Clint Oram, the co-founder and vice president of Products of open source CRM provider SugarCRM (News - Alert) was recently interviewed by Tasneem Balapurwala, sharing some interesting insights on the company in specific and open source in general.

Balapurwala asked Oram As an open source organization, “what are your expansion plans on a global basis?”

“The pro product, Sugar Professional, with more features, support training and management is the sale point,” Oram answered, saying that worldwide, “we plan to increase our partner size from 250 to around 1,000 by year end. On the technology front, we will expand our cloud footprint making large investments to run SugarCRM on Amazon, MC2 cloud or other cloud environment.”

Overall, he noted, “the idea is to make it easy for partners and enable local VARs to build local CRM SaaS (News - Alert) businesses.”

Balapurwala wanted to know how an alliance with SugarCRM could “translate into profitable business for the partner community?”

Besides selling our products to customers, “partners are consultants at one level,” Oram noted, explaining that “CRM it is not a point solution like e-mail or telepresence. It embodies a continuous process which is a natural interaction between a company and its customers. Just deploying a technology or turning on software does not translate to success in CRM world.”

He cited research showing that most CRM implementations of organizations fail “because they simply turn on technology without changing control process of mapping technology to their people and processes.” Partners, however, can add value as they “act as strategic implementation consultants, map the processes to the software, train the employees and move towards business optimization.”

And when asked, as he probably is fairly frequently, how SugarCRM fends off Salesforce.com (News - Alert), Oram pointed out that Salesforce.com “is more involved with large enterprises and not focusing much on small and medium sized organizations as in the past.This segment is our sweet spot as companies of up to a thousand employees now prefer us over them.”

Addressing the company's specifically Indian growth plans, Oram noted that half of total revenues come from the United States “and Europe contributes another third of it. We are currently investing more in partners across APAC and India is a big focal point.”

In fact, he said, “the several thousand leads emerging from India every month was the prime reason for our formal entry into this marketplace.”