Sudden exit for SugarCRM co-founder and CEO

SugarCRM > Salesforce.com

@BoldMan - probably because salesforce.com is the closest competitor, and Sugar makes a big thing about being as good as salesforce, but a lot cheaper. (Actually they seemed to have toned this down lately -not sure why as the comparison made sense)

Having been involved in a mid-sized salesforce rollout, and later experimented with Sugar, I can safely say that with a PHP developer and a good sysadmin you can deliver 95% of the functionality of salesforce, plus some things that salesforce doesn't deliver, for less than 25% of the cost.

I'll personally be very sad to see SugarCRM go under -my experience of the SFDC team (not the developers behind the system, the ones who go to your company and implement it) is that they over-promise, under-deliver, and jump ship as soon as possible leaving you with a partial rollout and a massive bill. With SugarCRM, on the other hand, you get exactly what you pay for. More work on your side, but realistic expectations and a product you can customise to suit you.

Hopefully, SugarCRM will be bought by someone who can market it properly...

Code and communitymatter,

..not a single person (or as someone noted - a handful of people).

Once again a "tech journalist" who probably has never written a line of code in his life is weighing in on a non-event as if it mattered to anyone really involved.

The great thing about LAMP stack apps is that they are all open - and Sugar is no different. If the company SugarCRM goes away - who cares? The project still has hundreds of thousands of supporters. In fact, in the UK there isn't even a real Sugar corporate office, and it's still going strong - the corporate side of Sugar is irrelevant to the product's success, and I'd argue the CEO even less so.

And I also agree that the comparison to Salesforce.com is silly. Two very different models and two very different cultures - I'd like to think that VCs sinking millions into a company knew what they were getting into. Expecting an open source company to see 500 million pounds in turnover a year in half the time as a proprietary SaaS company spending 100 million pounds a year in marketing - yeah, that's a feasible expectation. Let's see where SugarCRM is in a full 10 year cycle and then make comparisons (remember Salesforce took eight years to see its first profit).

I like how this writer throws out like 5 names over a few years of people sacked. Please. Has anyone here ever worked in sales? In tech startups? Turnover is part of the business. How many presidents and major VPs have left oracle, Salesforce, Siebel etc. without it seeming alarming (hello, Shai Agassi left SAP and less was made of that and he was actually the only brain in that operation for the past decade.)

In short, Gavin, pull your head out of your arse.

@Jonathan

Don't get too excited about Sugar. I've been developing commercial SugarCRM modules for several years and can tell you that the quality of Sugar's code is shockingly bad. Their appalling documentation doesn't make matters any better. Yes, you pay less initially for Sugar but their horrible framework means anything but the most mundane customizations take more time, effort (and thus money) than any decent framework.

My hope is that if someone buys Sugar they overhaul the code base, ideally porting it to something sensible like Symfony.