SugarCRM

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SugarCRM
Type Private
Industry CRM Software
Founded California 2004
Founder(s)

Clint Oram, John Roberts,

Jacob Taylor
Headquarters Cupertino, California
Key people Larry Augustin (CEO 2009 - present)
Products Sugar Community Edition, Sugar Professional, Sugar Corporate, Sugar Enterprise and Sugar Ultimate
Revenue ~$96 million (2012)[1]
Employees 350+[citation needed]
Website www.sugarcrm.com

SugarCRM is a software company based in Cupertino, California. It produces the web application Sugar, also known as SugarCRM, which is a customer relationship management (CRM) system that is available in both open source and Commercial open source applications.

Sugar's functionality includes sales-force automation, marketing campaigns, customer support, collaboration, Mobile CRM, Social CRM and reporting.

The company operates a number of websites, including its commercial website Sugarcrm.com, a development website (SugarForge.org), Sugar Exchange (for third-party extensions), and user forums.

History

From left to right, Jacob Taylor, John Roberts and Clint Oram in 2004

John Roberts conceived of the idea and name of SugarCRM while riding his mountain bike named Sugar in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the winter of 2003. Clint Oram, John Roberts, and Jacob Taylor started full time work on the SugarCRM open source project in April 2004, and incorporated the company in California in June 2004. Roberts served as the CEO from 2004 to 2009, Oram was the vice president, and Taylor was the CTO & vice president of engineering.

SugarCRM was one of the first commercial open-source-based corporations to raise venture capital. In June 2004, Josh Stein of DFJ invested $2M into the startup and became a board member. With the help of this investment, Sugar expanded quickly and by September 2004, potential users had downloaded 25,000 copies of the application, then named Sugar Open Source. In October 2004, the company was named "Project of the Month" on Sourceforge.[2]

The popularity of the project allowed the company to raise $46 million of venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Walden International, and New Enterprise Associates.[3]

In November 2004, a fork of SugarCRM, vtiger CRM, was started, intended to be a fully open-source solution. The software's core development team is based in Bangalore, India.

In November 2005, the company SplendidCRM was formed, which produces software that was initially a clone of SugarCRM, but intended to run on the Microsoft ASP.NET framework. Like SugarCRM, SplendidCRM produces both open-source and commercial versions of its software.

In 2007, SugarCRM launched SugarCon, a conference for Sugar customers, users and developers, that has since become an annual conference, held in the San Francisco Bay Area.[4]

By 2008, SugarCRM employed over 150 people.[5]

In June 2008, co-founder Taylor left the company, during what technology website The Register called "a mysterious exodus of senior and experienced business staff" from SugarCRM.[6] Clint Oram replaced him as the CTO.

In May 2009, co-founder and CEO Roberts left the company. He was replaced as CEO by SugarCRM board member Larry Augustin, who had previously founded and served as the CEO of VA Linux (now known as Geeknet).[6]

In June 2010, Sugar launched Sugar 6, a major upgrade emphasizing ease of use and introducing a complete UI overhaul of Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise.[7]

In early 2011, Sugar was selected as an IBM Global Alliance Partner for Cloud Services.[8]

In January 2011, SugarCRM co-founder John Roberts starts X2Engine CRM a new open source CRM project.

In February 2011, SugarCRM announced it turned cash flow positive for the first time in its history.[9] SugarCRM has remained cashflow positive since.

At SugarCon 2011, SugarCRM also announced its first acquisition; iExtensions, the Market-Leading CRM for Lotus Notes.[10]

In June 2011, SugarCRM continued building on the Sugar 6 theme by adding more global capabilities (25 languages), enhanced Mobile CRM (native application support for over 90% of the world's smartphones and tablets) and extensive Social CRM integrations (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, InsideView, LotusLive, WebEx, GoToMeeting and Google Docs).[11] As part of this release, Sugar introduced two new editions; Sugar Corporate and Sugar Ultimate. eWeek said of Sugar 6 that SugarCRM gets it right.[12]

SugarCRM scored another banner year in 2011, with record fourth quarter revenues (up 92 percent from Q4 2010) and annual revenue growth of 67%[13]

At SugarCon 2012, SugarCRM announced the Sugar 6.5 release.[14] This new release offers customers an updated UI; more powerful search capabilities, an updated calendar and faster performance. The 6.5 release also introduces additional support for different IBM software and hardware platforms. Sugar 6.5 went GA in June 2012.

In April 2012, SugarCRM completed a $33 million financing round[15] for further expansion into the enterprise.

