Open source is giving a mighty boost to the enterprise software industry, changing the support equation for users and signaling to Microsoft and other proprietary vendors that it’s time to catch on or be left out, according to Larry Augustin, an open source visionary and the current SugarCRM CEO.
Augustin, who took over SugarCRM about three months ago, built his reputation on his early work in the open source community and during a stint as a venture capitalist. He thinks the maturing software industry is showing signs of changes that will redefine the customer/vendor relationship, alter current business and distribution models, and eventually fuel cloud computing.
With SugarCRM today, users have a back-end database they can move from internal clouds, to external clouds, to hosting environments.