SugarCRM Generates Business Results and a Loyal Customer Base

Commercial open source model, flexible deployment options, ease-of-use and time-to-value are leading reasons for why more and more companies are choosing SugarCRM

SugarCRM Inc., the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, continues to pioneer a new approach to producing and delivering CRM applications. Over 300 commercial customers across a variety of industries rely on SugarCRM's expertise to manage their enterprise-wide customer relationships.

"SugarCRM gives us complete CRM functionality on an open platform," says Frank Pecaitis, VP of Marketing and Sales, Medsphere Systems. "Our employees like Sugar Professional because it is so easy-to-use and provides management greater insight into the progression of our business opportunities. The SugarCRM team has done a great job building the most functional CRM application in the market today."

"SugarCRM's flexible, high quality and cost-effective commercial open source solution has generated a very loyal customer base," says Lars Nordwall, Worldwide VP of Sales at SugarCRM. "Companies like Pierce-Eislen, Covalent Technologies, Sterling PCU, MedSphere, and SynApps have standardized their customer-facing business processes on SugarCRM's Sugar Suite. Every day, customers count on our solution, and we are committed to delivering above their expectations."

Success Based on Community and Customer Satisfaction
SugarCRM's rapid growth is due to its commercial open source model. In the last year and a half, Sugar Open Source had been downloaded over 400,000 times. With each product edition, the source code is freely available, allowing the SugarCRM community to contribute to product direction, testing, language translations, and add-on modules to Sugar Suite, SugarCRM's leading CRM application. The SugarCRM community has grown to over 3,000 developers and 10,000 members. Currently, there are over 130 projects underway at SugarForge.org, the destination for SugarCRM's open source community to share ideas and innovations.

One example of the power of the SugarCRM Community concerns languages. Community members from across the globe have contributed language packs to Sugar Suite. The result: Sugar Suite has been translated into 24 languages. By comparison, after seven years of operation, proprietary vendor Salesforce.com offers its application in 11 languages. NetSuite provides its applications in six languages.

Like many other customers, Pierce-Eislen, a leading real estate information service, began using Sugar Open Source and then moved to a commercial edition. "We began on Sugar Open Source, and then moved to Sugar Professional after a few months. Sugar Professional delivered everything we were looking for in a CRM application and it was still open source where changes big and small can be handled by our company," says Sheldon McGee, IT Director, Pierce-Eislen

Cost-Effective Innovation Speaks for Itself - In Many Languages
SugarCRM is using the Internet and a commercial open source business model to radically reduce the cost of CRM software. In the most recent earnings statement, the three largest hosted, proprietary software vendors revealed that, as a percentage of revenues, they spent only 11 percent on Research and Development and more than 42 percent on sales and marketing expenses, according to their income statements. SugarCRM is breaking the cycle of customers paying hefty subscription fees so that the vendor can spend more money selling to those same customers.

Covalent Technologies, an enterprise solution services provider, switched to SugarCRM because the company delivered the promised benefits of CRM without the hefty subscription fees and vendor lock-in. "Our conservative estimate is that Sugar Professional will increase our bottom line by $20,000 a year compared to salesforce.com," says Ryan Lindsay, Chief Operating Officer at Covalent.

"SugarCRM addresses the dramatic inefficiencies around how proprietary enterprise software is built and sold," says John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. "Customers are speaking loudly and clearly that commercial open source is a better model for producing and delivering higher quality, more innovative business applications. I am not aware of any proprietary business applications company that has added as many paying customers in such a short period of time as SugarCRM. We are incredibly pleased by the customer momentum we've achieved to date."

SugarCRM Uniquely Offers Multiple Deployment Options
SugarCRM offers flexible deployment options with an automated migration path. Customers can choose between hosting Sugar Suite, managing it on a turnkey appliance, Sugar Cube, or running Sugar Suite on their own servers with on-premise.

Sterling PCU, a leading provider of specialized equipment for automotive and appliance industry, chose SugarCRM so that it could have more flexibility in the future around how their customer information was managed. "SugarCRM also gives us the flexibility we need to grow as a business. We are using Sugar On-Demand now but will most likely move our customer assets to on-premise in the future," says Christopher Edwards, General Manager, Sterling PCU.

SynApps Solutions, a leading provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and system integration services, wanted a CRM solution that they could manage within their own corporate firewall. Like many Sugar Suite deployments, interest in the solution was spawned by the users, who found Sugar Suite to be simple and intuitive. "We found Sugar Professional easy to use and easy for people to get their heads around. It was the best solution that kept our customer data within our company," says Jason Scholes, Director, SynApps Solutions.

About SugarCRM
SugarCRM is the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for companies of all sizes. SugarCRM's Sugar Suite easily adapts to any business environment by offering a more flexible, cost-effective alternative than proprietary applications. SugarCRM's open source architecture allows companies to more easily customize and integrate customer-facing business processes in order to build and maintain more profitable relationships. SugarCRM offers several deployment options, including on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based solutions to suit customers' security, integration and configuration needs. For more information, call (408) 454-6900 or 1 87 SUGARCRM tollfree in the US, email contact@sugarcrm.com, or visit http://www.sugarcrm.com.