SugarCRM continues to innovate and has a significantly better model than Salesforce.com (Sugar sweetens CRM for non-techies, 3 September).

As an early Salesforce customer I loved the solution but for a 20-person deployment it was costing almost $17,000 a year. I replaced Salesforce with SugarCRM’s open-source platform, which we run internally, and spent the savings on marketing and sales. If I wanted to have the solution hosted, I could do it with SugarCRM or an open-source hosting provider.

Long-term, I feel that on-demand software will be important but prices will have to come down.

Mark Johnston