UPDATED 08:00 EDT / MAY 10 2016

NEWS

SugarCRM has big analytics and mobile plans, but not open source

SugarCRM Inc. is setting the table for what it says will be a major series of announcements at its SugarCon 2016 conference in San Francisco next month with an updated version of its CRM platform that improves information access for customer-facing employees, enhances search functionality, provides better facilities for writing and sharing articles internally and expands lead conversion tools.

The big news is expected next month, however, when SugarCRM plans to detail its roadmap for integrating the mobile technologies it picked up with the acquisition of Hothouse Labs Inc. early last year and the analytic capabilities it got when it acquired Contastic Inc. two months ago. SugarCRM Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Clint Oram wouldn’t divulge details of the upcoming announcements other than to say that they will involved “leveraging information that’s not in your database,”

“SugarCRM 7.7 makes your life easier, better and faster, but it’s really a setup for what will be announcing in June at SugarCon,” he said.

One term you won’t be hearing a lot at SugarCon, by the way, is “open source.” Sugar CRM made its reputation as the most popular open source platform of its kind, but the company quietly stopped open-sourcing new versions after version 7 nearly three years ago. The company still offers a community edition for free download, but it’s positioning that version as a developer training platform rather than a full-blown CRM suite.

“We’re not releasing any updates to our open source edition,” Oram said. “As the market has matured, the way you build your technology is a lot less relevant than it was 10 years ago. We are putting all of our efforts into our commercial products.” He noted that SugarCRM 7 “continues to be the top open-source CRM download.”

SugarCRM has raised more than $104 million, according to Crunchbase, and it appears to be making good progress establishing itself as a solid on-premise alternative to Salesforce.com Inc. Oram said the company is expanding beyond its traditional strength in the small and midsize business (SMB) market to court large enterprises, and has recently signed up two of the country’s largest banks as well as IBM and another large technology company. Selling points include speed of deployment and flexibility to run SugarCRM on premise, in the cloud or as a hybrid.

Despite Salesforce.com’s powerful share of mind, CRM is not shifting in large scale to the cloud, Oram noted. “Pretty much every one of our accounts of more than 1,000 seats is not running in our cloud,” he said, citing integration and compliance concerns. While acknowledging that Salesforce.com is considered in every deal the company encounters, he doesn’t consider it a goal to displace the cloud rival. “We do a fantastic business replacing [Oracle’s] Siebel and homegrown solutions,” he said. “We also do a lot of business helping companies move off of spreadsheets.”

The addition of custom tags in version 7.7 allows users to tag any record in the application and to share the classification with others. Tags are also integrated into the new search mechanism, which enables results to be filtered by tags. Each query searches across all Sugar standard and custom modules, matches any text or number stored in the application and prioritizes frequently viewed records in the result set. Lead management features include enhancements that better highlight key quote and forecast information and support Sugar Logic in the Sugar Customer Portal.

SugarCRM pricing ranges from $40 per user per month to $150 per user per month with minimum contract requirements.


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