SugarCRM and Alfresco: already old fashioned companies?
On May 7th 2009, SugarCRM announced that its CEO John Roberts was leaving the business effective immediately for undisclosed reasons. Such decisions are never surprising for the insiders, but for the others, the news was quite unexpected. SugarCRM has always communicated on bright results. The reasons for leaving the company are undisclosed, so you just don’t know. You know that the newly appointed CEO, may be appointed temporary (or not), but will not change anything for the short term. OK so the CEO is leaving, but nothing changes and an adviser of Sugar CRM, Matt Asay, is clearly explaining that there fore the company remains in good hands. I rather suggest reading the excellent comments of Robert Lausseger.
I have always believed that “open source” was a synonym of “transparency” (and not for naïve reasons, but for very capitalistic ones). I am not the only one and the same Matt is proclaiming the CEOs of open-source companies set new standards for connectedness and communication transparency.
Being transparent by communicating only the good news and don’t comment the others or don’t disclose them at all, is not my definition.
As a private company, you have no obligation, and you can (should?) keep you mouth shut when it comes to finance and other corporate stuff. As a self proclaimed open source leader changing the world and over-communicating about your successes and bright future, you need be good at broadcasting not only the good news, but also managing the inevitable bad news that any company is facing sooner or later.
So what? Actually I am disturbed by the recent criticisms coming from such inconsistency. Recently, the MGI group raised the point: SugarCRM CEO Departs - Open Source SaaS Not Immune to Recession.
That’s quite sad and somewhere unfair considering the (self-proclaimed again but very likely to be) impressive growth of some shiny VC back-up open source companies such as SugarCRM or Alfresco. But in business we always (or almost) have what we deserve: great expectations must lead to great results. And when investors put millions on the table, they expect a lot, really.
These companies are saying they are open source leaders and receive my criticisms for not being as transparent as they pretend, far from that. I find them much less transparent than the “grandpa-endangered species close to extension and publicly listed-close sources companies” (are you sure?) such as Open Text (NasdaqGS: OTEX) or Autonomy-Interwoven (LSE: AU.) who have no choice but disclose a lot of information and not just those they want. I don’t approve overselling the potential (which is huge btw) of open source business for obvious short terms motivations. If the business model is good, and I do believe it is, like so many, it will succeed. Sorry: it has already succeeded. No needs to disappoint the public, the clients and the investors by promising the impossible or adopting such communications behaviour.
Open source is shiny, funky, trendy and growing. It’s time for open source to understand we are in 2009 and nothing will be the same (when the sky is falling, that’s not for just a few). Growth & profits will be there for most of us (open source and other hype software vendors), fair enough, not for all (see social text last news, ok not open source but quite hype too, more may come too), but no more cheap capital neither investor ready to buy out companies at no price (read Oracle buys VC-backed virtual Iron ). Somewhere, pretending “nothing has changed for us” looks to me old fashioned, which is strange for speaking about such innovating companies. We will need more than never the cash of investors, we need to deserve their trust and associate also the words “open source” with “long term investment”.
So I can quote Oscar Wilde:
It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.
But that would be unfair considering the impressive results achieve by the VC back up leaders, and also considering my real and sincere sympathy for them. To qualify them, I prefer from far this one, also from Oscar:
Go for the moon. If you don`t get it, you`ll still be heading for a star.
I hope the investors will at least appreciate this moment of poetry.
Disclosure: my employer, Jahia, is (very) rarely in competition with Alfresco. Most of the time both solutions look complementary to the clients (at least so far), and we never compete with Sugar CRM, obviously.
So, in this case I think I was right to stick to the facts and allow others to uncover added details, if any. I suspect you'd agree with this reasoning?
One nit, though: it's true that public companies like OpenText and Autonomy are required to disclose information, but don't for a minute think that any of them fully do so. They comply with the law, I'm sure, but there's a lot of room before you bump into the law on any given bit of news. There are always people involved and it's important to protect people.
Regardless, I greatly appreciate your feedback and hope you'll keep reading and commenting.
Reading your feed back, you don't seem indeed to be in a position to clarify what is going on inside SugarCRM,and I don't think some one can blame you for that btw. But if it is not you, someone else could. Not only giving no reason about "bad" news let the people imaging the worst, but it is the opposite of being transparent, which is - stop me if I am wrong - a key asset of open source companies.
The close source companies are always using any opportunity to demonstrate - or trying to demonstrate, sometimes pathetically, we (open source companies) are not so different from them. So we shoud not help them in that task and when bad news come, no company can prevent facing at least some, we should be somewhat transparent, at least more than them.
Otherwise, thanks for your comment about the public companies. FYI my formers employers, before Jahia, were all publicly listed. So I can have a pretty good idea of the distorsion you are mentionning ;) And I agree with your statement.
Looking forward reading you on CNET,
Tristan
PS: about your PS, Jahia opened the door for a collaboration with Alfresco in 2006 but Alfresco did not pursue the discussions - at they started the development of their own WCM. The door has remained opened since then. Indeed Alfresco's WCM, as a matter of fact, rarely compete with ours (so far).
That said, clients requirements may need a joint integration of both products and I am aware of at least several projects in development with a tandem Alfresco-Jahia. We could (should?) leverage them later in 2009 to demonstrate the added value of our combined open source products. Again, our door is opened, Afresco can contact us whenever they want (and we are meeting your guys at different events btw).