I had the opportunity to attend the SVPMA in early June, and the speaker was John Roberts, SugarCRM CEO.

John is one of the 3 founders of SugarCRM.com, they are an open source Salesforce type application. They have a very interesting business model where they actually sell their SugarCRM tool a as "pro" version with a given set of features, but they also open source "ALL THE CODE", so they have a huge community of open source developers helping them develop their solution, they also allow the open source community to resell whatever they create for SugarCRM. They have had tremendous growth and success with this model, as their client base has grown to over 1400 paying customers in less then 3 years.

One specific example he mentioned on the benefits of this approach is the short time cycle to get things back from the community, within 10 days of releasing all the strings for localization of SugarCRM, the product had been translated into 7 languages. SugarCRM is now available in 75+ languages around the world, this just about floored me, as I painfully spent the better part of a year trying to get some software I managed localized into 3 languages and ultimately we gave up on one of the 3 languages.

Overall, John mentioned that he felt they had really nailed down the ultimate model to allow customers to really contribute to the product they want to use, and this is turn will help SugarCRM become the best CRM tool in the market.

Now just sit back for a second and think of the possibilities if you were to open up an open source model to your products ... . Interesting isn't it? :)