Introduction
SugarCRM has been the leading provider of open source customer relation management (CRM) solutions for businesses of different sizes in the world. The Sugar Software offers cost effective and more flexible alternative than any proprietary application in order for it to quickly adapt to any working environment. The open source software architecture of SugarCRM enables companies of all sizes to customize and integrate all business transactions in a very easy way for building and maintaining more income-generating relationships. The deployment options offered by SugarCRM include on-premise, on-demand and appliance-based solutions that are designed for suiting the needs of customers with regards to integration, security and configuration.
A Brief Historical Overview of the Company
Founders Clint Oram, John Roberts and Jacob Taylor launched the company on April 1, 2004 to introduce an open source project to SourceForge. There were only 10 employees when the company started. 149 dollars per user per year was charged for a set of support services in accompanying the free open source software. The first 2 million dollars financing was raised by the company in August 2004. By September of the same year, the free Sugar Open Source was downloaded in more than 25 thousand copies from SugarForge. Board member Larry Augustin was appointed by the company as its interim chief executive officer following the departure of founder John Roberts in May 2009. In July 2010, the company released the SugarCRM version 6 with new features including easier installation, a PHP application and better mobile device integration.
The Business Model of SugarCRM
The business model of SugarCRM is tiered in three. The company provides the basic open source solution application and sells the Sugar professional version including more enhanced features such as Microsoft Outlook Integration. It then offers the enterprise version of Sugar with disconnected mobile support, support for Oracle, customer self-service as well as system integration functionalities for businesses aiming for achieving full customer relation management software potential.
Sugar Editions
The CRM software editions of SugarCRM include Sugar Enterprise, Sugar Professional and Sugar Community Edition which originated on the Lamp stack of MySQL, Apache, Linus and PHP. The can also adapt other platforms that are capable of delivering PHP, MySQL and Apache such as
Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.
Why Sugar
The SugarCRM software is designed to offer devoted hosting abilities through Sugar On-Demand that handles maintenance and upgrades. It is made for businesses that find comfort with housing their customer data outside of their firewall without a support from an information technology staff for managing their CRM systems. All the advantages of hosted applications are provided to customers with the added flexibility in migrating to an appliance or on-site solution from a hosted service. A more secure environment is offered by Sugar On-Demand compared to other hosted CRM software solutions because there is an independent management of application, data and API.
All hosted CRM software may not meet the needs of a business because of the growing complexity in terms of business processes. The Sugar Sofware is the only CRM software on the CRM market that provides a seamless transition to an on-site, open source deployment.
