SugarCRM

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

SugarCRM is a customer relationship management (CRM) package based on the LAMP stack. SugarCRM is available both as proprietary software versions and as a version under a license that the company calls open source. The product is always mentioned to be the natural alternative to Salesforce.com online CRM.

SugarCRM Professional is a full featured CRM application for small business to the enterprise. Comprised from PHP and MySQL, it is designed for maximum ease of deployment for the management of sales leads, business contacts, and more. SugarCRM Professional and Enterprise versions can be licenced under a proprietary EULA licence. SugarCRM OpenSource can be licenced under the SugarCRM Public License version 1.1.3 or Microsoft Shared Source Licence. SugarCRM Public License is based on the Mozilla Public License and the Attribution Assurance License. However, SugarCRM Public License is not approved by the Open Source Initiative.[1]

Founded in 2004, SugarCRM was one of the first venture capital funded open source shareware application companies. Although this may have hampered their ability to raise funding, their #7 download ranking on SourceForge.net provided the opportunity to raise $26 million in venture funding and grow their staff to 90 people. Between 2004-2006 their customer base skyrocketed from 50 customers to 800. On December 18, 2006, the company announced they have reached more than 1,000 paying customers since their first edition, and that is being used by several large customers, such as Honeywell, Yahoo, Starbucks, State of Oregon, NASA Ames Research, AXA Rosenberg, First Federal Bank and BDO Seidman. They currently have over 2,000,000 downloads of the open source version of their product and remain one of the most active projects on SourceForge.

There has been some concern in the community surrounding SugarCRM, about the "commercial open-source" used by the company, because all the source code is actually controlled by SugarCRM, Inc. (i.e. the developers from the community have no access to any CVS, fix bugs or make any improvements to the project), although they make available to the public the source code of their Open Source version, at the same time they release their Professional commercial version. Also, available via the SugarCRM forums, there is some kind of support from the company to the community of developers who want to make changes in the code.

SugarCRM (the company) also sells the product as a Software as a Service (SaaS) version, where the customer can rent the installed version of the product already installed on a server provided by SugarCRM, and also get technical support, all by a monthly fee.

There are also third party companies that have taken the open source version of the product, and made it the base for its own product, modifying the standard modules that come originally in SugarCRM, and adding new ones, related or not to the core CRM functionality. Some have taken the CRM core and expanded it to have more ERP functionality (notably Info At Hand), while some other companies just provide hosted access and support to the Open Source version of the product.