With over five million application downloads and over 500,000 users in 75 languages within the customer relationship management, or “CRM,” industry, open source CRM provider SugarCRM (News - Alert) CEO Larry Augustin, the company has a strong cloud story to pitch as well.
“We are open source, but we rely heavily on our Cloud strategy for differentiation,” Augustin said, adding that, while the open source aspect remains vitally important, he can see a lot of things in common between open source and Cloud Computing. If you take a step back, they're both about lowering barriers to adoption.
According to Augustin, customers want easier system adoptions, but don’t want to have to go through long and cost adoptions and implementations.
“Anything that allows a customer to get started cheaply, quickly and rapidly is of interest,” he added. “Cloud works like that, open source works like that.”
SugarCRM’s future is filled with applications such as open source and cloud that sit beside each other and work interchangeably for a successful interface for users. And, while the resources outside of an organization, such as a cloud infrastructure, is cheaper and more readily available and that’s obviously an attractive quality, it won’t remove other systems such as open source, as there are critical issues that need non-cloud systems to solve.
“It's a pendulum thing – these things don't go all the way one way or the other,” Augustin said. “Databases at customer sites are not going to go away; there are too many things in them that end up being mission critical.”
So, by having systems like SugarCRM’s open source and cloud, a CRM company, or any telecom company can have the best of both worlds with scalability and accessibility from all areas. , SugarCRM has solidified itself as a premier open source systems provider in the telecom world.