Open Source Weblog

SugarCRM reported 1,000 paying customers and over one million downloads, while JasperSoft reported 5,000 customers and two million downloads, as well as 20,000 deployments.

One million downloads is a figure to shout about, but with only 1,000 paying customers, that’s a conversion rate of just 0.1%. JasperSoft is doing better, although two million downloads and 5,000 customers is a conversion rate of just 0.25%.

These figures are not unusual – according to this data MySQL had 5,000 paying customers and six million users in 2005, a ratio of 0.083% - slightly worse than the one in 1,000 quoted by Jason Maynard of Credit Suisse First Boston in June.

Meanwhile Marc Fleury, senior vice president and general manager of Red Hat's JBoss division, revealed in an August blog posting that “on average we only monetize 3% of our user base for JBoss and roughly 10% for Linux.”

As Matt Asay has noted, this conversion rate is likely to increase over time, but for the likes of SugarCRM, JasperSoft and MySQL, not is the time to be proactive – a good product in itself will not be enough.

“The secret sauce, then, for JBoss and all successful open source companies is an exceptional product. Next, be sure to build momentum for your brand so that conversion rates (and sales) rise even as downloads level off,” wrote Asay in July.

Hence MySQL’s revamping of its MySQL Enterprise subscription offering to include MySQL Network Monitoring and Advisory Services.