This review applies to all companies interested in implementation of open source on-demand or on-premise solution for sales force automation, marketing and support using SugarCRM.com

Our Recommendations

Our recommendations are coming from the many types of consultants: business, technology, partners, etc. Most of their recommendations are placed in our internal CRM Center of Excellence. Below are a few pros and cons on using SugarCRM.com software:

Pros:

• Aug 21, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) – SugarCRM was named the winner of CRM magazine's 2008 Market Awards in the open source category.
• At the same time SugarCRM was also named a leader in the small business suite category.
• SugarCRM offers a Web-based human interaction management platform, suited for companies of all sizes in any industry.
• SugarCRM also allows businesses to design and build custom applications in support of business processes outside the CRM, example: HR and PR functionality.
• SugarCRM's open source architecture allows companies customize and integrate customer-facing business processes
• SugarCRM offers several deployment options, including on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based solutions

Cons:

• Customization can be expensive
• Personal Identification Information could be at risk

Analysis

SugarCRM.com Market Place Review

SugarCRM is a pioneer in the market for commercial open source applications. Over the past few years, its CRM software has been downloaded 4 million times and translated into 75 languages, and the company has more than 3,000 paying customers. In May, the company introduced a data center edition for service providers and large enterprises.

• Company has 160 employees and just raised over $46 million in venture capital
• Company makes its money both through support contracts and by offering hosted services
• Company has about 150 partners around the globe. Today company competes against the Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Oracle.

SugarCRM.com Product Overview

The open source solution is available in on-site and hosted editions—and the recently-introduced Data Center Edition allows ISPs to offer their own hosted versions of the software to their end users. SugarCRM's suite consists of: Sugar Community Edition, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise. Sugar Community Edition is available under the GPL v3 at SugarForge, SugarCRM's community development Web site. Both Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise can be deployed on-site, or delivered over the Web via the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Sugar 5.0 supports sales-force automation (contact and account management), for example), marketing automation (lead management, analytics), and customer support (case management, bug tracking). The platform also includes collaboration, project management, an Outlook plug-in, and management tools. For companies that prefer to manage the software themselves, Sugar 5.0 can be downloaded or purchased as an appliance. It's also available as a hosted application for $40 per user per month.

Notable features in Sugar 5.0 include an Ajax e-mail client, a variety of new dashboards, fine-grained access control, and a tool for creating custom modules. The recently released Sugar Data Center Edition lets enterprises and partners deploy multiple Sugar instances and manage them from a central console. It includes design templates, one-click provisioning, and the ability to monitor usage across instances. Stack installers make it easier to deploy Sugar on Solaris and OpenSolaris.

The data center edition

Last month SugarCRM launched Sugar DCE (Data Center Edition). DCE is systems management software for managing multiple instance of SugarCRM that was developed in house to manage SugarCRM own on demand environments. This would effectively give partners more control over service delivery to their customers.

Sugar DCE also allows resellers to modify the offering as needed to meet their customers' specific needs. SugarCRM partners customizing and adding value to Sugar by translating it, or by making a manufacturing vertical or retail vertical. With Sugar Data Center Edition, partners can clone those instances and go to market much more rapidly to their customer segments.

The pricing for Sugar DCE is reasonable. SugarCRM charging partners $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 per year to use it, depending on number of users and number of customers.

A free Community Edition of Sugar is available under GPL version 3. Resources for developers and users include downloads, forums, and the SugarExchange online marketplace for extensions and more.

SugarCRM Pricing

SugarCRM offers different features sets in each of their three editions, Sugar Community Edition, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise. As you can see in the table below, these editions differ in features and functionality, as well as in license and cost:

As a pioneer in the open source application space, SugarCRM has a dual license approach to commercializing their offering. In order to acquire advanced features, organizations must invest in one of two commercial editions. We have found customers easily understand and are willing to pay for the commercial products if the business requirements are such that commercial features are needed. We have equally found that it is difficult to determine which edition will meet an organization’s needs by simply determining the number of users. There are businesses with five users that require the SugarCRM commercial editions, while in other cases the needs for deployments with 100 users can be met with the open source Sugar Community Edition.