Beagle Research Group Principal Denis Pombriant returned from open source CRM provider SugarCRM's (News - Alert) tenth user group meeting in San Francisco, terming it a "great success."

The meeting attracted more customers than ever before, Pombriant noted in a postmortem on the Beagle site, "some from as far away as India and the vendor ecosystem was well represented too."

If you wanted sessions you got your money's worth, evidently: "There were eight [count 'em] tracks with a total of 88 sessions over two days." And they offered quality as well as quantity, Pombriant noted - "Paul Greenberg gave the Day 2 keynote and he was brilliant as usual.  Dan Lyons from Newsweek was very funny as he forced us to look critically at the warts on our industry."

The hoedown aside, Pombriant finds that "by most objective measures you have to say that Sugar is on track and gaining altitude in the CRM market.  The company is aided by the fact that it is the biggest dog in the open source CRM space."

Noting that he's been "a fan of SugarCRM" for a good while now, Pombriant remarks that "though the business model seems difficult, there's a for-profit model as well as the open source one."

Open source may be "a great model for larger efforts like Wikis and operating systems," Pombriant writes, adding that "I had my doubts about applications like CRM. But from what I have seen of the partner ecosystem and the company's growth, it appears that open source is working at the application level too."

In his opinion, "there's an opportunity in open source because it stands as an alternative to purely commercial SaaS (News - Alert) solutions.  The challenge for open source won't be from traditional license software but from commercial SaaS because it may appear to offer a cost advantage."