Record growth for SugarCRM and partners in 2010
If you have a Google alert on SugarCRM, you likely caught our announcement today that 2010 was a fantastic year for SugarCRM and our partners. From delivering an exciting new look to CRM in Sugar 6, to breaking 700,000 Sugar users worldwide, to 52% year-to-year growth, to hitting that all important milestone for start-ups, cash flow positive, this past year broke records quarter after quarter. In addition, over 100 new partners joined the SugarCRM value added reseller (VAR) program and 2010 was the first year that one of our channel partners, Levementum, drove over $1M in SugarCRM subscriptions alone.
I’ve got to tell you, it’s truly exciting to see SugarCRM develop into the world’s fastest growing CRM company. When we started the company just seven short years ago, I didn’t think we would so quickly become the largest company in the marketplace focused exclusively on solving CRM problems. The growth in the CRM market as a whole has been as exciting to be part of as the growth here at SugarCRM. It’s never been a better time to help companies gain and retain customers.
Now with growth comes change. SugarCRM is going through another transition right now that is also exciting to see happen. Because SugarCRM works with our customers through channel partners, our business grows as our partners’ businesses grow. Following our vision of “CRM Made Open”, we have put several new people and programs in place to streamline working with our channel partners and accelerate their growth.
Near the end of last year we launched a new approach to working with our channel partners on developing the Sugar technology. We invited a few of our Gold partners to participate in a developer code sprint. About 20 developers from our partners sat side-by-side with developers from SugarCRM, learned our development methods and contributed code directly to our next releases.
Developers who completed training at the sprint also now have direct access to our entire source code management system and can see exactly the state of our latest development branches. They have a level of visibility into our development cycle they could never have with one of our closed competitors.
In a similar spirit, we applied the same concept to sales at the beginning of this year at our annual Sales Kickoff. This is where we bring our entire global sales team to Cupertino for a week and invited over a dozen of our North American Gold partners to join in. It was wonderful to have everyone working side-by-side and learning from one another.
The next event coming ahead of us all is SugarCon 2011 in San Francisco on April 5-6. This time everybody gets to come and join in the fun. We’re expecting another fantastic event with a thousand attendees projected to come. Come learn more about Sugar, meet your local VAR and chart a path to CRM success. You’re going to get quite the “Sugar Buzz” spending time with the Sugar team and our partners. The energy is electrifying!