SugarCRM

Infobox Company
company_name=SugarCRM
company_type=Private
foundation=California 2004
founder= John Roberts, Clint Oram, Jacob Taylor
location=Cupertino, California
industry=CRM Software
products= Sugar Community Edition, Sugar Professional, Sugar Enterprise
num_employees=150+
parent=
subsid=
homepage= [http://www.sugarcrm.com/ www.sugarcrm.com]

In computing, the software-solution vendor SugarCRM produces the Sugar Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

History

John Roberts, Clint Oram and Jacob Taylor founded SugarCRM in 2004. The company began as an open-source project on Sourceforge in April 2004. By September 2004, potential users had downloaded 25,000 copies of Sugar Open Source. In October 2004, the company was named "Project of the Month" on Sourceforge. [ [http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2004-10.php SourceForge.net: Project of the Month ] ] 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. [ [http://venturebeat.com/2008/02/07/sugarcrm-raises-20m-more-for-open-source-crm/ SugarCRM raises $20M more for open source CRM » VentureBeat ] ] SugarCRM currently employs over 150 people. [ [http://www.crn.com/software/206106218 SugarCRM Nets $20 Million Investment - Software - IT Channel News by CRN and VARBusiness ] ] Sugar Open Source has been downloaded over 4,000,000 times [ [http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9866743-7.html SugarCRM lands $20 million venture round | Tech news blog - CNET News.com ] ] and the project remains one of the most active on SourceForge.

The company operates a number of web sites, including its commercial web site SugarCRM.com, a development web site (SugarForge.org), Sugar Exchange (for third-party extensions), and user forums.

Products

Versions

SugarCRM develops CRM software in three versions:

* Sugar Community Edition
* Sugar Professional
* Sugar Enterprise

Each product derives from the one code tree, with Sugar Community Edition containing roughly 85 percent of the functionality contained in Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise. The products originated on the LAMP stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, but also run well on other platforms that can deliver Apache, MySQL and PHP (such as Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X). SugarCRM can also use alternative databases such as Oracle. Product functionality includes sales-force automation, marketing campaigns, customer cases, collaboration and reporting.

SugarCRM makes Sugar Community Edition available free of charge, and sells annual subscriptions to Sugar Professional and to Sugar Enterprise.

Deployment types

SugarCRM offers Software as a Service (SaaS), on-premise offerings and appliance solutions.

License

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. [ [http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=62AED6AA-BAA3-4A9E-9A8B-0E4C72B3A3E4 SugarCRM adopts GPLv3 for Community Edition - Computer Business Review ] ] The GPL takes effect with the release of Sugar Community Edition 5.0, scheduled for late northern-hemisphere summer 2007.

SugarCRM licensed previous versions of Sugar Community Edition 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 licence allowed for the inspection and modification of the source code and for the creation of derived works, the communitywho? had expressed some concern over SugarCRM's use of the term "commercial open source" to describe its products. [ [http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1787 ZDNet Magazine, "Commercial Open Source, A Misnomer?" (August 29, 2005)] ]

See also

* CiviCRM
* Web application
* Vtiger CRM, an open source fork of SugarCRM
* SplendidCRM, an implementation on the Microsoft technology stack (Windows, C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server).

External links

* [http://www.sugarcrm.com Official website]
* [http://www.sugarforge.org/ Sugarforge] — Plug-ins and third-party projects for SugarCRM

References