SugarCRM Head Up In the Cloud

Searchcrm had a very interesting interview with SugarCRM’s CEO, John Roberts. Roberts talks about the current situation and the future of the company, and focuses on 3 subjects: the economic slowdown, the cloud, and mobile. Not surprisingly, these are 3 of the hottest trends in the current business application realm: open source and cloud computing as the most viable option for business software  in a slowing economy, and the future of business user interaction - the smartphone.

As was reported by Open Source ERP Guru, the entire open source business application industry is experiencing an impressive growth. Roberts explains the trend:

We’re seeing a big shift here to commercial open source as a more efficient and innovative method [of delivering applications]. This recession is certainly highlighting our value proposition versus our competitors. We’ve seen our product surge since Q3 of last year.

The big premise of commercial open source solutions is finally sinking into the minds of CIOs, who are faced with a very attractive option: get a fully functional, mature ,well tested CRM or ERP solution, without having to pay any license fees. “My CEO and CFO are gonna love me for that” , that’s what their thinking. That mindset is the wind powering the turbine of open source business applications recent growth.

The cloud has been around for many years, but the question was (and still remains) - how do business applications live so high, when CIO and IT people like to have their servers nearby, where they can control the application, the data, the servers? SalesForce.com took CRM out of the company’s server room and flew it right up to the cloud. That made things much easier for SugarCRM, who are generating 30% of their revenue from hosted SugarCRM instances. Numerous hosting providers offer their own SugarCRM services to other customers. Since there are so many services out there, in the cloud, integrating them into SugarCRM provides a lot of added value to customers:

As a customer, it’s great that you get these great data information services, and we’re partners with a lot, including Hoover’s, Jigsaw and LinkedIn, and others that are releasing their public APIs. At the same time, SugarCRM as a code base — because it is open — people are building all sorts of different cloud connectors to different information providers across the cloud.

A couple of days ago we wrote a post on SugarCRM mobile services. Roberts mentions the Sugar integration we discuss with the iPhone and Blackberry. Currently, solutions are available from 3rd part software vendors, but Sugar version 5.2 will have full support for these devices and other smartphones, according to Roberts. We look forward to testing this integration.

February 22, 2009 · Filed Under SugarCRM

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2 Responses to “SugarCRM Head Up In the Cloud”

  1. Dan Waldron on February 22nd, 2009 1:16 pm

    Can you tell me who did your layout? I’ve been looking for one kind of like yours. Thank you.

  2. osscrmguru on February 24th, 2009 3:02 am

    Hi Dan,
    If you are refering to my blogs’ layout, take a look at the links at the bottom of this page. The name of this specific one is Vertigo 3 columns.

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