SugarCRM Introduces Advanced Project Management Integrated with CRM

Companies can now use CRM information to more effectively manage customer-driven projects

CUPERTINO, CA (March 19, 2007) — SugarCRM Inc., the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, today announced the immediate release of Project Management for its Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise product lines. Sugar’s Project Management offers the advanced capabilities of a standalone project management application integrated into SugarCRM’s market leading CRM suite.

“As companies become more service-based, managing customer and internal projects becomes even more critical,” said John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM. “Project Management delivers a best-in-class project management application fully integrated with SugarCRM.”

According to a recent on-demand solution by Nucleus Research, 32 percent of on-demand customers are using on-demand CRM and only 23 percent are using on-demand project management. However, future buying intentions in on-demand shift from CRM to project management, with 29 percent of companies planning to buy on-demand project management and 16 percent planning to buy CRM in the next 12-18 months.

“Managing customers and projects is the next step after acquiring them, making integrated project management a key factor in driving greater value from CRM,” said Rebecca Wetteman, Vice President of Nucleus Research. “Current SugarCRM customers have an opportunity to gain even greater return on investment by using Sugar Projects; others looking for a CRM solution with tight project management integration should investigate the Sugar offering.”

CRM and Project Management
Sugar’s Project Management delivers a full project management solution combined with the sales management, marketing automation and customer support used by employees to manage customer-centric activities. These new capabilities allow users to deploy projects across all customer-facing tasks, including campaigns, opportunities, accounts, and customer cases. Since Project Management is integrated with Sugar’s customer information, users no longer need to be concerned with redundant or inaccurate information, lost customer data, poor information sharing, or lack of user adoption.

By leveraging existing information within Sugar, Project Management gives users a head-start in tackling their most complex customer-facing projects. Additionally, tighter integration with the advanced reporting engine allows project managers to generate accurate reports, dashboards and key performance indicators (KPI’s) based on customer activity.

New functionality includes:
Sugar Projects give users a 360-degree view of a project and enables better communication through the sharing of files, notes, and benchmarks from within SugarCRM. Sugar Projects enable collaboration between internal users and customers.

Planning Grids allow users to build a project quickly, and manage it from a top-line perspective.

Project Templates allow users to create projects from pre-defined templates. This minimizes the time to create repeated and most frequently executed projects.

Gantt Charts present a time-phased bar chart that lists tasks or activities along with a time length bar which represents the duration of the activity.

Integrated Case Management allows customer support representatives to manage complex customer cases as a project. Complex cases can be separated into independent parts, classified based on urgency, and assigned based on subject-matter expertise. The related case status is also exposed in the project dashboard to provide a consolidated view of the project status.

Project Collaboration History gives team members a view into all emails, meetings, and calls in context of the project.

Team Controls leverages Sugar Access Control to manage who can see sensitive project information.

Project Dashboards provide a visual representation of key project metrics such as upcoming tasks, open items, percentage completion and open cases. Project managers and users see different views of the dashboard depending on their role.

Exportable Projects are compatible with Microsoft Project®, a popular project management tool for external distribution purposes.

Pricing
Project Management is included in the subscription of commercial editions. Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise On-Site are available for $275 and $449 per user per year respectively. Sugar Professional On-Demand and Sugar Enterprise On-Demand are available for $40 and $75 per user monthly, respectively.

Availability
Project Management is now available at www.sugarcrm.com. The module is included in Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise. Access a free 30-day trial of Sugar Professional On-Demand at http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/ondemand_eval.html.

About SugarCRM
SugarCRM is the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for companies of all sizes. Sugar 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 toll free in the US, email contact@sugarcrm.com, or visit http://www.sugarcrm.com.