Open source software companies continue to strengthen their channel partner programs. The latest example involves SugarCRM’s new Open+ Partner Program. But SugarCRM isn’t alone. The VAR Guy has a hunch that several open source partner program announcements will surface this week. Here are the details. The VAR Guy’s 2009 Open Source 50 survey revealed most open source application providers were just getting started with Partner Programs.

MindTouch, the open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, will present at this year’s SugarCon event in San Francisco, being held April 12-14. SugarCon 2010 unites CRM customers and developers with companies and projects committed to building open business applications for the Cloud. Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of MindTouch will lead the discussion, aimed at highlighting how companies can gain from adding next-generation, open collaboration tools to their existing CRM initiatives.

SugarCRM announced the new program at Everything Channel’s annual XChange Solution Provider in Los Angeles. The Open+ announcement comes on the heels of major channel accolades for SugarCRM. The company was recently named one of CRN Magazine’s Top 100 Cloud Computing Companies. Vice President of Worldwide Sales Jeff Campbell was also named a 2010 Channel Chief by CRN for his leadership in building one of the most channel-friendly CRM applications companies in the market.

DataSync, a leading provider of consolidated business software solutions, will present at this year’s SugarCon event in San Francisco, being held April 12-14. SugarCon 2010 unites CRM customers and developers with companies and projects committed to building open business applications for the Cloud. Mike Vetter, CEO of DataSync, will lead the discussion, aimed at highlighting how companies can gain from running their business applications in a cloud environment.

This year SugarCon has expanded to eight breakout tracks that tackle the industry’s most important trends – cloud computing, social networking, and open source – and offer practical advice for improving sales, marketing and support operations. The tracks are: CRM Strategy, Open Source and Open Cloud(s), Business Apps in the Cloud, Extending Sugar, Beyond CRM, Getting Social, Partner Innovation and SugarU.

The first, a large manufacturer of industrial equipment with about $650 million in annual revenue, is using SugarCRM to push critical customer information to its far flung salesforce. They’ll also use Sugar for traditional sales opportunity management functions like keeping up with their sales pipeline, but the real value of the system will be a tight integration with their ERP system, which is closed and difficult to use. By linking it to SugarCRM, sales reps will be able to view and act on customer order histories, order status information, inventory levels, and customer payment data.

Clint Oram, Co-Founder, SugarCRM in an interaction with Biztech2.0 gives a comparative view of different CRM models and their adoption trends. Many of SugarCRM’s larger customers with strict data management needs, run their CRM solution in the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment. Where the infrastructure is delivered as a service, our local implementation partners manage the software application as a service and the customer 'owns' the data storage environment, thereby ensuring compliance to data management policies.

BrainSell and SugarCRM will take attendees through a whirlwind session of social media marketing. Speakers will evaluate the usefulness of "hot social media sites" and discuss how exactly these tools can increase business visibility, lead generation and sales. Dharmesh Shah, Chief Technology Officer & Founder of HubSpot and co-author of Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs, will present the keynote and offer a book signing in the afternoon.

Inbound Marketing (getting found) and leveraging Social Networks (alerts, notifications and process) seem to be two sides of a very important coin. In the context of business to business, the process from getting found, to Prospect, to Lead, to Opportunity, to Customer is not always simple. Since trust is such a big factor, how do you envision a hand-off from Marketing (team) to Sales (team)? In BtoB Lead nurturing might need to be a little more personal 1 to 1 than other consumer types of business, no?

Your product is great and your campaign execution was breathtaking – the only thing hindering the ROI your finance director demands is the sales team. So what are you going to do about it? Marketers are renowned for spending a fortune on market research. But if the insights aren’t passed on to the sales, telesales and customer service teams – and in a way they can understand and act upon – you may as well have saved yourself the bother.

We’ve implemented a CRM solution for the application process called SugarCRM that is basically managing all of our outreach in terms of generating applications for it. In the past, it was managed more informally through a collection of spreadsheets among our staff of 10 or 15 outreach specialists. Now, we’re tracking all of our efforts and the application data for each company, which enables us to do a bunch of things. For example, we have a clear record of every time we’ve touched one of these applicants or leads.

In operation since 2004, SugarCRM has over 6000 customers worldwide in over 30 countries. As a commercial open source company, we have over 6 million downloads of SugarCRM products and approximately 10000 of them originate from India. The pro product Sugar Professional with more features, support training and management is the sale point. Worldwide, we plan to increase our partner size from 250 to around 1000 by year end.

Take a look at Levementum, a cloud integrator that specializes in SugarCRM (open source CRM) and Compiere (open source ERP) customer deployments. And yes, many of those projects involve Levementum deploying customer applicatons in Amazon’s cloud. When The VAR Guy needs some perspective on cloud integrators, our resident blogger typically calls Levementum.

Since its founding, SugarCRM has worked closely with a global network of value added resellers, partners and developers to create and deliver CRM solutions for customers around the world. SugaRCRM has been recognized by Everything Channel's CRN Magazine as one of the '100 Coolest Cloud Computing Products' and named Vice President of Sales Jeff Campbell as a CRN 'Channel Chief.'

It's surprising just how significant the communities are around an increasing number of enterprise open-source projects, which communities include both users and developers, a significant number of whom actively contribute code to these enterprise applications. Who would imagine a community of millions forming around developing and using software designed to help the world's largest enterprises solve some of their biggest problems? In other words, helping the Man feed...the Man?

For the eighth consecutive year the top Channel Chiefs were chosen by Everything Channel editorial based on criteria including policy and program innovations made during the past year, the amount of revenue their company generates through partners, their willingness to speak out publicly on behalf of the channel and the number of years they have dedicated to channel activities.

If you think open-source server technologies are limited to Linux distributions, think again. Although these software projects pair well with Linux, it isn't an integral part of any of the 10 listed. Open-source software no longer refers to a Linux-only environment. In fact, open source now crosses all operating system boundaries, so much so, that Microsoft launched its own open-source laboratory called Port 25, and it is a platinum-level sponsor of the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

This integration leverages the widely appreciated extensible application framework of SugarCRM. The module based design of SugarCRM provides functionalities that are segregated yet related i.e. it has enabled addition of new information flow modules without any modification in the existing ones. This is especially useful in businesses like insurance selling, trading, collections, healthcare industry.

The enterprise has long favored Java and .Net, but PHP and other dynamic programming languages have left their infancies and are rapidly closing the gap on their more stodgy competitors. While dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python dominate Web engineering, the signs that they are breaking Java and .Net's hold on the enterprise are less clear. Forrester recently reported that PHP claims the highest instance of open source use within enterprises, at 57 percent penetration.

Located along the eastern fringes of Canada and within the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, the island of Newfoundland won’t be confused with India as a major outsourcing hotspot anytime soon. But thanks to the development of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing, the concept of locating virtual call centers within the rural bastions of North America has become achievable, and for one SugarCRM customer, a reality.