A Q&A with Clint Oram, SugarCRM's Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer

SugarCRM is celebrating its 20th year in business in 2024. Clint Oram, its co-founder and chief strategy officer, recently gave a far-reaching interview with DestinationCRM, answering questions on everything from the impetus behind starting the company to the future for himself and SugarCRM in light of the continuing evolution of AI.

CRM: What was the impetus behind the founding of SugarCRM 20 years ago?

Oram: When, I told family, friends, and my parents that I was quitting my well-paying job to start a company, most of them were wondering: "What are you thinking." When I came out of college, I knew that I was going to start a software company. My Dad had started a software company in the early 1980s. I got to watch him do everything at every stage of growing a business. It would have been an internet company if the internet had existed then.

With my Dad building a company, I got the [entrepreneurial] bug early. I always had a keen sense that I was going to start my own company. In fact, I'm fourth-generation California entrepreneur, something I've always been proud of. For me, it was not a matter of if but a matter of when.

CRM: What were the challenges in starting the company, and how did you overcome them?

Oram: We enjoyed a bit of a Cinderella story. It was a fast start from us; it worked quickly. It wasn't the arduous journey that I've heard about from some other entrepreneurs. We had the right product and the right team at the right time.

Just getting started is the hardest part. You're walking away from your comfort zone. There are the voices in the back of your head that ask: "What are you doing?" Getting past your own fears is the biggest challenge.

In April 2004, the three of us who started the company (Jacob Taylor, John Roberts, and I) went full-time. In June, we raised $2 million in venture funding. In August, we started selling software. In November, we raised our second round of investment funding for $5.75 million. We ended the year with three months of selling software at $250,000 in revenue, which is pretty darn good the first three months. We had a rocket ship.

The hardest part was just convincing myself to leave the comfort of my old job and go out on my own.

CRM: SugarCRM has received industry awards for its mid-market CRM suites (including CRM magazine's 2024 Industry Leader Award). To what do you credit that?

Oram: It's focus. We've been focused on the mid-market for six years. It's been our area of expertise. Most of our customers are mid-market companies. The large enterprise customers we have are our customers because they want to operate like like a smaller, more nimble company. The small customers we have are on their way to becoming mid-market companies. Mid-market companies are ready to invest in CRM initiatives; they're always looking to connect more closely with their customers. That's why they choose Sugar: we help them connect more closely with their customers.

CRM: What do you see as the biggest challenges, opportunities, and threats for CRM providers today, and how does SugarCRM address those?

Oram: The short answer is artificial intelligence.

Beyond AI, there are always macro-economic challenges. They're a real challenge for all companies, especially those looking to drive growth. Our customers are working on those challenges. Economists say a recession is coming, then two months later they say it isn't. That isn't helpful for companies leaning into a growth strategy.

Companies are looking to take full advantage of the employees and the solutions that they have today. They are investing more in the software to do that than ever before. Companies are looking to drive automation to get more efficiency, so macro-economic issues represent opportunities and threats.

But the biggest opportunity, threat, and challenge is how AI is going to transform the CRM industry. We will start living in a world of dedicated customer assistants. I will be able to have discussions with my CRM application and ask it: "Where are my most valuable customers? Where am I losing customers? Where am I gaining customers?" That's going to open up a whole new world of creativity and innovation. It's going to shorten time to creativity. It's as profound as the shift from desktop to mobile or from client-server to a web-based architecture.

CRM: There was a lot of hype about dotcoms in the late 1990s, then a large percentage of those companies failed. What is the difference between that and what is going on with AI today?

Oram: What made AI possible were compute power and the power of the cloud. AI needs a lot of horsepower to make it work. And it needs access to massive amounts of data, which it gets through the cloud, to train models and get accurate predictive results. Generative AI will require a massive next-level investment in the cloud infrastructure around the world.

CRM: How is SugarCRM approaching AI?

Oram: We've been able to kick it off the ground. There is going to be a whole new wave of investment in infrastructure ahead of us, because to get to that level of discussions with your technology assistant is going to require even more compute horsepower, even more cloud horsepower, than we have today. That's why we're resting on the shoulders of giants like Amazon Web Services, which is our cloud infrastructure provider. We have our own proprietary predictive AI technology. We're working directly with OpenAI for generative AI and sentiment AI technology. We've been working with AI for the last 10 years to perfect the models and turn them into reality.

CRM: A naturally flowing question would be what will the next 20 years bring? But as fast as technology moves today, no one can predict the next 20 years. So where do you see the CRM industry in five years?

Oram: In 20 years, I hope to be retired. Five years from now, I will still be working. We have an exciting time ahead of us developing the next generation of business applications that are leveraging generative AI in an entirely new way.