I'm recently back from a tour of Northern California companies, and still have a lot of notes to assimilate. One of the biggest standout companies was SugarCRM. What an interesting story they have to tell. For those of you unfamiliar with the Cupertino, California-based SugarCRM, the company offers the first completely open-source CRM product. The company, founded by former Epiphany employees, aims to fit in where other CRM companies cannot: by offering their products via open source, they can appeal to companies that need low cost and a high level of flexibility: something for which traditional CRM companies are not well known. (Director of Marketing Tara Spalding told me the cost for SugarCRM is approximately $240 per user, per year.)

Predictably, SugarCRM, which is built on a Linux/Red Hat base, has shown it has great appeal to the IT community. Tara Spalding indicated that while Salesforce.com skipped the IT departments of companies to appeal to the business users of CRM solutions, SugarCRM has decided to begin from an IT perspective, understanding that today's IT departments have a great deal of influence on business processes, and they do not like to be cut out of the process of business software implementations.

For more information about SugarCRM, visit www.sugarcrm.com.

TES