SugarCRM CEO John Roberts will be feautred in an August 10 webinar sponsored by Webex and Selling Power. Results will be presented from a recent survey conducted by Selling Power magazine in which over 600 industry insiders participated. Selling Power publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner will also present the survey results and interview Roberts.

SugarCRM is finishing a big month, during which it released Sugar Suite 3.0.1 B and celebrated theone-year anniversary of the launch of its open source customer relationship management (CRM) application.

SugarCRM claims a rapidly expanding community of users that now includes over 300,000 free downloads and 250 paying customers for its professional edition. There are also 575 open source developers contributing new code and enhancements to the system, and nearly 9,500 participants active in multiple forums sponsored by the company.

These numbers mark SugarCRM as the most successful open source enterprise application in the industry, the company says. The rapid adoption rate validates the open source model for use in enterprise environments and lays the groundwork for extending the reach of SugarCRM into more and larger organizations.

“Many software companies don’t sell any systems at all in the first year, and many of the mid-tier CRM companies don’t have more than a few hundred installations even after years in business,” said John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. “Our success testifies to the market’s willingness to embrace the benefits of open source in general and our solution in particular. People are tired of failed CRM implementations, and we offer an easy-to-use, easy-to-integrate, and cost-effective alternative to the inflexible proprietary systems that have left many companies high and dry.”

The usability of SugarCRM stems specifically from its open source roots. A community of developers has contributed to creating the user-friendly interface that eliminates the complexity of traditional CRM applications, and the availability of the source code makes it possible to integrate SugarCRM easily with back-office applications to ensure that key customer data can be shared between the two systems.

In addition, open source developers around the world have already built more than 70 core enhancements to the SugarCRM platform, ranging from document management and knowledge management systems to timesheets, database backups, and Java synchronization. The software has also been translated into 14 languages.

SugarCRM is available in installed, hosted and appliance-based versions that offer the full range of CRM functionality required to manage customer interactions. The open source edition offers the core CRM application, while the professional edition offers additional features, extensions and technical support for hundreds of users at an annual fee of $239 per person per year.

SugarCRM Management team John Roberts, Clint Oram, Jacob Taylor