CRM solutions company SugarCRM Inc. has acquired Stitch, a personal assistant app for salespeople that “helps them work smarter.” Stitch offers technologies that increase individual productivity by making personalized recommendations to users based on an integrated analysis of data in various communication systems, including email, calendar and CRMs. Stitch capabilities will be integrated into future releases of Sugar to enhance its mobile innovation.

“We’ve made Sugar an indispensable tool for customer-facing employees,” said Larry Augustin, SugarCRM CEO. “Sugar gives them the right information, when they need it, even before they ask. Incorporating Stitch will make Sugar an even smarter, better-informed customer relationship management system, and put information at mobile users’ fingertips no matter where they are.”

SiliconANGLE recently talked with Augustin about SugarCRM’s partnership strategies and why they are central to the company’s success.

The importance of partnerships to startups

Q: It seems SugarCRM’s ecosystem is critical to your company’s success. What’s your philosophy when seeking partners, and what are the challenges in integrating technologies from different companies?

Augustin: As a startup, you can’t do everything yourself, so you have to be a partner and work with other people. When you talk to a customer, we’re going to have three or four other companies helping with that customer. We recognize that we have our expertise — we know CRM. But we’re not going to do all the tactical pieces of that. So we have to seek out partners to fill in the pieces. As a startup, you have to have friends to help you compete, and they’ll have their areas of expertise too. Partnerships are hugely important to us.

Sixty percent of our business goes through a reseller channel. That’s different for startups. The typical method is to bypass the channel. I like being contrarian with these things. If everyone’s off to the right, you can find an opening on the left. We have a model that supports the reseller channel. The VAR channel has been a huge success for us — helps us leverage the business. Finding those places where you can find partners is hugely important when you’re a startup.

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Q: In 2011, you told SiliconANGLE of your desire and the challenges around hiring developers. Is this still a priority position for you to fill, and have things gotten any easier in the past few years?

Augustin: Hiring tech development is still one of the great challenges for anyone in the industry. It’s a competitive market, and there’s not enough tech people trained to fill the demand today. We struggle here to find enough people with engineering skill sets to fill demand. If you look at employment figures for the industry, there’s far more demand than available talent. And yet you see some areas of underemployment.

I see it as an education challenge. There are jobs, but those available require a lot of training and education. There’s got to be a way to retrain or educate people to fill roles we have available. No, it hasn’t gotten any easier, and I don’t see it getting easier anytime soon!

Fitting into the Big Data market

Q: SugarCRM recently integrated with NetSuite for data-sharing. Where does your company fit into the larger Big Data market, where practitioners in particular are posed to make the most of data-driven management tools and visualization methods?

Augustin: The thing about what we do with CRM — it really sits at the center of the front office. Everything someone does in the business integrates or flows through what we do. Whether it’s starting out with marketing automation … through the selling cycle, post-sale and product delivery, all those interactions are recorded and mapped with Sugar. There is a huge amount of data in that system, all about the customer prospect. Because of that, we have to integrate with a lot of things in the same way everything in the back office integrates with ERP.

On the front office side, you may have marketing automation integrate with sugar. We have to have an open architecture to support all those systems. There’s a huge opportunity for analytics, which we offer, but we also partner with other vendors, like IBM and Cognos, to provide analytics to the customer.

There’s a third angle to that — data privacy. Because we have all that info about the customer, one of the things we’ve done is create a highly secure cloud service. But we give customers the option of installing the system on premise, which is a contrarian view because everything’s going to the cloud.

Having the data inside your own firewall is important, and you see a mix with us. You hear about hybrid cloud — we have a lot of customers concerned with data privacy, and often data analysis is best done inside the firewall, especially as we go international. I don’t see the world going to one cloud. There will be a mix of on premise, private and public clouds, and they’ll all have to connect.

Bonus life lessons

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Q: How do you hope the tech community will benefit from the work being done with the University of Notre Dame’s research Institute, where you serve on the advisory board?

I love helping young entrepreneurs create and build companies.  I became an engineer because I love building things.  In many ways building companies isn’t that different from creating the next great product.  It’s still about building something new that’s never been done before.

I’m the Graduate Studies and Research Advisory Council for the University of Notre Dame.  Notre Dame has invested heavily in entrepreneurship programs, and aims to enable the next generation of entrepreneurs with the skills to build great companies. It’s an opportunity to give back to the community by helping build programs to train the next generation of entrepreneurs.  Notre Dame has been ranked #1 four years in a row in Bloomberg Businessweek‘s ranking of Best Undergraduate Business Schools.  The Gigot Center for Entrepreneurship at Notre Dame offers a number of programs to support entrepreneurs.  Notre Dame also built Innovation Park (IPND) as a start-up incubator and it’s done so well that they are now planning to expand the facility.

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Q: You’re a fellow midwesterner – if the Midwest were a gadget, what would it be?

It’s not a gadget, and pardon the plug for our business, but we have a lot of SugarCRM customers in the Midwest. I think it’s because we share a lot of Midwestern values. Some of our competitors are more flashy, but once you get past the flash we deliver a better product at a better price.  We’re a fantastic value, and Midwesterners appreciate hard work and value.  They don’t have a lot of patience for show over substance.

So when I think of the Midwest, I think of hard-working, practical and people that value substance over style.

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Q: I hear you’re quite the gym rat – do you think about CRM while you work out?

I don’t think anyone has ever asked me that before! Short answer: I definitely solve problems while working out.  Intense physical exercise is a great way to clear and focus the mind.  Your body is producing adrenaline, which raises your alertness and helps you focus.  I’ll often reason through a particularly difficult problem while exercising.  I do every kind of training: high intensity, suspension, core, strength, etc.  Twice a week I do spin classes which I find are the best for problem solving.  Your mind is working through a particularly difficult problem and that helps you ignore the pain in your legs.

Image source: sugarcrm.com