Three Traits that make Sugar an Innovative, Award-winning CRM Platform
Gartner recently named SugarCRM as a Visionary for the second straight year in its Magic Quadrant for Sales Force 
Automation. Sugar’s innovative mobile user experience, and flexible deployment options were cited as reasons for the continued strong ranking.
Also, SugarCRM took home five awards as part of CRM Magazine’s annual Market Leader Awards thanks to the innovative nature of the software, as well as the way it empowers novel CRM deployments – such as Redglaze Group’s CRM Elite winning deployment.
All this recent recognition got me thinking: what does it truly mean to be a visionary when it comes to CRM? I think, in Sugar’s case, it comes down to three key differentiating points:
Innovative User Experience: Sugar has long been focused on user empowerment – making CRM a mission-critical tool for customer-facing employees, and not a simple data capture mechanism. Sugar’s ubiquitous, intuitive experience across all mobile and desktop touch points is a key differentiator.
Flexible Platform: Hands down, no other CRM provider offers such an open, extensible and scalable platform for CRM. The open nature of Sugar allows any user to customize and integrate with nearly any other data source or application.
Value: In a long-term CRM deployment, value comprises far more than just “what the system costs.” So again, when choosing a more open and extensible platform, the total cost over time is far less than a proprietary app or platform. The available talent around open, standards-based platforms is more abundant and less expensive, and the ease of extension given the lack of proprietary limitations generates greater lifetime value.
I believe that today, CRM is a market in transition. We are starting to see concepts like mobile, big data analytics and cross-departmental process automations shift from “nice to have” aspects of a CRM turn into “must haves.” In my opinion, only the most flexible, scalable, highly user-focused platforms, which provide the most value for the investment – will thrive in this new era of CRM.
Want to hear more about our visionary take on CRM? SugarCRM’s CMO Jennifer Stagnaro will be highlighting some great customer success stories aligned with our vision at Gartner’s Symposium IT Expo event in Orlando, Florida on October 7th.