OPEN SOURCE BLOGROLL

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SugarCRM progresses towards IPO
August 29, 2007

SugarCRM’s CEO John Roberts has been doing the rounds as part of the company’s beta release of Sugar 5.0, outlining the company’s financial progress to date as it heads towards an eventual IPO.

According to Reuters, the company expects revenue to double to $15m this year, and it was cash flow positive in its most recent quarter.

These are both signs that the company could follow MySQL towards an open source IPO. That is precisely what the company is intending to do, according to Roberts.

"Now we're at a point where we're acquiring customers extremely fast," he told CNET. "We've gone from 'we hope to (go public)' to 'we absolutely are on track.'"

The company has a couple of revenue targets, according to the VAR guy: $25m and $100m. Given current growth rates the first should be achievable in the next year, but the second will be a tougher nut to crack, not least because the growth figures reported make it an attractive acquisition target.

For more on the new release, see Angela Eager's interview with Clint Oram, SugarCRM co-founder and European general manager here.

Incidentally, I hate to say I told you so, but I was just reminded of this sentence from the MySQL post referenced above:

"Others that might be heading for acquisition or even IPO in 2007 or 2008 could include XenSource, SugarCRM, Zimbra, Levanta, JasperSoft, Linux Networx, MontaVista... we could be in a for a busy few years."

I didn't think they'd do it in that order...