SugarCRM vs. Salesforce.com: All About The Benjamins

In the online CRM market, SugarCRM has been marketing against its chief target, market leader Salesforce.com, with a fury. The SugarCRM website guarantees that Salesforce.com customers will save 50% by switching to SugarCRM.

And indeed, in the range of features and number of users in which these systems are chiefly targeted, the Professional level, SugarCRM’s pricing is less than one-half that of Salesforce.com’s, at $30 per user per month vs. $65 per user per month.

As an example of “do unto others” or karmic poetic justice, we see that Salesforce.com’s original selling proposition was in undercutting traditional on-premises packaged solutions like Siebel’s by making CRM more affordable as a SaaS product.

SugarCRM markets its software as more flexible, open, and affordable—meaning less expensive and more customizable than Salesforce.com‘s. SugarCRM’s promotion of these messages has been aggressive and pervasive, with its “The Top 10 Reasons Salesforce.com Customers Switch to SugarCRM” infiltrating all corners of cyberspace.

CRM analysts generally agree that SugarCRM’s open source model gives it a compelling proposition in pricing and the involvement of a worldwide development community. For some users, SugarCRM’s open source nature is attractive, while to others being open source is seen as too murky and scary a risk.

Recognizing that price was a key factor in CRM decision making, Chris Bucholtz,s editor-in-chief of CRM Outsiders, conducted a CRM TCO study released in 2011 that examined all hidden costs and fees. Bucholtz’s study found that the cost of a 10-user Professional version of Saleforce.com was more than double that of a SugarCRM Professional version, at around $22,000 vs. $10,000, respectively.

Excerpted from SugarCRM vs. Salesforce.com : All About The Benjamins, By Michael Neubarth

New SugarCRM Videos To Be Featured on Facebook

Beginning Tuesday, January 31, 2012 Allegro will be posting to facebook new videos featuring actual SugarCRM customers telling the SugarCRM story.  There are four videos in this series that will describe why companies chose Sugar and how they have benefited since implementing it.  If you are not currently a SugarCRM customer, these videos are a great way for you to see how other companies are already realizing the value that SugarCRM can provide.  Visit Allegro's Facebook Page and "like" us to be automatically notified of each post!

SugarCRM Wins 2011 Product of the Year Award

TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named Sugar Ultimate a Customer Interaction Solutions 2011 Product of the Year. Customer Interaction Solutions magazine is the leading publication covering CRM, call centers and teleservices since 1982.  Sugar Ultimate lets large enterprises collaborate across extended teams, publish and manage Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality, and leverage the administration and support services expected of mission-critical applications.  “Today’s competitive enterprise can count on Sugar Ultimate to support complex global applications including Mobile CRM and Social CRM,” said Nick Halsey, Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of Corporate Development, SugarCRM. “It offers our most complete package of sales, support, marketing and collaboration features, delivered on SugarCRM’s open and flexible platform for the ultimate in customization capabilities.”

“SugarCRM was selected to receive a 2011 Product of the Year Award for its achievement in advancing CRM, contact center and call center technologies. Sugar Ultimate has demonstrated excellence as well as provided ROI for the companies that use it,” said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. “Customer Interaction Solutions magazine has been recognizing innovative companies for 14 years and SugarCRM has earned its place with this distinguished honor.”

The 14th Annual Product of the Year Award winners are published in the January/February 2012 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine,www.cismag.com.

SugarCRM Arms Developer Community with More Tools with Newest Version of Sugar 6

Latest Community Milestones Include More Than Ten Million Community Downloads and 1,000 Extension Projects to Date

CUPERTINO, Calif. – November 3, 2011 – SugarCRM, the world's fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced the release of Sugar 6.3, a major upgrade to its Community Edition. Since 2004, there have been more than ten million downloads of Sugar and its related projects, delivering value to more than 850,000 people at more than 70,000 organizations worldwide.

The latest platform enhancements include support for deeper integration with third party applications, faster feedback for real-time collaboration, and tighter administrative control for a 360-degree view of all activities and projects. The new Sugar 6 dedicates the most flexible, intuitive and open CRM platform on the market to its community developers and customers.

