This week is SugarCon, SugarCRM’s users and developers conference in San Jose, CA. A pretty amazing event that the Sugar folks have pulled together – 300 attendees gathered for 3 days at the Dolce Hayes Mansion to hear from SugarCRM, their partners and an impressive panel of keynote speakers: Jonathan Schwartz, Larry Augustine, Daniel Lyons (the Fake Steve Jobs), Paul Greenberg, etc.

As a technology and business partner of SugarCRM, Talend is sponsoring this conference. We presented two sessions: Vincent described how we used our own data integration technology to integrate our own instance of SugarCRM (yes, we even use it internally) with our other mission critical systems. And I was on stage yesterday to present why open source data integration is a must have in any SugarCRM deployment.

Among the highlights, in no specific order:

• Lots of interest from SugarCRM customers and professional services people for data integration.John Roberts’ opening keynote started with a guitar solo from Martin Schneider, SugarCRM’s Sr Manager of Product Marketing – to show that SugarCRM is not your typical software vendor
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• Still in this keynote, John showed a screenshot of SugarExchange showing one of the most popular projects on it: Talend Open Studio (see photo on the right)
• The special event at the Testarossa Winery in Los Gatos featured a live band of SugarCRM employees – including Martin Schneider and John Roberts. Not enough light for the iPhone camera unfortunately.

The event is closing at midday today, so far it’s been a very worthwhile conference for us. Our partnership with SugarCRM is definitely a great one for all the parties – SugarCRM, Talend, and our joint customers.

Yves