John Roberts (pictured), CEO and co- founder of SugarCRM Inc. will be making a presentation at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo on August 9 in San Francisco called "Wearing Two Hats: Managing a Business That Offers Open Source and Commercial Products."

The discussion will revolve around the challenges of satisfying the open source community while also building a business that can generate revenue using open source projects as the foundation.

SugarCRM is one of the most successful commercial open source enterprise application vendors, with over 300,000 downloads and 250 paying customers for its professional edition since the first product was released in July 2004.

Last week Roberts gave a presentation at OSCON called "The DNA of a Commercial Open Source Software Business Model," where he explained the reasons behind the heavy demand for commercial open source software and discussed how vendors can provide successful mainstream solutions that compete with the existing proprietary market, based on the strategies used at SugarCRM.

As one of the three founders of SugarCRM, Roberts is a pioneer in the open source enterprise application market and an early proponent of open source as the only viable contender to the established proprietary CRM solutions. His background includes 11 years in the enterprise CRM space with strong business, marketing, business development and product management experience. Prior to co-founding SugarCRM, he held product management and sales engineering positions at E.piphany, BroadVision, Baan/Aurum Software and IBM.

SugarCRM will also be exhibiting. LinuxWorld Conference & Expo runs August 8-11 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For further nformation see: http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/about/events.html.