In a talent grab that also takes a dig at rival CRM software provider Salesforce.com, Inc. SugarCRM, Inc. has snatched up the intellectual property and other assets of Hothouse Labs, Inc. the San Francisco-based maker of the Stitch mobile app. SugarCRM also hired eight employees of the developer and promptly discontinued the app, which runs on the Salesforce.com platform.

While Stitch is no more, the technology that created it is bound for SugarCRM’s namesake Sugar platform. Stitch is similar in concept to Google Now, the Android application that continually offers up information based upon what it thinks is relevant to the user at any given time. SugarCRM sees that capability taking CRM beyond its sales automation roots to a higher level of personal productivity.

“Historically CRM systems have been about acquiring data; Stitch is about prompting and guiding what to do next,” said Larry Augustin, SugarCRM CEO, in an interview with SiliconANGLE.

CRM has also historically targeted sales management with a focus on tracking quotas, pipelines and sales rep performance. In contrast, Augustine said Stitch is a productivity tool for individual salespeople. “When sales reps are talking to the customer they’re not thinking about forecast and pipeline. They’re thinking about how to help the customer,” he said.

Such functionality could help expand SugarCRM’s appeal outside of sales operations, Augustin said. “We see this technology applying to anyone in the business whose job it is to talk to customers,” he said, ticking off customer service, support, marketing and product management as potential targets.

The price of the acquisition wasn’t revealed. Stitch has raised $3.3 million since its founding in 2013. The company employed 14 people.

SugarCRM expects to incorporate Stitch’s machine learning functionality into its core application, but what that will look like and when it will appear are still undetermined, Augustin said.

The company may be feeling some pressure from investors for a liquidity event. It has raised $104 million in seven rounds since 2004, according to Crunchbase. That’s an unusually long incubation period for a startup.

Sugar claims an impressive customer base of 1.5 million users in 120 countries. Its core Sugar platform started life as an open source project, but when version 7 was released a year ago, the company said it would no longer provide free open source editions.

Amid a broad migration of the CRM software market to software as a service (SaaS) SugarCRM has continued to generate most of its sales from on-premise installations, Augustin said. Sugar is also available as a hosted option from SugarCRM and its partners, but on–premise sales are keeping pace with the SaaS business, he noted.

Read the Q&A interview with SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin.

Photo via Pixabay