SugarCon 2013 Day 1 - Synopsis

Sugarcon 2013 opens with some strong riffs. Guitar riffs that is, care of the SugarCRM band, playing in the same ballroom as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame plays their introduction ceremonies here at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

Unfortunately one can not go to the basement, they have 3, where the Presidential train and "secret" railway station lies. Read more here.

Larry, Clint, Lila rock the house with Sugar7 details around social and collaboration efforts, mobile client improvements, inline editing and more.  The theme for this year is:

Every Customer, Every User, Every Time

The belief is there is an under served population of workers who should be using CRM and SugarCRM wants to grab that market. This led to a keynote that was one of the best I have heard in recent months.

Paul Greenberg, His book, CRM at the Speed of Light: Social CRM Strategy, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers, is in its fourth edition and been called “the bible of the CRM industry”, gave an excellent keynote which left many of us in the audience wishing he could continue through lunch and afterwards. When I caught up with him at the evening event he said he would have spent lunch with us if we asked. One opportunity lost, but I had a great discussion with him and look forward to getting the slides from his session.

Paul reminded us that it is just as much about what customers want from us, as what we want from them. I could spend paragraphs on his session.

Back to SugarCon. IBM is a Diamond sponsor and has a mini theater at their stand where I have been doing a mini session on how VoiceRite integrates SugarCRM and IBM Connections.

The vendors here are very into social, marketing automation and analytics. It is all about CRM after all. For the estimated, by me, 1,200 attendees, there should be enough for everyone to find something they are missing.

Sessions in the afternoon, an average of 5 sessions running at the same time, were all well attended and provided best practices, experiences, coding examples and beyond.

The evening event was held on a rooftop bar in NYC and luckily it was a beautiful night, no clouds and reasonable temperatures prevailed. We had an excellent view of the Empire State Building and the skyline from north to south.

Looking forward to today's sessions and my own session at 3:40 in the Morgan room.