SugarCRM Named a 2012 CRM Excellence Award Winner by Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine

Cupertino, CA — May 14, 2012 — SugarCRM, the world’s fastest-growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, announced today that TMC, an integrated media company, has honored the company with a Customer Interaction Solutions 2012 CRM Excellence Award. Customer Interaction Solutions has been the premier publication in the CRM, contact center and teleservices industries since 1982.

The Sugar platform offers full sales, marketing and support automation capabilities allowing organizations to easily organize and track people, companies, and sales opportunities. SugarCRM has seen many customers achieve success, including USAFact, an Internet-based employment background & drug screening provider specializing in technology and web integrated workflows, that teamed up with Epicom, a SugarCRM channel partner, on its implementation.

By automating the quote process with Sugar, over the past 18 months USAFact has experienced a 12 percent average increase in monthly gross revenue, an 86 percent gain in profitability and a 15 percent increase in average new contract values. Matt Davidson, Chief Executive Officer at USAFact stated, “Our quote customizations have taken our customer interaction to a new level. It allows us to focus on the customer and provide them with many options for cost effective solutions that grow our business. The new efficiency with which we can do this is the truly remarkable part.”

“SugarCRM has been granted a CRM Excellence Award for its commitment to its customers and their clients,” said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. “SugarCRM has demonstrated to the editors of Customer Interaction Solutions that the company has improved the processes of its clients’ businesses by streamlining and facilitating the flow of information needed for companies to retain customers.”

“Sugar lets salespeople organize and automate tasks so they can be more productive and focus on what really matters: gaining and retaining customers,” said Nick Halsey, Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of Corporate Development for SugarCRM. “Watching USAFact streamline processes and boost revenue as a result of its Sugar deployment has been very rewarding, and we are honored to have received this recognition from TMC.”

Based on hard data, the CRM Excellence Awards rely on facts and numbers demonstrating the improvements that the winner’s product has made in a client’s business. Winners were chosen on the basis of their product or service’s ability to help extend and expand the customer relationship to become all-encompassing, covering the entire enterprise and the entire customer lifecycle.

The Thirteenth Annual CRM Excellence Award winners can be found in the May 2012 issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.

CUPERTINO, Calif. – April 4, 2012 – SugarCRM, the world’s fastest-growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced it has completed a $33 million equity and debt financing round. The investment round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and includes participation from new investors Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital. All of SugarCRM’s current investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International also participated. Brooke Seawell, Venture Partner at NEA has also joined SugarCRM’s Board of Directors. SugarCRM will use the funds to continue its advancement into the enterprise market and to pursue strategic business opportunities.

“NEA supports SugarCRM’s vision to drive increased CRM adoption by offering affordable and easy to use CRM solutions to its customers,” said Brooke Seawell, Venture Partner at NEA. “We believe SugarCRM is uniquely positioned to serve the market and continue to generate impressive results.”

Driven by increased global adoption of SugarCRM and new product capabilities enabling the company’s advancement into the enterprise market, SugarCRM saw strong financial performance in 2011, achieving 67 percent top-line billings growth. In addition, the company added more than 2700 new companies around the globe to its impressive customer roster last year alone. With more than one million users and 370 channel partners, SugarCRM is now the third most widely used CRM solution in the world.

“In 2011 we saw demand for CRM solutions grow exponentially with an increased number of enterprise companies looking for an open and flexible CRM platform that can effectively scale with their growing businesses. Our growth was up 67 percent last year, and we are off to a great start in 2012,” said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM. “Adding Brooke’s experience and talent to our Board will help us drive the company to the next level. We are excited to continue our expansion into the enterprise space and are privileged to have the strong support of top investors that have domain expertise in the CRM market and who support our mission.”

Sugar 6.5 Includes New Search and Navigation Capabilities to Further Boost User Productivity and Satisfaction

SUGARCON – SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – April 24, 2012 – SugarCRM, the world’s fastest-growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced a new version of its flagship product, Sugar 6.5, at its annual customer, user and partner conference, SugarCon 2012. Sugar 6.5 introduces significant architectural enhancements, as well as performance improvements to increase productivity and satisfaction for the end user.

Pivoting from the legacy approach to CRM design that has typically been solely focused on sales management, Sugar 6.5 ushers in a new era of CRM focused on end users first. By arming sales professionals with an easy-to-use application that they can access from any browser or mobile device, Sugar is heavily focused on enabling increased user productivity with simplified navigation through an enhanced user interface design, full-text search functionality, and new calendar and scheduling capabilities.

"Better search capabilities mean that the product works the way users work, providing them a new way to search for and find the critical customer information they need to run their business,” said Clint Oram, co-founder and CTO of SugarCRM. “Instead of using wizards or clunky database queries, users can simply type in what they are looking for. For a generation of business people who grew up using Google, this is CRM search the way it was meant to be."

Customers like E3 Technology, Inc. experience the power of the Sugar platform every day. “SugarCRM offers an affordable CRM package with broad capabilities,” said Michael Leach, vice president, sales at E3 Technology, Inc. “While their feature set and basic value proposition earned my interest, Sugar's dedication to continual improvement has reaffirmed our commitment as a SugarCRM customer. We’re very pleased with the redesigned interface as we see this platform as an instrumental tool for bolstering our team’s productivity.”

Additional Sugar 6.5 key benefits and features include:

Increased ease and speed for finding critical information

• An updated user interface to make finding and accessing customer information even easier
• Improved navigation with full-text search so that users find the information they need, faster

New calendar with dynamic scheduling

• A new calendar feature that uses a modern drag-and-drop UI, while supporting recurring meetings
• Integration with the iCal standard as well as easy integration with other calendars used by business professionals today

Architectural and performance improvements

• Abstracted database layer that enables simplified and more highly performing database access
• Dramatic performance improvements across the database and UI layers, including client-side caching to deliver sub-second screen refreshes
• Optimized growth and scalability with support of IBM DB2 and IBM PureSystems

Tighter integration with leading applications

• Easy import feature for LinkedIn contacts
• Enhanced Microsoft Outlook integration
• Greater social business and smarter commerce capabilities through integration with IBM Connections and IBM SmartCloud for Social Business