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The weather was warm, the people were outstanding. The 3rd annual SugarCon conference was a great experience, and a lot of fun to be a part of. SugarCon is SugarCRM’s annual developer and partner conference that’s held in the valley. I always enjoy a break from South Dakota cold this time of year. SugarCon is a place where I’m surrounded by people who hold a lot of the same ideals on how better software will make a major impact on business.

I was privileged to speak on a panel for the partner track at SugarCon, and got some excellent feedback about what we’re doing at DataSync, and how it fits into Sugar’s channel program.

The conference had an very polished feel this year – Sugar obviously understands its market space extremely well, and has assembled a solid team and group of partners (which we’re excited to be a part of!). This year’s conference was obviously slanted towards selling in a bad economy. However most partners, like DataSync, haven’t seen a downturn in business. Open source is a tremendous value play in today’s marketplace.

Conference Highlights

• John Roberts (SugarCRM’s CEO) opened the conference with a brief discussion of SugarCRM and how it fits into the global move to open systems and cloud computing. His perspective on the distribution model of software, and how flat the world actually is with open source is a good reminder for everyone.
• Jonathan Schwartz (Sun’s CEO) announced Sun’s upcoming cloud computing initiative. Details were scarce, but the overall push of the message was engaging open systems and the cloud. I was surprised that Schwartz chose to use a conference like SugarCon to announce such a large initiative – a major endorsement of open source and SugarCRM. It’s worth noting, however, that Sun doesn’t actually use SugarCRM, they use SalesForce.com (reference here). Still trying to figure out why Schwartz has been doing keynotes at SugarCon the last couple of years…
• Jim Fowler (CEO – Jigsaw) delivered what was, in my opinion, the best keynote of the conference. He understands open information like no one I’ve heard. Watch for his company to go places.
• Mark Leslie (former CEO of Veritas and board member at SugarCRM) – This guy understands the sales model at startups. Ramping sales is something every startup (including DataSync) is confronted with every day. He had some great strategies for doing it effectively.
• The sessions – SugarCon had some great sessions about its platform. My favorite session was done by Amie Dolittle, VP of inside sales at Sugar. She did an outstanding job articulating how Sugar uses it’s own platform to automate and streamline sales processes.

Overall the conference was a great experience. As with all conferences, the contacts I gained were the greatest benefit. I’ll be cruising back to San Francisco next month for OSBC (Open Source Business Conference), another great open source conference. Drop me a line if you’ll be at OSBC and I’ll make an effort to connect.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.