On-Demand and On-Site: Why the Difference in Updates?

By Dax Farhang, Director of Product Marketing

Two weeks ago, we announced some feature enhancements to Sugar that would make their debut in qualifying Sugar On-Demand instances and then become available to Sugar On-Site customers in a comprehensive release in mid-2013. This staggered approach to introducing new features generated feedback from a few customers, which gives us a chance to explain our thinking here.

In short, we’re changing our process for pushing out new features because customers are asking for it.  On-Demand customers prefer regular updates, pushed out automatically. With this updated release model, SugarCRM will be able to make new enhancements available as quickly as possible with no effort from On-Demand customers.

Our On-Site customers have a different set of requirements. Since they’re maintaining their own instances, IT teams require time from to implement new versions. Unlike On-Demand customers, they simply can’t upgrade frequently and often prefer to stay on a particular version for an extended period of time. These companies will now benefit by being able to plan on 1 or 2 feature upgrades a year to take advantage of all the latest Sugar innovations

As always, we take pride in giving our customers choice and control over their deployment models and are excited that we’re able to further optimize each option by meeting the specific needs of each customer type.