SugarCRM – Hundreds and hundreds served

Okay, so it doesn’t hold a torch to the infamous McDonald’s claim, but SugarCRM Inc. public relations representatives were as happy as a hamburglar with a handful of Big Mac to announce a doubling of its commercial customer base in the past half-year. The list of SugarCRM customers accumulated since the first release of Sugar CRM in September 2004 passed six hundred members in May. Public relations at the Cupertino, Calif.-based SugarCRM Inc. proudly proclaims that such attainment of customers so quickly “demonstrates a rapidly accelerating adoption rate” while providing SugarCRM with “a larger customer base than many proprietary CRM vendors” and that their customer base in itself no less than “marks a new milestone in the acceptance of open source enterprise applications by the business community.”

All grandiose claims and modesty aside, however, the SugarCRM record is impressive. Sugar Professional has made its presence well felt in the small- and mid-sized business market with their Sugar Professional and in the large market with Sugar Enterprise. Licenses for their software are available in packages of five to nine thousand seats. SugarCRM application deployment can be via installation, host or appliance. Some 500,000-plus users have downloaded Sugar Open Source, the core SugarCRM (and free!) application. Over two hundred extensions and other enhancements have been contributed by the development community and have been downloaded more than one million times in forty languages from Sugar Open Source online development forum SugarForge.org. And, along the way to SugarCRM’s Sugar Suite’s fourth generation, Sugar gained a reputation as the world’s leading provider of commercial open source CRM software for companies of all sizes.

As a demonstration of both its wide-reaching share of the market and adaptable applicability of its forum, company PR touts partner firms on its website such as international industrial product manufacturer The 3Sixty Group, which centralized CRM activity in linking fifty countries’, five offices’ and two continents’ worth of business with SugarCRM’s web-based architecture; information security consulting firm Prevalent Networks, which integrated the Sugar CRM application and added critical capabilities such as tracking of maintenance contracts; and public safety systems provider InterAct Public Safety Systems, who recently added key ERP and customer service system integrations that automatically push hardware purchases, service histories and other information to the SugarCRM database.

"Our CRM platform continues to be the most successful commercial open source enterprise application in the industry,” proudly says CEO / chairman / co-founder John Roberts, “and it is paving the way for a fundamental shift in the way that business software is developed and sold.” Backing up the seemingly audacious statements and thereby putting the company’s proverbial money where his mouth is, SugarCRM co-founder Clint Oram will be offering his perspective on a webcast entitled “Commercial Open Source CRM: Transforming the Enterprise.” The webcast will be taking place on Thursday, 25 May. Oram will be appearing with Evolved Media Network CTO / Publisher Bob Gatewood and athenahealth CTO Dan Woods. The theme of Oram’s comments will focus on how open source applications are “driving results in the marketplace.” A Q&A session will be included in the webcast. With all hyperbole and boasting aside for a moment, SugarCRM is not yet a McDonald’s in this business sphere. But they continue to roll, gathering no sesame seeds.