SugarCRM Upgrades, Integrates With IBM sMash

In this weeks’ sugarCRM news roundup, we learn about Sugar’s plans going forward with versions 5.5 and 6.0 from Clint Oram, SugarCRM co-founder and vice president of product management, and present IBM’s Web 2.0 development platform sMash integration with SugarCRM.

Marketing campaign and partner management enhancements

SugarCRM 6.0 is coming up next year, and plans for that release have been detailed by Clint Oram, who founded sugarCRM over 4 years ago, and currently holds the position of of V.P. of product development. SugarCRM 6.0 is going to provide enhancements in two area:

  1. Marketing campaign management: as more and more people do business on the web, larger amounts of ad dollars go to online ad campaigns. It becoming an integral part of any marketing strategy. Sugar plans to improve manageability of multi-step campaigns, in which potential customers are engaged in several ways, including phone, email and web advertisement.
  2. Partner portal: networking is everything these days, and developing strong relationship with your partner network is crucial to the success of any business. SugarCRM 6.0 will include a dedicated partners portal, allowing your partners to login securely to your SugarCRM system and access relevant information.

According to Oram, the next sugarCRM release, 5.5, will include mainly platform enhancements rather than new functionality.

IBM - SugarCRM Integration

When one of the largest IT companies in the world wants to integrate with your application, you must be doing something right. IBM announced that it’s Web 2.0 platform, sMash, would be able to run SugarCRM and enable developers to easily build composite applications on top of it. Such composite applications, or business mashups, can integrate SugarCRM with an ERP solution, for example. Another important enhancement the sMAsh integration provides is the ability to build and execute workflows on top of SugarCRM. It would be interesting to see Mashups including SugarCRM, especially with ERP systems. A robust composite application, pulling data from multiple backend systems, including Sugar, can make it easier for the IT team to sell SugarCRM inside the enterprise, as users don’t like multiple applications, each with their own UI.

March 19, 2009 · Filed Under SugarCRM

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