Last Monday (March 24th) Aaron and I traveled to San Francisco to attend OSBC(Open Source Business Conference). The conference was put together very well and pulled in a fairly good crowd from companies such as Microsoft, MySQl, SugarCRM and many more.

My first day at OSBC was particularly interesting. I attended a great series of panels/speakers that addressed the status of Open Source progress at largely proprietary companies. Most of the discussions, for obvious reasons, were directed at Microsoft and their current stance towards Open Source. Despite their fairly intolerant history towards Open Source there have been many recent successes within the company targeted at embracing the Open Source movement and even assisting and enabling it.

The last panel of the day was a VC panel which gave us some insight from both the VC and the entrepreneurs perspective. The panel included Jeff Clavier from SoftTech VC, Ann Windblad from Hummer-Windblad, Brian Gentile from JasperSoft and Aaron Fulkerson from MindTouch. Aaron addressed questions about the appropriate time to accept VC and also what you should look for as when narrowing down your VC search which apparently related to most of the audience.

Aaron was also asked to participate on a Social Enterprise Software Panel where he discussed MindTouch’s approach to connecting web 2.0 services on a single platform. In particular he talked about how MindTouch is enabling IT admins and end users to organize data and systems in a way that allows them to better achieve their objectives

I also had an opportunity to spend some time in the evening with other attendees. On Monday I boarded a 50 something foot catamaran and sailed around San Francisco bay courtesy of the SugarCRM team. Nice Job guys! In addition to the great cruise we were also given SugarCRM sailing jackets to keep us warm. Later on Aaron introduced me to the SugarCRM CEO John Roberts so I thanked him personally for my awesome new schwag.

Perhaps the most valuable part of the trip was the feedback I received from the other attendees. To put it best, everyone was ecstatic! It was very rewarding to see how everyone welcomed the MindTouch team and how we seemed to be a part of so many panels.

Overall the conference was a great success. I left with some great new contacts from a group of terrific companies including BitRock, Linagora, Enomaly, ProcessMaker, Xenoss and others. We also spent a fair bit of time with Mark Hinkle who offered great feedback on our efforts. I’ll be back next year for sure!

Damien
DamienH[at]mindtouch.com

categories: MindTouch |