Hey there,

My name is Clint Oram and I'm one of the three founders of the SugarCRM open source project and SugarCRM Inc., the company behind the project. Today I run a few organizations here at SugarCRM; our community programs (most notably SugarForge.org and SugarExchange.com), the customer support department and the training department. I’ve described my charter as making sure that people are successfully using SugarCRM, from the source code up to the user interface.

I was reading Andy’s post where he cataloged some of the accomplishments of the company over the past two years. Truly amazing that something I helped build has taken off so much. But before I digress into thankful musings about how incredible the SugarCRM community is and how much fun it is to work with such a passionate and dedicated team here at the Sugar offices, I guess I should stick to the purpose of this particular forum in the Sugar Lounge and introduce myself.

A little about my career background. Soon after graduating from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo with a CSC degree, I headed to the center of the computing universe, Silicon Valley USA. It was the front-end of the boom and times were good. While at HP during the mid-90’s working in the HP-UX development labs, I had the opportunity to work with some fantastic engineers and really build a solid foundation as a coder and a software engineer. But while we were all arguing which flavor of proprietary Unix was best, along came a little penguin and flipped the operating system market upside down.

I figured it was time to move on to greener pastures. It was 1999 and web-based apps had come into their own. I joined the professional services team at a start-up called Octane Software which was one of the first web-based CRM apps (SilkNet being the other). Over the next several years, Octane was acquired by Epiphany and I moved on from coding to project management and then to product management and marketing. It was in the product marketing organization at Epiphany where I learned how a software company was run and learned the details of the enterprise software market.

But those details began looking rather bleak by 2003. It was in late 2003 and early 2004 that I became convinced the enterprise software market was going to be forever changed by a variety of factors, most notably by open source software.

I’ll save the details for another post, but in early 2004 John, Jacob and I decided it was time to take the plunge and build our own CRM company. But not like anybody had ever done it before. We were convinced (and still are!) commercial open source is the best way to build a product and a company. Well the last two years have certainly been quite eventful and I am thankful every day to our community and customers that support us in building the best business application on the planet.

I am also extremely thankful to my family for supporting me in this crazy idea of building a software company around commercial open source. My wife and two kids are my inspiration and my joy. My time outside of Sugar is filled with watching my daughter take her first steps, teaching my son to swing a golf club, and encouraging my wife as she follows her life dream, working towards her M.D.

I occasionally have time for a round of golf with my friends or a good Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Speculative Fiction book (really enjoyed Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle). But frankly most of my “spare time” is spent working on the fun side of Sugar (writing code, answering questions in the forums, stuff like that).

I’ve got to admit it, I’m a Sugar Addict!

Clint