According to SugarCRM co-founder and CEO John Roberts, SugarSuite 4.0 is ready for the enterprise and the company is now setting its sights on uprooting the established CRM incumbents in the market.
Roberts, who started SugarCRM after a stint at CRM firm Epiphany Inc, says the 4.0 release now offers broad functionality on a par with other mature hosted and licensed CRM products in the market today.
As an example, he highlighted several new features in 4.0 aimed at bumping up the workflow process automation capabilities of the system.
Administrators can now define rules without programming, Roberts said pointing to a new rules-based workflow engine.
SugarSuite’s campaign management features have also been tightened up, allowing support for automated outbound email campaigns and inbound email lead generation and sharing. The reporting capabilities have also been extended with new tools for ad hoc generation of graphical charts and dashboards.
In line with previous releases, SugarSuite 4.0 also comes in three versions: a free basic version and two commercial editions (Professional and Enterprise, which costs $240 and $450 a year per user respectively).
There are also three delivery options — hosted, appliance and licensed on-premise.
The on-demand versions runs at $40 per user, per month.
Roberts is bold enough to call 4.0 a milestone release, claiming its the first open source CRM application that can stand toe-to-toe with other commercial CRM applications. The company says that open source’s innovative distributed development model will eventually give SugarSuite a functional leg up over proprietary CRM applications.
Roberts said it was the most collaboratively produced offering from SugarCRM since the company debuted its first software offering in July 2004.
However, large companies are unlikely to dismantle their Siebel systems tomorrow. Many are only just starting to get to grips with the notion of open source enterprise software and it will take several iterations and proven implementations before they dive head first into this new type of application development model.
In the meantime, the low hanging fruit for SugarSuite could well be cost-conscious small and medium sized businesses who are on the lookout for functional yet inexpensive enterprise software solutions.
SugarCRM’s core product boasts over 300,000 downloads to data. It has also been translated into 25 different languages.
SugarSuite isn’t alone in trying to shake up the CRM status quo. Microsoft Dynamics also launched its CRM 3.0 product recently.
