The SugarCRM Offerings Portfolio
SugarCRm is a very popular open source CRM solution. As a natural evolution of its offerings protfolio, Sugar is offering much more than just a CRM application. We will preview its most interesting offerings in this post. An in-depth analysis of each offering will follow.
Core Application - SugarCRM Suite
Sugar started as a stand-alone PHP application. You could download the php code, untar it to a directory on your Apache server (bundled with PHP and Mysql) and presto - you got yourself a working CRM solution. That was, and still is, the core of Sugar’s offering - a fully functional Customer Relationship Management application.
Current version of SugarCRM is 5.0 . It is offered in several editions - Community, Professional and Enterprise. You can still download and use it for free ( the community edition).
Sugar Services
Sugar, like many other open source business applications, offers services around its core CRM application. These services include installation, customization, technical support, migration and upgrades, to name a few.
Sugar divides its service offering to 3 main categories - support services, implementation services and professional services. I think this services schema is a bit too complicated.
If you plan on using any of them, I would suggest you to thoroughly research and understand what you get for your buck. Support services are a must for any production implementation of a CRM application, open source or proprietary, and nobody knows Sugar better than the people who develop it.
Sugar On-Demand
One of the main reasons for the success of Sugar is the fact that it is a native web application. It is built on top of the very popular LAMP stack. Offering Sugar in a CRM SaaS model (hosted software) is a natural evolution of Sugar. I predict that more and more CRM customers will go for Sugar’s CRM SaaS model.
SugarExchange
Microsoft Windows is a very successful software. Why was Windows such a huge success when it first came out? Microsoft realized, earlier than anyone else, that if you write software, it needs to be easily extensible. For an operating system vendor, that means it should be easy to develop software that run on your OS.
Sugar (and other CRM application vendors) realized that in order to grow faster than possible organically, it needs to open up its application and promote 3rd party add-on development around its core CRM application. The developers extend Sugar’s core CRM functionality, making Sugar a viable option for a wide range of customers.
That is what SugarExchange is all about - it’s a marketplace for 3rd party add-on applications written specifically for SugarCRM, enhancing its core functionality with features such advanced reporting, mobile connectivity, integration components and more.
I plan to cover Sugar’s entire offering portfolio in details, so stay tuned by registering to our RSS feed.
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