Optaros at SugarCON 2008

I spent the Wednesday - Friday last week at the SugarCON conference in San Jose. Overall, I found it a good event with relevant and entertaining speakers, topics, and lots of opportunities to hook up both with the SugarCRM team and other players in that eco-system:

- SugarCRM CEO John Roberts illustrated the SugarCRM success story; among a bunch of other things, SugarCRM has closed another round of funding for additional 20 MIO USD.

- Daniel Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs gave a hilarious show of ruthless one-liners dishing it out to more or less everyone in the IT industry.

- Jonathan Schwartz spent a large part of his presentation on explaining the drivers behind the acquisition of MySQL.

- Paul Greenberg gave some good food for thought on how to leverage / be aware of the role of the consumer in terms of building / killing your brand (see the Sony PS3 video here).

It was good to see some of the innovative, higher-complexity solutions that are being implemented based on SugarCRM. More and more companies are taking the same view and outset as we’ve been doing at Optaros for a while; using Sugar as an open, flexible platform to base more complex solutions on – or as Geoffrey Mobisson put it, “Sugar as the Swiss Army Knife”.

I presented our Wonderbox showcase on Wednesday evening. Had a good crowd turning up, and some very good questions and discussions. It was very apparent that the level of complexity we addressed in this project made an impact on the audience. Especially the multichannel architecture able to deal with B2C, B2B and B2P triggered a lot of interest. Complex multi-channel relationship management including partner management was high on many people’s list. Go here to download the full presentation.