14 years of experience with enterprise CRM applications, John Roberts embarked on a journey to build a fast growing CRM company that challenges entrenched proprietary CRM vendors by using Web 2.0 and commercial open source.

With over 150,000 open source and 15,000 commercial users in three years, SugarCRM is the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software. CEO John Roberts will discuss how he leveraged Web 2.0 technologies and trends and the growing tide of open source software to build the leading commercial open source CRM platform on the web. During this talk, Roberts will talk about building a community and ecosystem through open source development and software licensing and the benefits and challenges of hosting local forge and exchange sites. He will explain the strategy behind building a strong, traffic-tolerant platform for Web 2.0 that can be localized and exported in different languages and how this design helped his business quickly reach an international customer base. In addition, he will share how open source business models are disruptive for proprietary software businesses, and deliver better solutions for the customer. Finally, John will discuss the culture around "Web 2.0 as the future" and present strategies for monetizing Web 2.0 and open source as cost-effective alternatives to traditional proprietary options through commercial open source SaaS and on-site deployments.