Novell Selects SugarCRM’s Sugar Suite for New Market Start Program
Commercial Open Source CRM Application Will Be Jointly Marketed by Novell
Cupertino, CA (September 12, 2005) –
SugarCRM Inc. today announced its selection as one of the first open source application partners for Novell’s® Market Start program, designed to make the low cost and easy back-office integration benefits of open source and open standards-based enterprise applications easily accessible to small and mid-sized businesses. SugarCRM’s Sugar Suite is the first customer relationship management (CRM) software to be selected for the program, reflecting the application’s status as the market’s most successful commercial open source enterprise platform.
SugarCRM’s participation in the Market Start program will broaden the visibility of Sugar Suite through joint marketing efforts between SugarCRM and Novell, as well as go-to-market activities executed through select Novell channel partners. The initiative will also expand the pool of open source developers familiar with SugarCRM’s products by exposing Novell developers to the platform, paving the way for further enhancements.
Through its Market Start affiliation, Sugar Suite will belong to an ecosystem of open source applications being promoted in conjunction with Novell’s open source operating infrastructure to aid companies looking for open source alternatives for their business software. The Novell program will minimize implementation and deployment risks for these companies by providing a hand-selected group of reliable open source enterprise applications and, in some cases, offering support through Novell’s own help desk.
“We selected SugarCRM for our Market Start program because they provide a proven open source and open standards alternative in the small and medium sized business marketplace,” said John Beuchert, director of the Market Start program at Novell. “With their early success, they will help us prove the viability of the open source model and further our goal of accelerating open source adoption in the business community.”
“Novell’s embrace of Linux has made the company a leading proponent of the open source movement, and their Market Start program is an important step in helping spread the open source gospel,” said John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. “Our participation in the program will allow us to reach a much wider audience by leveraging Novell’s brand and credibility to demonstrate the value of open source applications in the enterprise.”
Now in Version 3.5, SugarCRM’s Sugar Suite offers the full range of CRM functionality required to manage customer interactions, utilizing a user-friendly interface that eliminates the complexity of traditional CRM applications. The availability of the source code makes it possible to easily integrate the SugarCRM platform with back-office applications to ensure that key customer data can be shared between the two systems.
Sugar Open Source Edition is available for free download at www.sugarforge.org. The more advanced Sugar Professional Edition and new Sugar Enterprise Edition are available at www.sugarcrm.com for $239 and $449 per user per year, respectively, including 12 months of application updates; installation assistance; trouble ticketing; global weekday email-based technical support (9AM-6PM Pacific time); and full production support including patch and fix distributions.
Sugar Professional and Enterprise Editions are also available in a hosted version, Sugar On-Demand, that eliminates in-house software installation and maintenance for $39.95 per user monthly; and on Sugar Cube, a ready-to-deploy stand-alone server that has Sugar Professional and all supporting applications installed and optimized.
Sugar Suite will be available for demonstrations at Novell BrainShare Barcelona 2005 from September 11-15 in Barcelona, Spain.
About SugarCRM
SugarCRM provides commercial open source customer relationship management applications for companies of all sizes worldwide. The SugarCRM platform is available in installed, hosted and appliance-based versions that offer the full range of CRM functionality. The company is headquartered in Cupertino, California, and was founded in 2004 by three Silicon Valley CRM professionals with over 20 years of experience spanning marketing, application design and engineering. For more information, call (408) 454-6900, email contact@sugarcrm.com, or visit http://www.sugarcrm.com
Novell is a registered trademark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. *Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Source: SugarCRM