“Being open and flexible is in SugarCRM’s heritage; we provide a free and open source platform that developers can use to build their own applications,” said John Mertic, community manager at SugarCRM. “The newest release of the Sugar platform is dedicated to our community and provides them with more robust tools and significant feature enhancements. It’s imperative we build together, so as the community grows, so does SugarCRM as a company.”

Enhanced Admin Control Provides Open View of All Activities

The new Sugar 6 provides more thorough administrative controls to users. The new mass update control allows administrators to arrange either role-based or policy-based access, granting a complete view of activities for better project management. Improvements to the platform increase the ability to handle activities during lead conversation, resulting in more flexibility during the lead conversation process. Sugar Logic now has the ability to import data, create formulas, rename modules and manage mass updates to all modules for greater transparency.

Intuitively Designed for Integration

Built for customization and to fit with a variety of third-party applications and different solutions, the latest version of Sugar 6 can now integrate data from even more sources. Sugar 6.3 has an enhanced Import Wizard and the ability to import Google contacts. Users can also do more inline editing thanks to the improved quick edit feature in ListViews, subpanels and reports. Users can also easily import and archive external emails into Sugar 6.3.

Continual Feedback Fosters Deeper Collaboration

The new platform allows SugarCRM’s open development process to gather continual feedback from customers and users, resulting in higher quality products designed to meet real-world needs. For example, through the company’s Open+ Developer program, Sugar 6.2.4 had a record 10% of the bug fixes that came directly from community contributions, and there have been nearly 100 accepted code contributions this year.

“By participating in the SugarCRM Open+ Developer Program, we have had the opportunity to contribute to code sprints and to co-innovate alongside other members of the community and SugarCRM engineers,” said Vincent Rollin, CTO and co-founder of Synolia. “The program lets us have a larger voice in SugarCRM, and we are effectively able to shape the future of the Sugar product family.”

The new platform also offers an upgraded AJAX user interface, resulting in an average of 40 percent performance improvement with faster response time.

As with all Sugar offerings, users can run Sugar 6.3 both on-premise and in the cloud and can make unlimited changes without restriction. Sugar is the world’s most widely used open source CRM solution. With more than 30,000 developers and over 1,000 extension projects on SugarForge, the Sugar community supports a growing collaboration of developers, programmers, partners and customers. With Sugar 6.3, the community now has even more choices and a greater ability to build tailor-made applications.

Sugar 6.3 is available immediately. For more information on SugarCRM, SugarForge or the latest version of Sugar, please visit http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/download or http://developers.sugarcrm.com/wordpress. Also, fan SugarCRM on Facebook, follow the company on Twitter and subscribe to the company’s YouTube channel.

About SugarCRM

SugarCRM makes CRM simple. As the world's fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than ten million times and currently serve over 850,000 end users in 192 countries. Over 7,000 customers have chosen SugarCRM's On-Site and Cloud Computing services over proprietary alternatives. SugarCRM has been recognized for its customer success and product innovation by CRM Magazine, InfoWorld, Customer Interaction Solutions and Intelligent Enterprise.
For more information, call (408) 454-6900 or 1 87 SUGARCRM toll-free in the US, email contact@sugarcrm.com, or visit http://www.sugarcrm.com.

IBM Gives Nod to SugarCRM Open Source Software for Smart Cloud

Published: 17 Oct 2011

SugarCRM is hoping a recent partnership with IBM will give it credibility among enterprise-class customers, some of whom still consider its open source CRM applications as alternative software that doesn’t fit mainstream business operations.

Last week IBM anointed SugarCRM’s software as the first CRM system for the IBM SmartCloud platform. The deal extends last year’s partnership in which SugarCRM was named an IBM Global Alliance Partners for the IBM cloud services.

“Let’s face it, even in business you are judged by the company you keep,’’ said Nick Halsey, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at SugarCRM of Cupertino, Calif.

SugarCRM’s Sugar 6 is generally available now for the SmartCloud Enterprise and will be sold through channel partners of both companies. It will initially target mid-market buyers.

“It raises awareness of the company and gives them credibility,’’ said Carter Lusher, a chief analyst at Ovum, a research firm headquartered in London. “If an IT manager has been thinking about SugarCRM and wondering about their staying power, IBM inviting them to partner is an implicit endorsement.’’

The IBM deal is considered a smart move by other industry analysts and existing customers.

