As the newly appointed CEO of open source customer relationship management, or “CRM,” provider, SugarCRM (News - Alert), Larry Augustin discussed in a recent video on The Var Guy about what is ahead for the company in the upcoming year.

“I have a couple of key things I am looking at for 2010,” Augustin said. “The first one is the channel partners. I think our big opportunity here as a company – at least on the sales side – is to work with our partners on a much deeper way than we have been.”   

With two-thirds of SugarCRM’s business coming from the channel already, the company’s focus for 2010 will create even more productivity going forward.

“We already do a lot of work with them, but I want us to be world class in terms of partner support and how we work with the channel,” Augustin said. “We put a lot of effort in starting to build that.” 

While the process takes a long time, SugarCRM has the emphasis and determination to be a world class channel partner. 

In regards to channels, however, Augustin said systems integrators, vars, consultants and software-as-a-service, or “SaaS (News - Alert),” providers will all continue to be business partners, but with more support on SugarCRM’s end.

“In terms of service and hosting providers – another part of our business we’ve stumbled in to in the past – we’re going to do a lot more to support those partners who host from us,” Augustin said. “We have a product called ‘Cloud Console’ which is a systems management product that allows our partners to host and be SugarCRM SaaS providers, SaaS vendors.” 

While the company is currently doing some hosting, Augustin said in the interview that there’s little to no temptation on his part to continue more hosting because of the investments it would require for the company. 

Big things are ahead for SugarCRM in the next year. And, with the new social media systems creating stiff competition for other companies in the field, it seems SugarCRM is well on its way to becoming a dominant CRM company.