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With over 4000 customers, in 75+ languages, SugarCRM is the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for companies of all sizes. SugarCRM's open source architecture allows companies to easily customize and integrate proprietary business processes to build, improve and maintain customer relationships. SugarCRM provides several deployment options, including on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based solutions to suit customers' security, integration and configuration needs.
SugarCRM has made such a significant impact by providing a flexible open source solution to meet the business needs of enterprises that seek to improve the way they manage and report customer relationship interactions.
Defining CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a customer-based business strategy with the goal of maximizing profitability, revenue, and customer satisfaction, by providing a cross-departmental view of all customer transactions and interactions.
CRM software solutions emerged in the early 1990’s with the promise of significantly improving the way businesses interacted with their customer base. While the promise made sense to many businesses, CRM software was only available to the largest enterprises due to high license fees, inflexible architectures and a high cost to implement.
Open Source CRM means lower costs
The goals of CRM remain the same, but in recent years, largely because of open source software (OSS), we have seen a dramatic improvement in the software that helps implement the CRM strategy. With open source, large numbers of programmers unite to produce high quality code more quickly, getting high quality software faster to their respective markets at a significantly reduced cost.
SugarCRM the leader in open source CRM software
SugarCRM is one of the world's leading providers of open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for small, medium and large companies. SugarCRM offers a flexible, cost-effective alternative to proprietary applications. SugarCRM's open source architecture allows companies to more easily customize and integrate customer-facing best practices and/or proprietary business processes. Additionally, SugarCRM can be deployed on SugarCRM’s on-demand platform or within a fully secure internal data center. And, continuing in the open source tradition, as an end user, you are not locked into either deployment option. You can move from one environment to the other seamlessly, offering greater flexibility as your business matures, your need to integrate grows or outsourcing IT services becomes a more viable option.
SugarCRM and Corratech
In 2004, CorraTech was originally drawn to SugarCRM by its ease of use and intuitive interface design. Over the subsequent years, the company advanced its architecture and functionality to more closely match more sophisticated proprietary CRM applications. After supporting SugarCRM client deployments for the past four years, we are very pleased with the reliability and scalability of the newest versions of the SugarCRM products. However, as with any enterprise software deployment, it is important to fully map the business strategy to the software in order for CRM to have the greatest impact on your business. It is important to remember that although the Sugar Community Edition does not require a license fee, this does not mean your CRM system is free. Planning is still the most important aspect of your project. While the product provides extraordinary capabilities, scalability and reliability, configuring the product to best meet your needs, customizing the product to maximize system productivity, integrating while mitigating the effect on the upgrade path and maximizing user adoption is best accomplished by experienced CRM professionals.
As SugarCRM launched their first commercial product, CorraTech successfully integrated SugarCRM to meet one of its largest clients CRM requirements. Now, with more than 15 person-years experience since 2004 implementing and supporting SugarCRM, our 70+ team of engineers and consultants are tasked with the objective to mitigate the risks associated with SugarCRM implementations as well its integration with internal systems and other open source software. Professional SugarCRM consultants can help you build custom modules to create competitively advantaged functionality, create custom training programs to improve training continuity at lower cost, integrate internal systems to deliver greater cross-departmental collaboration, build vertically focused CRM systems, integrate open source software to lower TCO further (such as with, Zimbra, KnowledgeTree, Joomla, OTRS, osCommerce, Openbravo, etc.) and extend CRM to external partners, agents or representatives.
SugarCRM Features
SugarCRM offers different features sets in each of their three editions, Sugar Community Edition, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise. As you can see in the table below, these editions differ in features and functionality, as well as in license and cost: 
As a pioneer in the open source application space, SugarCRM has a dual license approach to commercializing their offering. In order to acquire advanced features, organizations must invest in one of two commerical editions. We have found customers easily understand and are willing to pay for the commercial products if the business requirements are such that commercial features are needed. We have equally found that it is difficult to determine which edition will meet an organization’s needs by simply determining the number of users. There are businesses with five users that require the SugarCRM commercial editions, while in other cases the needs for deployments with 100 users can be met with the open source Sugar Community Edition.
SugarCRM has done an excellent job at building their products to meet the general need of the business user. They have built a set of feature-rich business processes that enhance marketing effectiveness, drive sales performance, improve customer satisfaction and provide executive insight into many categories of business performance. While developing SugarCRM with CRM best practices in mind, SugarCRM focused their road map on providing the tools necessary to meet the business need rather than requiring the business to change internal processes. Not only did this decision facilitate the growth of one of the most robust open source communities, but allowed IT groups to meet user demands more easily with the natural byproduct of higher user adoption rates. Some examples include the customizable user interface, the module loader, the workflow engine, its modular architecture, the visibility of the source code all lend the products towards delivering value to the end user. This is unprecedented in the CRM space. SugarCRM has made a significant impact by providing a better way to manage
and report customer relationship interactions. To learn how your company can
benefit from SugarCRM please call +1-973-783-2783 or click here.
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