“How can we take a product called Sugar seriously?’’ said Shannon Boyd, director of marketing for BNSF Logistics, LLC, which switched from Salesforce.com to SugarCRM four years ago.  “But if you can get past that, it’s like the David and Goliath story in the market. They are a solid application. I feel very comfortable with the decision we made.’’

Boyd said his company, based in Springdale, Ark.,  evaluated several CRM software options four years ago because, while it had been using Salesforce.com software, “we wanted the ability to configure and make changes to the software,’’ Boyd said. “Sugar allowed us to do that.’’

Boyd said he is looking forward to SugarCRM acquiring more clout in the open source CRM market.

With about 7, 500 customers, SugarCRM’s presence in the CRM market is dwarfed by powerhouse Salesforce.com, which has more than 100,000 customers.

Unlike Salesforce.com and other CRM market leaders such as Oracle Corp., Microsoft and SAP, SugarCRM provides open source CRM applications, which can be modified and freely distributed. SugarCRM offers a free open source CRM, which accounts for 90% of its user base.

There is an open source community of SugarCRM users and repository of free applications called SugarForge, which, as of last week, included 998 programs, Halsey said.

The company makes money by selling its own modified versions of the open source software. There are four versions that scale up in price, functionality and support with the top-of-the-line version costing $100 per user per month.

SugarCRM’s offers on-premises and cloud-based versions of its software. The deal with IBM is not exclusive and Halsey said the company plans to offer its software on other platforms as well. In addition to being part of the IBM SmartCloud services, SugarCRM also runs on Amazon, OpSource and Rackspace.

But the IBM deal “is the most important partnership they’ve ever had,’’ said Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group. “It gives them the ability to go to the enterprise.’’

SugarCRM Wins Bossie Award

SugarCRM has been chosen as a 2011 InfoWorld Best of Open Source (Bossie) Awards winner in the category for best open source applications.

The 2011 Bossie Award winners in applications are the InfoWorld Test Center's top picks for the best open source server-side apps. These include enterprise search, Web content management, blog publishing, CRM, ERP, process management, and business intelligence.

Doug Dineley, Executive Editor/Test Center at InfoWorld said,  “In every software category worth mentioning, you'll find a competitive open source solution. And in some cases, open source is the only solution. Our 2011 Bossie Award winners represent the best that open source has to offer in application development, desktop productivity, mobile computing, and the data center.”

InfoWorld noted that SugarCRM is still the top choice in open source sales force automation and customer support services. And although this year we saw only minor updates, the push to improve mobile access and social hooks helped to contemporize the feature set, while a Lotus Notes plug-in played to the enterprise base.

For more information about Allegro's SugarCRM integration and support services, visit our site.

SugarCRM Earns Four Awards

SugarCRM, the world’s fastest-growing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) company, today announced that the company won four awards in CRM magazine’s 10th Annual CRM Market Leaders Awards program. Awards were given at last week’s CRM Evolution 2011 event in New York.

Vendors were evaluated in the areas of depth of functionality, price, company direction, and customer satisfaction, and SugarCRM took home the following victories:

• Winner – Open Source CRM category
• Leader – Midmarket Suite CRM category
• Leader – Small-Business Suite CRM category
• One to Watch – Sales Force Automation category

In their announcement of this year’s award winners, CRM magazine highlighted the positive view of SugarCRM held by leading industry analysts. Michael Fauscette, group vice president for software business solutions at IDC, said, “‘Anytime you talk about open-source CRM, Sugar comes up; they’re by far the best known and by far the largest.’” In addition, Denis Pombriant, CEO at Beagle Research Group, LLC, referred to SugarCRM as an “‘out-of-the-box thinker,’” complimenting the company’s “‘continually improving…solution set.’” The full article can be found online at destinationcrm.com.

“SugarCRM has had a great year, and it was no surprise to us that they claimed so many awards at CRM Evolution,” said David Myron, Editorial Director, CRM and Speech Technology magazines. “Clearly, the CRM market is continuing to evolve very quickly, and it continues to be shaped by this year’s CRM Market Leaders like SugarCRM.”

“We have over 7,000 customers and more than 850,000 users worldwide who rely on SugarCRM to execute marketing programs, grow sales, retain customers and create custom business applications,” said Nick Halsey, chief marketing officer and executive vice president of corporate development for SugarCRM. “We focus on providing customers with a tool that’s easy to use, flexible and open, and this recognition from CRM magazine further validates our strong presence in the market.”

