Hello folks, my name is Mark Brandon. I'm the President of Flat Hat Systems.

We market an Internet/Tablet PC based sales process to retail auto dealers. You can find out more about what we do at www.dealerlogix.com.

While we currently market our products to retail auto dealers, we feel the core engine of the process is well suited to sell other products in other industries. Unfortunatlely, like most small software companies we are self funded and lack the resources to pursue these other opportunities.

Due to our resource constraints, I have been researching the possibility of moving to an Open Source licenseing model to address these other industries. In doing my research I came across SugarCRM and I was impressed with the feel of the company through their website and this forum. In particular I found Sugar's story about the decsion to go Open Source educational.

As I dig deeper into Open Source, I'm becoming convinced that if Flat Hat were to move in that direction, the software franchising model would best fit our products, resources, and revenue needs. My single concern remaining is that we built our products on MS SQL and .NET and I'm unsure how many developers there are out there interested in Open Source Microsoft projects.

I look forward to reading all the great posts here at the Sugar Loungs while watching and learning from a dynamic company like SurgarCRM.

Regards to all,
Mark