Visions of Sugar(CRM)plums dancing…

SugarCRM Inc. is winding down the calendar having passed a nice couple of milestones. Company figures show that SugarCRM can now claim over 1,000 paying customers since the first edition of the commercial open source customer relationship software was released in September 2004. And Sugar Open Source has now been downloaded over 1,000,000 times. Sugar Open Source now sports over 300 extensions and enhancements and has been translated into over 40 languages.

The Sugary folks can also take pride in a customer’s success today, as Sterling PCU, a provider of specialized equipment to the appliance and automotive industries, was presented with a Stevie Award in the CRM Implementation & User Adoption category at the 2006 Selling Power Sales Excellence Awards in Las Vegas this week.

Sterling employs Sugar Professional On-Demand across the board in its sales process, from the initial lead to custom quoting. Sterling’s use of SugarCRM was cited because the company was able to automate complex and lengthy business processes within SugarCRM while achieving user adoption levels of over 90 percent.

Called “the business world’s own Oscars” by the New York Post back in 2002 and dubbed such ever since, the Selling Power Sales Excellence Awards were jointly presented by Selling Power magazine, a sales management publication with 145,000 subscribers in 67 countries. More than 600 entries from companies of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted for consideration in more than 40 categories this year; the CRM Implementation & User Adoption category was an addition for 2006.

Meanwhile, representatives of Linux-based enterprise messaging software provider Scalix Corporation and SugarCRM yesterday announced that mutual customers can now integrate their Linux-based messaging from Scalix with their customer relationship management system from SugarCRM. The integration seeks to allow seamless movement within a complete Linux environment involving Outlook desktop email client, SugarCRM software and Scalix’s Linux-based mail server.

The companies are also reportedly collaborating to bring further integration between Sugar and web-based messaging for enterprise sales teams to manage sales leads and customer accounts.

Scalix’s integration with SugarCRM is enabled by Scalix’s full, native support for Microsoft Outlook 2000, 2002 (XP), 2003 as well as support for Mozilla Thunderbird clients.

Scalix is a Linux email, calendaring and messaging company, specializing in supplying CIOs, email administrators and end users with a Linux-based, open source-supported, field-tested collaboration environment. Scalix now claims over 1 million mailboxes worldwide, 60,000 Community Edition downloads, more than 3,000 community forum members and over 425 corporate customers.

Founded in 1946, Sterling PCU provides specialized equipment to the appliance and automotive industry. Sterling’s refrigerant and fluid processing systems are used by large firms such as Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Caterpillar and General Electric.

SugarCRM is a provider of commercial open source customer relationship management software for companies of all sizes, offering deployment options in on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based formats.