For more information regarding SugarCRM or to sign up for your free 30-day trial, visit our Allegro.

SugarCRM Announces End Of Support Date

Effective July 31,2011, SugarCRM will no longer provide customer support maintenance patches or bug fixes for Sugar 5.5.x.  This applies to the versions 5.5.1, 5.5.2, 5.5.3, and 5.5.4 of Sugar Enterprise and Sugar professional, along with the plug-ins and extensions.  It is recommended that customers running 5.5.x or earlier versions of Sugar upgrade to the latest version, 6.2.x.

Sugar 6.2.x contains many new features and enhancements, including the following:
•    New Sugar Cloud Connectors
o    View and import 3rd-party data from Hoover's and InsideView
o    Access files on and upload files to Google Docs and LotusLive
o    Manange Gotomeeting, Webex and LotusLive meetings
•    New Social Media features
•    Sugar Mobile for iPhone and Android devices
•    Advanced customizations through Sugar Logic
•    Advanced configurations using Module Builder and Studio
•    Enhanced Web Services
•    Improved performance and scalability
•    Improved stability

If you have questions regarding your SugarCRM application or would like to implement SugarCRM please contact Allegro.

Social CRM Sales Intelligence, Now Inside SugarCRM

What if you could get a warm introduction to each of your prospects and could prepare for meetings in just minutes? You can, with SugarCRM and InsideView.

We’ve added InsideView sales intelligence at no charge to every Sugar subscription. To celebrate, all Sugar subscribers are eligible for an InsideView premium edition trial and this limited-time offer:

Subscribe to InsideView PRO edition by December 31 and get 50% off your InsideView subscription.

Subscribe to the newest InsideView CRM+ for Sugar edition, created specifically for SugarCRM, for only $19/user/month.

InsideView provides comprehensive, up-to-date business information on your Accounts, Leads, Contacts, and Opportunities from over 25,000 online sources, and it’s all right inside Sugar.

With InsideView in SugarCRM, you can:

· •Get company and contact information from editorial sources like Reuters and NetProspex, and social media from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.

· •Monitor business events that affect your prospects.

· •Discover how to reach prospects through your social network connections.

· •Create targeted lists to reach the right prospects at the right time.

· •Have relevant business information at your fingertips before making the first call.

· •Gain more leads, convert more prospects, and win more business.

As a special bonus, with a Sugar subscription you can activate the features of the premium InsideView PRO version for 14 days to see the benefits for yourself. The premium version adds custom agents, connection details, social network intelligence, list building with export to Sugar, and much more.

To learn more about SugarCRM and InsideView, please contact AllegroConsultants.

Save the Date!

Sugar Con 2012

April 23-25

Palace Hotel, San Francisco

Registration and sponsorship information coming soon!

SugarCRM Gets It Right

Customer-relationship management software—thankfully referred to as CRM in casual conversation—is the sort of tool that you don’t know you need until you’ve tried to work without it. It barely existed a decade ago, although the category can trace its roots to the contact-management tools that proliferated throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, and before then to the bare-bones order-entry systems that encouraged businesses to buy their first computers 30 or 40 years ago.

Although many people consider CRM to be synonymous with Salesforce.com, there are plenty of competitors to the cloud-based titan. Perhaps one of the pluckiest—and possibly the best—is SugarCRM, whose eponymous CRM package is more flexible in some significant ways than Salesforce.com, and certainly less expensive.

SugarCRM can be deployed as a cloud-based application and for many organizations, that model makes the most sense. After all, cloud-based deployments such as Salesforce.com offer advantages such as accessibility and scalability while relieving IT departments of much, if not all, of the dirty work and finger-pointing associated with the care and feeding of line-of-business applications.

But SugarCRM goes two better on Salesforce.com, by offering its software as an on-premises install, and as an appliance that’s designed to be easily added to an existing IT infrastructure. These may be especially appealing to those organizations that, for whatever reason, can’t or won’t use a cloud-based application, in cases where the entire focus is on inside sales, or where the reliability of WAN connections is less than ideal.

