[via Jeff]

Jeff pointed out an interesting article from Business Week about Open Source Software, and more specifically, about sugarCRM, a software company which is developping a CRM open-source application.

Eighteen months ago John Roberts, Clint Oram, and Jacob Taylor decided to quit their jobs at Epiphany, a maker of customer-relationship software. The trio wanted to target the same market, but write a new application developed using open-source code. It took them only three months to create the program and just another month to close their first round of funding. Little more than a year later, their company, SugarCRM, has given away more than 325,000 copies of its software, and raised a second round of capital, for a total of $7.75 million.

Giving away software isn’t your typical path for a venture-capital-backed startup. But Roberts & Co., are smack in the middle of the next frontier of the open-source movement: business applications. “No one had funded an open-source application company at that point — it was all infrastructure,” says CEO Roberts. “We broke a glass ceiling.”

And this input from Jeff (wow):

[…] This is one of the few enterprise software companies I have been interested in tracking. The company had raised their $5.75M Series B and their $2M Series A respectively 10 and 15 months ago, and did not require a new cash infusion based on its reported market success. By implementing a dual license strategy, and leveraging the community to develop portions of the product, and make available through 21 languages less than 18 months after launch (which is more than Salesforce.com after 8 years).

I have downloaded the Sugar open source edition v3.5.0b (windows exe, about 23MB) and installed the software by our hosting provider OVH, as the solution is fully based on a LAMP stack (Linux Apache MySql PHP). OVH is supporting all the requested components, I just had to upgrade from mySql 3.x to 4.x. I was *really* impressed by the install process delivered with the open source version of sugarCRM. Impressive!! A kind of “windows setup”, great :-)

We are now testing the functionalities of sugarCRM and we will decide in some times if we will use sugarCRM or not.

I will publish in some days some thoughts about the business model and the approach of sugarCRM. There is something very interesting in it.