Customers can try Sugar Enterprise for free for 7 days.[16] Sugar Community Edition is available as a free download on sourceforge[17] or directly from Sugarforge, which has seen over 11,000,000 downloads.[18] In November 2012, Sugar was implemented in the Ministry of Education in New Zealand to help manage direct inquiries. The Wellington based company Daylight Consulting was responsible for implementing the software.

August 2013 - a new fork of the CE edition, SuiteCRM, has been delivered by some in the CE community, triggered in the light of SugarCRM Inc failing to state that planned new version 7 will have a CE edition - see notes in Editions section below.

Editions

SugarCRM develops CRM software in five editions:[19]

  • Sugar Community Edition (CE) (previously known as Sugar Open Source)
  • Sugar Professional
  • Sugar Corporate
  • Sugar Enterprise
  • Sugar Ultimate

Each product derives from the same code tree, with Sugar Community Edition containing roughly 85 percent of the functionality contained in Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise[citation needed]. The products originated on the LAMP stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, but also run on other platforms that can deliver PHP (such as Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X). SugarCRM can also use MS IIS as a web server, DB2 and MS SQL or Oracle as alternative databases.

SugarCRM makes Sugar CE available free of charge, as well as four paid editions: Professional; Corporate; Enterprise; Ultimate.

In 2013 in announcements for the future version 7 - SugarCRM has, despite specific questions, not stated that CE will be available for version 7. This is in sharp contrast to its clear statement that version 7 will be available initially as an onDemand (ie non CE) version only. SugarCRM.com developer forums

In August 2013 this has triggered a new Fork - SuiteCRM.com - from long-established SugarCRM developer and provider of open-source modules for SugarCRM: UK based SalesAgility.com [20]

Deployment options

SugarCRM offers 4 different deployment options. Customers can deploy Sugar as a software as a service (SaaS) solution in the Sugar Cloud, as an on-premises solution behind their firewall, in the cloud of one of SugarCRM's partners or in the public cloud, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Windows Azure Services Platform, Rackspace Cloud, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise.

License

SugarCRM initially licensed Sugar Open Source under the SugarCRM Public License (based on the Mozilla Public License and the Attribution Assurance License). While users could freely redistribute Sugar Open Source and the license allowed for the inspection and modification of the source code and for the creation of derived works, critics, including Dan Farber, editor in chief at CNET, expressed some concern over SugarCRM's use of the term "commercial open source" to describe its products.[21]

On July 25, 2007, SugarCRM announced the adoption of the GNU General Public License (version 3) for Sugar Community Edition, the offering previously known as Sugar Open Source.[22] This license took effect with the release of Sugar Community Edition 5.0.

On April 11, 2010, SugarCRM announced that starting with version 6.0.0, the Sugar Community Edition would be licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3.[23] The charts module, customer portal, mobile support, some SOAP functions and most of the default theme templates were removed from the AGPLv3 licensed Sugar Community Edition 6.[citation needed]

Open source forks of SugarCRM community edition

See also

References

  1. ↑
  2. ↑ SourceForge.net: Project of the Month
  3. ↑ SugarCRM raises $20M more for open source CRM » VentureBeat
  4. ↑ SugarCRM announces SugarCon 2009
  5. ↑ SugarCRM Nets $20 Million Investment - Software - IT Channel News by CRN and VARBusiness
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Sudden exit for SugarCRM co-founder and CEO, Gavin Clarke, The Register, May 7, 2009
  7. ↑ ZD Net: Sugar 6 offers simplified UI and information access
  8. ↑ As a member of the Global Alliance Portfolio in the Cloud Solutions area, SugarCRM will work with IBM to provide integrated cloud solutions between SugarCRM and a number of IBM offerings.
  9. ↑ SugarCRM Continues Record Growth in 2010
  10. ↑ SugarCRM Acquires iExtensions, the Market-Leading CRM for Lotus Notes
  11. ↑ SugarCRM Announces General Availability of Sugar 6 Spring Release: More Choice, Better Options
  12. ↑ SugarCRM Gets It Right
  13. ↑ FY 2011 results
  14. ↑ What's new in Sugar 6.5
  15. ↑ SugarCRM completes a $33 million financing round
  16. ↑ SugarCRM 7-day Free Trial
  17. ↑ sourceforge
  18. ↑ Sugarforge
  19. ↑ http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/editions SugarCRM Editions
  20. ↑ Linkedin.com SuiteCRM group
  21. ↑ ZDNet Magazine, "Commercial Open Source, A Misnomer?" (August 29, 2005)
  22. ↑ Martens, China (26 July 2007). "User pressure leads SugarCRM to adopt GPLv3". Computerworld. Retrieved 11 March 2012. 
  23. ↑ Moving to the AGPLv3 for Sugar 6

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