SugarCRM is available as a free, open-source Community Edition, or as the for-pay Sugar Enterprise and Sugar Professional. The 6.2 release, which I evaluated and at the time of writing was slated for release in early June, will feature two new editions: Corporate, which will occupy the space between Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise, and Sugar Ultimate, which will apparently offer everything there is in Sugar Enterprise and then some.

The paid versions have a five-user minimum “cover charge” and through release 6.1 included 1GB of storage for application data. Additional data storage is available, at $200 per gigabyte per year; this pricing is expected to change with the 6.2 release, to a charge of $500 per year for each additional block of 5GB. The various editions will also see their built-in storage allocations increase, to 15GB for Sugar Professional, ranging up to 250GB for Sugar Ultimate.

Sugar Professional, at $360 per user annually, offers the same interface, dashboarding features and Microsoft Office plug-ins as Sugar Enterprise, as well as the administration, customization and integration features of the enterprise edition. Both Sugar Professional and Enterprise offer unlimited online and email support, with premium support available at an additional price.

Sugar Enterprise offers the widest range of features, and currently costs $600 per user per year; this version gives organizations the ability to use MySQL and Oracle 9i and 10g as the back-end databases, and includes Sugar Mobile, which allows users and administrators to access and manage the software via an iPhone. (Sugar Mobile for Sugar Professional is available for $120 per user.) Sugar Enterprise also includes a self-service portal and SQL reporting features.

Sugar Community Edition is unsupported and doesn’t come with any technical support whatsoever. It includes a bare-bones set of dashboards and collaboration and reporting tools, and lacks the finer-grained security of the for-pay versions.

Compared to Salesforce.com, SugarCRM is easily the winner on price. In essence, the price for Sugar Enterprise works out to $50 per user per month, or one-fifth that of Salesforce.com’s list price for Sales Cloud Unlimited. It’s just under that (19 percent) for Service Cloud Unlimited.

On top of that, some features that SugarCRM bundles into its Enterprise edition, such as the portal, are only available in Salesforce.com at an additional cost. For many customers, that sort of hidden cost may discourage the use of what could be an invaluable tool. To be fair, the Unlimited editions of the Salesforce.com packages do appear to offer a better level of bundled support, but whether that’s worth the gold-plated price is certainly open for debate.

I spent a couple of weeks on a cloud-based instance of Sugar Enterprise, and found it to be a powerful and flexible, yet unintimidating package. From an end-user perspective, SugarCRM presents a restrained appearance that has all the tools that define modern CRM offerings and more. Opportunities and reporting functions are all available at a click, and the user interface is uncluttered, with the apparent intent of keeping users working efficiently. From an administrative perspective, things are equally straightforward. Access controls can be set up by team as well as by user role, allowing businesses to properly separate teams when desired.

Arguably, the whole point of a CRM system is to keep users inside the application as much as possible, and Sugar Enterprise does a good job of that. The only complaint I had during my evaluation was at a fundamental level of the user interface. If I had to pick a word to describe SugarCRM’s default color scheme, it might be “soporific.” Its overwhelming grayness is almost too comforting. Those designing future versions should take a hard look at this, if only to keep users awake.

Despite its growing user base and developer community, as an underdog in the segment, SugarCRM faces an uphill battle. But the company’s eschewing of glitz is a sound approach, one that allows it to give users the information they need to chase opportunities, close deals and service customers, without fuss or muss.

SugarCRM Takes Top Honor

AlwaysOn, the leading business media brand networking the Global Silicon Valley, is proud to introduce the second annual OnDemand 100—the top emerging Internet companies disrupting the established enterprise and pioneering cloud computing and SaaS.

This year SugarCRM, with whom Allegro is a sliver partner, has taken the place of Overall Winner.  SugarCRM is being recognized as a leader amongst their peers.  The companies being honored were chosen a set of criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz. 

The AlwaysOn editorial team, along with partners at SAP, Morgan Stanley, KPMG, Hewlett-Packard, Blackstone Group, Bridge Bank, Fenwick & West, Silicon Valley Bank, and industry experts across the globe scoured the entrepreneurial community to identify the top 100 private companies that are taking old notions of data management, customer relationships, and infrastructure and forging solutions that will shake up the industry and lead to huge value creation opportunities.

To see the complete article, go to AONetwork.