special deals for large customers (in accordance with the maintaining partner)
- Do not compete with your partners. You will lose on the long run. CRM is nothing that can be sold out of the box via a web shop.
- Distribute leads transparently and control the fulfilment.
Posted by: Robert Laussegger | May 10, 2009 at 01:47 AM
Well things must be going better, because I have upgraded Sugar twice and haven't had any major bugs except in developing modules. Commission trackers etc. I still praise you guys daily for this project and am anxious to install 6.0 as it is looks amazing.
Posted by: Jeremy | April 17, 2010 at 08:13 PM