The 451 Group Analyzes SugarCRM

SugarCRM opens up for Windows with its 4.5 release

Analyst: Martin Schneider
Sector: Enterprise Software
Date: 26 Jul 2006

Event summary

Version 4.5 of the SugarCRM product includes the fruits of a Microsoft partnership announced earlier this year. The new version now supports Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), Active Directory and SQL Server.

The interface has gotten a bit of a makeover, and Ajax technology has made the product easier to customize at the group and individual-user level. The Studio module allows for drag-and-drop customization and creation of dashboards and layouts.

The company has also added some features to support the international growth of the product. Users can now store, search and retrieve data in any language, including double-byte characters.

The 451 take

SugarCRM continues to impress us with the sheer speed at which it has grown. Not only has it incubated a very large and seemingly active open source development community, but the company has proven a real player as a commercial entity. While we imagine many of the 800 customers the company touts are not paying much, that number is nothing to sneeze at. And if SugarCRM continues this pace, it could be a serious threat to not just Salesforce.com, but also vendors like SAP and Oracle in time.

Details

With the release of version 4.5 of its CRM product, SugarCRM has delivered the first of a series of developments born from its partnership with Microsoft announced in February. The company has tweaked the product so it now supports more Microsoft infrastructure software, including IIS, Active Directory and SQL Server, instead of running only on Apache and mySQL. Version 4.5 is also available under the Microsoft Community License, part of Microsoft's shared source initiative. In addition, SugarCRM has Ajax-enabled essentially the whole UI, making it easier to customize, configure and change without having to reload the Web-based interface. Enhancements to the product's Studio module make it easier for end users to make customizations and perform other personalization tasks.

The international features of the product, including support for all languages so that users can store, retrieve and search data in any language, is a testament to SugarCRM's momentum. The company now has 800 customers, and says it added 200 last quarter alone. And with more than 150 partners and the open source community at large offering more than 220 extensions or add-ons to the product, it's safe to say that the company's product is a real quantity when it comes to the sector at large.

Competitive landscape

While some might immediately think that SugarCRM would be a direct competitor to Microsoft's Dynamics CRM product, the two companies both say they are not seeing each other in competitive deals. SugarCRM says the main competition is really still homegrown attempts at CRM among small companies, mostly using spreadsheets or relying on email threads and static contact lists and calendars to gain insight into customer activity. But Salesforce.com is a major force in competitive deals. And SugarCRM says it sees a good amount of Sage Software's Act and FrontRange Solutions' GoldMine product.

Because the company is starting to experience some enterprise interest in its product, Oracle's Siebel offerings (both on-premise and hosted versions) and SAP's mySAP CRM have popped up in competitive deals; in a lot of instances, SugarCRM is looking to replace these incumbents.