SugarCRM CEO Augustin on his 2014 outlook

 

Dec 23, 2013, 6:01am PST

SugarCRM CEO Augustin on his 2014 outlook and the limitations of the cloud

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SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin says you'd be shocked at how much market potential is left for customer relationship management vendors.

Jon Xavier

Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal

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Customer relationship management software is one of the fastest growing segments of business software, with Gartner expecting it to reach about $36 billion by 2017. That’s because it answers a crucial problem in today’s business environment — how to keep track of who your customers are, and manage your interactions with them as you move through complicated sales cycles or deal with support issues.
But CRM software doesn’t look like a lot of other large business software markets, I learned from speaking with Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, a Cupertino-based software maker that competes with Salesforce. In the following Q&A, edited for length and clarity, he talks a bit about what the CRM software landscape looks like, and why he expects the market might start to move away from cloud in 2014.
Q: So SugarCRM had a great year this year. Tell me a bit about some of the things that have happened this year.
A: It’s been a fantastic year overall. The company’s now grown to over 400 employees, and over 7,000 customers. We had a major product release this year — version 7 of Sugar — that’s been met with fantastic feedback from the industry. Analyst firms were really recognizing us as well this year. Gartner put us in their visionary quadrant for CRM. We had a major fundraising round from Goldman Sachs, it’s been... gosh, about three months now. Time flies. We raised $40 million in funding. In Q3 we were cash flow positive and saw our revenue up about 80 percent. So just great results all around.
Of course, the reason we raised that money was we want to invest, so we’re planning to go out and spend some money in the new year to continue to drive growth. But it’s gratifying that we can run this as a profitable business that actually brings in money.

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Jon Xavier is Web Producer at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1826.

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