Recap on SugarCRM 2010 Conference.

I was honored to be invited to attend SugarCRM annual SugarCon 2010 Conference. It was held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. I liked the location mainly because it was next to a BART station – made my commute to SF from Bay Area much easier.

On another hand we all were unhappy with unreliable WiFi connectivity at the hotel. Seems like most of the venues in SF are not addressing this very important issue..

First day’s keynote was packed with people occupying empty floor spaces on a back of the hall.

Major partnerships has been announced:

-         with Microsoft – seems like Sugar CRM was able to secure MS support in cloud applications space;

-         with SnapLogic – also important partnership; integration is always a constant area of concern and with SnapLogic’s opening of integration widgets appstore, this potentially expensive and time-consuming task can be simplified;

-         lastly with their partnership with SIOS, Sugar CRM was able to address the reliability aspect of cloud-based mission-critical applications.

For the rest of the conference I pretty much reserved my space in Social CRM room. Listened to series of great presentations from Mitch Lieberman, Esteban Kolsky, Jeremiah Owyang, and others.

I really wanted to talk about Social CRM with SugarCRM customers. And I planted myself at the table with 5 small businesses owners at lunch time and initiated conversation around “social” aspect of CRM. To my surprise: none of these 5 people have used Twitter or Facebook. Some of them have attended Social CRM sessions but could not relate to the content – was too advanced for them. I am not sure how representative these 5 were out of hundreds who attended the event, but I thought it would have been helpful to split Social CRM sessions into novice and more advanced groups.

I managed to video tape few talks:

- Esteban Kolsky;

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- Jeremiah Owyang;

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- Kira Wampler.

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In general it was great to chat and listen to thought leaders in Social CRM space and learn more about SugarCRM’s strategic directions in this space.

Special thank you goes to Mitch Lieberman for great facilitation of Social CRM discussions!

Hope to see you all next year!